Pecha Kucha 2025

Pecha kucha 2025

Nadine Lollino

Much of my inspiration since Trey and I moved to Taos almost six years ago, has come from the interplay of the rich outer landscape with my internal landscape. What you’ll see are some observations from my walks and how they’ve manifested in performance. As a teacher and a performer, I’ve been designing the 3Bodies method, an experimental movement practice which explores awareness, creativity, and your own physical intelligence, listening through motion.

Listening more deeply to the changes in the landscape, i notice the grasses with their seasonal variances, changes in the patterns of the earth after a rain. I track my breath and the pattern of my own footsteps. My teacher defines tracking as observation going beyond what we think we can know about a place or a thing.

The material for my weekly movement class, which happens here on this stage, comes from tracking my current internal weather while I walk. What is going on this week for me, how do I feel, what am I working with? And how can I move my body in a way to explore this? Often these questions aren’t just from my personal struggles, but also collective stress. What we explore in class becomes material for performances. Those who come regularly to class and are interested in performing, are welcome into MovementLab’s collective.

On my walks, I found that the decaying sage branches resembled bones, I noticed the way they lay down to rest on the dusty earth. Leaning in, I noticed their twists both echoing resistance and flow, creating a stability for their conversations with the wind and other elements.

A costume emerged. The branches attached to my body through strands of fabric remind us that although we are transient creatures, who often forget our connection to place, the plants remind us through their roots of our birthplace. The covered eyes express the sense of being lost, in lostness we can find our way through deeper listening. The balanced branch, how precarious, how precious our lives are, balance being a state of moving in the waver.

As nature began imprinting into my dance works, other costumes emerged. The 1000 origami crane dress speaks of a unified embrace of gentleness and peaceful warriorship. Colors of the koi swirl on a bed of soft greens. Its biggest lesson ended up being all the life I lived in the three years of its creation. Though turbulent in heart and body, it was a great lesson in patience and resilience. During this PASEO performance, resembling a web, the set of arm crocheted ribbon became a projection surface. It was danced in gentleness and strength.

For the PASEO festival last year, I asked the dancers to identify a landscape, real or imagined, that they considered calming, and a sound from that place. Each dancer wore a bluetooth speaker emanating their sound as they explored the landscape of the Luminarium. When the dancers crossed paths, the interplay of their landscapes created interesting stories. The costumes were designed by using plants around our homes to create sunprints on the fabric.

A connecting thread through the work is the conversation between resistance and flow which reflects back to my college studies in the contract and release method of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham.

Resistance or the contract phase, can be there to hold us back, to support us, and to connect us. Whether it's through ropes of fabric or other costume pieces, these various expressions of resistance also contain flexibility comparable to the release phase. Flow still exists, just as the sage branches must be able to bend and twist to be stronger, the spider's web strong enough to catch its prey, yet flexible to the wind, we are strong and flexible in mind, body and spirit. With enough patience we can balance an egg on the floor. A circle of dominoes that contains or restricts, can be released by a single breath. Even if resistance is sometimes uncomfortable, it can offer the chance to find new creative pathways. It can be messy like an unraveled basket, endless like a road, the journey can feel both heavy and light. And this we seek to express in our 3Bodies practice, in performance and in design.

For the PASEO festival this year, the performance features a collection of people’s recorded dreams into a dream choir, capturing the vivid, otherworldly essence of the dream state and its influence on our waking life.To experience a dream, to daydream, to imagine, to have aspiration or hope. Imagination helps us visualize that which may not yet be in physical reality. This in-between, transitory space is recognized beyond boundaries or differences, everyone dreams of something.

Discovering new pathways inside and outside, we weave our creativity, the support from resistance, the connections to each other, deep listening with our landscapes, and we play, twist and flow, we return home. Through the contract and release of effort and ease, we pay attention more deeply, recognizing our capacity together, we hold each other up, and taste the sweetness of life.

photo by S. Flynn flynnworks.com