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04/13/2022 08:30 AMAs a former Guilford resident, Morley van Yperen has always loved the Guilford Green—winter, spring, summer, and fall. That’s why she’s thrilled to be returning on Sunday, April 24, when Ekklesia Contemporary Ballet (ECB) presents Body & Land: A Dance & Dialogue for Eco-Justice on the Guilford Green at 1 p.m. The free, interactive performance integrates ballet, poetry, science and theology. Morley is ECB’s theologian in residence.
Body & Land is supported by a Creation Care grant from the National Episcopal Church. Locally, the family-friendly Guilford performance is a co-presentation of Christ Episcopal Church of Guilford in partnership First Congregational Church of Guilford. Morley’s mom, Jennifer Huebner of Christ Church, is among those helping to organize ECB’s Guilford visit, as event chair. Morley is also a mom; she and her husband, Nico, have six children.
Body & Land features four talented ECB dancers performing unique pieces choreographed by ECB’s artistic director, Elisa Schroth, with each dance designed to represent a season. The contemporary ballet will be framed by a re-composition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons crafted by contemporary composer Scott Simonelli.
As the program describes, Simonelli’s re-composition, which is recorded, “incorporates sounds of catastrophic climate change into a re-composition of Vivaldi’s score, to illustrate how the climate has changed from Vivaldi’s idealized 18th-century world to our 21st-century reality.”
“It’s so interesting,” says Morley of the music, which she says includes sounds such as “the crack of a glacier.”
“The initial part of each movement is some of the original score of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, but then [Simonelli] has added to it, and taken it and shifted it,” she says. “One of the things Scott has done, and Elisa Schroth, the choreographer, has done, is to think about the comparison between the way the world was when Vivaldi wrote his Four Seasons, which was before the Industrial Revolution, and now.”
The performance also incorporates a reading of original poetry inspired by the presentation, authored by ECB Poet in Residence Kwamena Blankson, who will read his piece at the Guilford event.
“Along with the choreography, there’s a poem that is read by the poet at the beginning of each season, which is part of the artistry,” says Morley.
As an ECB presentation, Body & Land involves much more than inspirational poetry, dance, and music. At points woven within this artistry, the dancers themselves, as well as Morley and others, will step up to spark conversations to help celebrate the Earth and engage community members in meaningful dialogue to address climate change.
“The dance and dialogue are different from a concert hall performance, because with each section of the piece, there is then dialogue,” such as that between the dancers and local advocates, she explains. “For each dance and dialogue, the members of the [churches] we’re working with identify two people from the community who can speak to community activism or the spiritual life of that church or community, to come and interact with the dancers during breaks between seasons.”
Community speakers at the Guilford event will include Pilgrim Fellowship participants of the youth group’s mission trip to Puerto Rico (speaking as community advocates) and, as spiritual advocate, Jenna VanDonselaar, who holds an M.A. in religion and ecology and is a member of Young Evangelicals for Climate Change.
For her part, as with the dancers, Morley’s discussion will be “very organic, and inspired by the moment,” she says. “The dancers and I prepare a little bit ahead of time. The dancers are each given a question to interact with following their season, but it’s really not set in stone. [It’s also based on] what are the spiritual and community advocates bringing to the conversation and what are the interactions in terms of the space and time and what everybody’s noticing.”
Non-profit ECB is based in Middletown in partnership with Church of the Holy Trinity and can be found online at www.ekklesiaballet.org, where the organization is described as “a professional dance company [composed] of artist-theologians whose goal is to create spaces where art and faith can flourish. Ekklesia’s diverse repertory utilizes a full spectrum of emotional and physical vocabulary while addressing issues such as poverty, inequality, and human suffering.”
Morley helped found Ekklesia in 2014, bringing her many years of experience as a talented, trained dancer together with her scholarly expertise in theology. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biblical studies and theology from Gordon Collegein Massachusetts and is currently completing a certificate of Christian studies in arts and theology through Fuller Theological Seminary in California.
Morley began dancing at the age of 4 in New York City and accepted an invitation to join Dance Family, a modern dance repertory company in New York City, as a middle-schooler. After her family moved to Guilford (1997 to 2010), Morley studied the Humphrey-Weidman technique of modern dance with Ernestine Stodelle, an original member of the Doris Humphrey Company (as were original members Martha Graham and Jose Limon).
As ECB’s theologian in residence, Morley collaborates with Schroth to shape thought-provoking programs such as Body & Land. Each of ECB’s resulting artistic-theological events are then shared with the broader community through traveling visits such as the one coming to the Guilford Green on April 24.
“We started to explore what dance might be able to do,” says Morley of the founding of ECB. “We started out opening up the psalms, because we realized the psalms were a way for human-kind to interact with God and all of our lived experience. Elisa Schroth really wanted to not just create beautiful pieces of ballet, but to interact with a lot of the social issues our world was facing. And the first one she wanted to tackle was the Syrian refugee crisis. We also realized there were theological dimensions to that, and also that art could work theologically and socially, and so that’s what I went about to study. And so that’s what I work on with the company.”
The refugee crisis piece was presented at Guilford’s Christ Church as one of the company’s first performances, she notes.
Morley ‘s theological efforts on behalf of ECB also include working with the company’s dancers in terms of personal theological development, their understanding of scripture, and their understanding of God’s interaction with the world, with them and in relationship to one another, as well as to delve into theological connections within each dance and dialogue.
Morley has high praise for Schroth’s work on behalf of ECB to create pieces which meld the meaning of each presentation with the actions of each dancer to help inspire thought-provoking dialogue.
“This is really all her brainchild,” Morley says of Schroth’s Body & Land creation. “It’s not just performance. It really is about the dialogue, to become aware of it. And because dance is embodied, we’re aware of the way our bodies are interacting with the climate and the way our bodies affect other bodies’ interaction with the climate.”
The performance also allows audiences to participate in some “in-body practices,” Morley notes, giving as an example an exercise developed for the company during the pandemic.
“As Body & Land was being choreographed, we were in the middle of the pandemic and we initially were not able to be in the same room together,” says Morley. Following some work with dancers via Zoom-based collaborations, “when they were able to be in the same room together, they had to be socially distanced, and so we used a piece of ribbon to choreograph partnering, which adds a lot of dynamic quality to movement. And then we used that string in some exercises to help everybody actually feel our interconnectedness with one another.”
The Guilford performance will be ECB’s third presentation of Body & Land and the first to take place since the fall of 2021. Morley notes ECB is especially encouraged by the remarkable collaborative ties between those in Guilford’s church communities.
“All of those churches on the green have a great ecumenical relationship, so we’re hoping to be able to become a part of that community, too, with this performance,” she says.
Whether audience members are looking forward to finding ways to interact with the piece, or to just absorb the impact of Body & Land on the Guilford Green on April 24, Morley encourages anyone with an interest in this incredible event to attend.
“It’s a really wonderful thing to be able to do this on the Guilford Green,” says Morley. “Guilford is a great community. Our hope is that it’s the beginning of something, that dialogue leads to something, and that everybody present will be able to have shared that experience.”
Attendees are asked to bring their own chairs and blankets to view Body & Land: A Dance & Dialogue for Eco-Justice Sunday, April 24, 1 p.m. on the Guilford Green. In case of rain, the event will be moved to the First Congregational Church on the Guilford Green. More information is available at www.christchurchguilford.org or email info@christchurchguilford.org.