Somewhere to Land: Dances for Sea and Low Sky to premiere September 26-28
Oakland-based vertical dance innovator BANDALOOP comes to Alameda Point for their home season in a series of three performances as part of Alameda’s Rising Tides public arts initiative that debuted in August and will continue through to the summer of 2025.
Alameda’s West End Arts District is collaborating with BANDALOOP on the creation and execution of Somewhere to Land: Dances for Sea and Low Sky, a new work that will use the metal girders of Hangar 25 at the western end of Seaplane Lagoon as a vertical stage to explore themes of climate adaptation, rewilding, and sustainable development in alignment with the vision for the City of Alameda’s De-Pave Park project, developed with CMG Landscape Architecture.
De-Pave Park takes the idea of rewilding and reclamation and makes it manifest by restoring natural habitat that transforms what is now dead, concrete tarmac into a thriving ecological home for migratory birds and wetland habitat. Through embracing sea level rise, repurposing materials, and maximizing carbon sequestration, De-Pave Park is a restrained approach with high impact for reclaiming our shoreline and creating “a place for people to experience the natural world in transition,” according to the City’s vision plan.
Somewhere to Land: Dances for Sea and Low Sky is part of BANDALOOP’s multi-part, vertical dance public art project FLOCK, responding to sites and paths for human and bird migration. The performance features an original live musical score by Destani Wolf (singer with Bobby Mcferrin’s Motion, Cirque Du Soleil, and multiple Grammy-nominated albums) and Ben Juodvalkis (composer for BANDALOOP, Lines Ballet, Joe Goode Performance Group and many others).
“Wolf and Juodvalkis have composed a living multi-lingual song cycle around themes of bird migration and human migration,” says BANDALOOP Artistic Director Melecio Estrella. “Migratory birds, directed by ancient internal maps, can perhaps inspire us to consider our own personal migration stories and what wisdom they may hold for us as we navigate the ever increasing changes and challenges of environmental and social change.”
Somewhere to Land: Dances for Sea and Low Sky is a further distillation of work that West End Arts District Executive Director, dancer, and choreographer Tara Pilbrow collaborated on with artistic director Melecio Estrella and his team in 2023. That work explored the spatial/technical possibilities of the structure and other notions including how the performance on the building by the dancers who seem to literally fly can represent its return to nature.
If you go
BANDALOOP’s Somewhere to Land: Dances for Sea and Low Sky
When: Thursday through Saturday, September 26-28, pre-show 7 p.m., performance 7:30 p.m.
Where: Hangar 25, Alameda Point
Tickets: FREE, RSVP online
More info: West End Arts District/Somewhere to Land
