As part of the 2025 INSTINCT Experimental Dance Festival, come join us on Monday January 6th at 6pm for a unique LIVE Performance Installation!
Ecotone: Exploring Sound, Dance + Habitat in Tension is the first draft of a performance installation throughout which participants are invited to move, rest and listen. Collaborating artists Ellen Smith Ahern and Menghan Wang share newly developed dance, soundscape and sculptural sets that bring bodies and habitats into delicate tension.

 

Participants ages 5+ are welcome to follow pathways through these liminal spaces of ongoing transformation, engaging with sound and movement from multiple angles and sharing reflection and conversation in community afterwards. This is an accessible event for folks who hear, see and move differently, including darkened, quieter spaces for reduced sensory input. 

Masks recommended.
Please come early to purchase tickets at the door!
$30- venmo/paypal/cash/check.

 


 

Ellen Smith Ahern is a dance artist and social worker/community organizer living with her family on Abenaki lands in N’Dakinna/New Hampshire. Her work explores the intersection of movement, storytelling and nature, including a wider array of people than might otherwise feel welcomed into traditional dance spaces. Ellen has performed and taught around the world, sharing work in diverse venues, from the National Gallery of Art and the Ionion Center of Kefalonia to a landfill in Georgia and a National Park in Vermont. 

 

Menghan Wang is an interdisciplinary sound artist, sound designer, and independent curator living in Vermont. Her work reflects the interplays between undercurrent and representation, self and otherness, creating environments that invoke inner journeys to (re)explore, reflect, and (re)discover the interrelations between the self and the environment. She received a Master of Arts degree in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Germany, and her work has been presented at Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project, Goethe-Institut Beijing, Climate Care Festival Berlin, etc. She is a member of the Crumb Factory Collective and Gallery in Montpelier, Vermont, where she curates exhibitions and events under the collaborative and curatorial platform Apolis with 23AD.


 

Together Ellen + Menghan are collaborating on an emerging soundscape for a new performance project, Shell. Rooted in creative field work at Vermont's National Park, the soundscape traces the intersections of multiple ecotones, weaving and building with sounds of wildlife, elements and human presence where forest habitat meets brook, meadow and road. As both a guided experience with embodied listening practices for public use and the beginning of an original score for Shell, their work explores multidimensional means of listening and communicating through layers and across species.

 

VDA Artists
WHAT
Creative Session
Demonstration
Performance
Work Share
WHEN
-
Event Location

INSTINCT Dance Festival at Main Street Landing
60 Lake Street
Burlington, VT 05401
United States

COST
$30