The Circle of Life: Dancing and Writing with Nature

We’ve moved online! All workshops will be conducted through Zoom, an interactive platform that allows you to participate in exercises and contribute to group conversation in your workshops. The day before your workshop you’ll receive an email with a link to Zoom for your workshop session. 

Instructor: Daystar/Rosalie Jones

The Native American HOOP symbolizes the “circle of life.” It was the Lakota holy man Black Elk who described all of the Creator’s work as a circle. It is our task to join that Circle in order to experience and understand the unity of all things. This workshop will begin with learning the basic “nature images” that can be created with the hoop, in stillness or in a dance. By writing that experience in prose or poetry, we will begin to discover the interconnectedness of ourselves to nature – sky, water, plants, animals – and the Earth.

Daystar/Rosalie Jones (Pembina ‘Little Shell’ Chippewa) specializes in “native modern dance” and contemporary storytelling as seen through the perspective and experience of ancestry and cultural values. In 1980 she founded her own company Daystar: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America and since has created over thirty choreographic works including Tales of Old Man (Blackfeet) and Wolf: A Transformation (Anishinaabe) and the scripted dance-drama No Home But The Hear based on family story and history. Published articles include Modern Native Dance: Beyond Tribe and Tradition in Native American Dance: Ceremonies and Social Traditions (Smithsonian, 1992); a recent work Dancing the Four Directions is both a solo choreography and published article in Dance, Movement & Spiritualities (Intellect Journals, 2017).  Now in permanent residence in Rochester, NY, Daystar continues to create unique native-based dance theatre and is interested in sharing that creativity – dance, song, storytelling – in workshop and residency environments.