Rulan Tangen has 20 years of experience as a dedicated dance artist, performing professionally with ballet, modem and powwow dance companies in New York, Canada, California and Europe. She has also worked as a choreographer & consultant on major features films The New World and Apocalypto. Rulan is also the Director of Dancing Earth, Indigenous Contemporary Dance Collective. In July 2007 she will be participating in the Native American Arts Summer Workshops sponsored by Idyllwild Arts.

To learn more, visit http://www.idyllwildarts.org or http://www.rulantangen.com

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For my first venture as the  monthly dance columnist, I humbly bring readers into a slice of my perspective of dance at this moment in time, commemorating its origins as a celebratory element of humans in relation to the earth. Below is an excerpt from a foreward I recently wrote for a book of photographs entitled HUMANLANDSCAPES...

Also, future columns will include guest writings from a wide circle of dance, including graffiti artist Brez, pointe shoe innovator Eliza Gaynor Minden, Gyro-kinesis teacher Echo Gustafsen, Blackfoot traditional singer/dancer Andrea Truejoy Fox, Mark Morris soloist of 8 years Greg Nuber, and Alaskan multi-artist Tanya Lukin. Keep your eyes open and your soul dancing!

Rulan Tangen
Artistic Director/Choreographer of DANCING EARTH
www.dancingearth.org

Human Landscapes by Rulan Tangen

Every human body is a landscape, a silhouette of overlapping ancestral shadows, an imprint of paths taken, a map of past and future dreamings.

Contours carved on mountainsides by gentle erosion and windswept touch are paralleled in bodies shifting through torrents of adolescent growth, wombs swelling with incumbent birth, flesh softening after bellies are filled with that which we then become.

What is your body reflecting today of its past, and how are you shaping it into what it will reflect tomorrow? Our very human form in motion can be a metaphor for the supple merging of the outside environment with our internal scope. Is it the soaring height of forests or skyscrapers, or a softly sloping valley, or cylindrical subway tunnel that create your shell which continually peels and renews ; while inside your joys and fears and angers and imaginings grow and become as much a part of you and make their distinctly marked impression.


Walking in beauty, through beauty, within beauty. Here in the American southwest there is not a single day falling into night that does not call for one to exhale in rapt gratitude for its beauty, giving forth in breath what is taken in by eyes and ears and heart. Even the scent on the air, from pinon wood-smoke to fragrant desert afternoon monsoons igniting rare blooms, all is beauty.

To feel beauty, one need only walk; out into the desert, the night, the mountains , the sunrise, the quivering aspens, the melting snow that is becoming river. Take in all , with every sense, and simply become. To be alive: listening, feeling, breathing, this is beauty.

While walking, a chest lifts to open the heart towards waiting sky, parting clouds with shiny reflection of teeth and eyes. Arms spiral until palms unfold like a golden leaves to behold the dance of body and land . The instant you forget yourself is the moment you become the dance. Whirling, shimmering, in swoops and arcs, you echo the rocks, the arroyos, the deep recesses of wind caves. Imbedded in the sandy ground are bits of bones and antler tips, and stars of quartz crystal, poised as percussion ready to accompany the rhythm of willing feet. Your breathing begins to mimic wind and a song is called out from your spirit.

It is impossible to disentangle human imagery from that of nature: hair as twisted grass, slivers of moon at fingernails, ribs arms and fingers as tree branches, feet as roots, starlit eyes and river veins. The Milky Way was a great female cleft to the Mayans, as the slot canyons are to others-the emergence point of humanity and creation. Where does land end and self begin – only you can decide.

Creation stories of Indigenous North America speak of us as beings descending from stars, emerging from fog, crawling from deep voids in the earth, floating across waves aloft twiggy nests. As far south as the land of Mayans, there are stories of humans being formed first of mud, then wood, then golden cornmeal. As we walk quietly with Mother Earth on her sloping turtle shell back, in this hemisphere these stories are built into the land, the constellations, and into the original names of buttes and lakes. To restore the land - and restore ourselves - we must recall the ancient stories of the land, to re-birth and embody them in our physical being, through our movements , and by our actions on this earth.

Each and every one of us, standing on our particular bit of ground, in our own particular time, from our own unique perspective, in our ever-changing bodies, with our constantly shared breath and incomparable secret internal songs and dances, are part of the vital architecture of our living landscape.

The more beauty we witness and hold in gratitude, the more beauty we will embody. The loving appreciation of our wondrous natural world will transform our heart, our bodies, and our lives.

With a dancing spirit,

Rulan Tangen