Artist Mia Kanazawa discusses her work at the Reach Performing Arts Center. A part of OHA's production Q2: Habitat.

dancing off the stones

While we're all thinking about dancing in the quarry, wearing sneakers and protective auras, let's not forget about another dance world, this one on Fox TV. If you're not watching "So You Think You Can Dance," shame on you. If you like dance at all any way any time, this is really must-see. Ignore the pandering to and of the judges, the stupid cutenesses, and concentrate on looking at what people can do with their bodies. The dancers are paired at random, and then are given dance styles at random: Susie and Johnny and Latin dance, for example, even if Susie is a "Contemporary " dancer (can someone explain what that it? It seems like modern dance without the edge, performed in halter tops and biker shorts) and Johnny is a hip-hopper from LA. Not to mention the odd styles of hip hopping: locking, popping, skanking (or maybe skank is the adjective).
Of course it's a competition, and of course people get voted off, but it's not too traumatic for those of us sitting on our couches with our feet in parallel first. Alice

Collaborative School Residency

The Many Habitats of the Settlement Quarry

"...the plant consisted of nine dericks, three engines, one traveling crane, one locomotive, two compressors, sixteen steam or pneumatic drills...." The great thing about creating performance at the Settlement Quarry is just this: it is an unbelievable combination of habitats: filled with bird song and wild creatures, as well as with the echoes and detritus of its industrial past and human present. Artists Mia Kanazawa and Alison Chase will recreate one of those famous dericks, and put it to an entirely new use in Q2: Habitat; the birds and their songs, the porcupines and spruce, will take magnified shape and life in the costumes of dancers and the objects animated by puppeteers. Using the derick and an excavator, a compressor on a tow truck, participants will operate a winch across the amphitheater floor: a slow moving cable expressing the ceaseless motion of the change all of us bring to our desired and selected habitats. The quarry bears the visible traces of all its inhabitants; and through the shared experience of performance we will all get the chance to be immersed in these past, present, and imagined futures in new ways.

Settlement Quarry

Settlement Quarry granite is 360 million years old. That's a long story, needless to say.... I'll hop right to 1900 when the Quarry opened. According to a 1908 publication succinctly titled Stone, "...the plant consisted of nine dericks, three engines, one traveling crane, one locomotive, two compressors, sixteen steam or pneumatic drills...." Well, you get the picture. Granite was in demand then and this quarry's stone still stands the test of time supporting the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges, protecting the New York County Courthouse, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Kennedy Memorial in Arlington Cemetery.

Today, the clank, roar and screech of industry is replaced by a chorus of bird song. Spectacularly so, if you visit early in the morning during the spring warbler migration, as these folks did a few weeks ago. Island Heritage Trust now owns and cares for this historic property. It is open to the public whether you have two legs or four, wings or wigglabilty. Please visit and let us know who you met there at our "wildlife sightings" page on www.islandheritagetrust.org.

and some 7th-grade seagulls.

Girls with wings--the 7th-grade girls try out their wings in the Settlement Quarry. Tawanda looks on from the right; Mia Kanazawa and Alison Chase are watching from the quarry's edge.

Thursday at the Quarry with the 7th grade

June 4th, a sunny, hot Thursday provided an early view of what Q2:HABITAT might look like if performed solely by 7th-graders from Deer Isle Stonington Elementary School. Mia Kanazawa stood in the quarry looking at what her costumes, sea-gull heads and wings right now, might look like in motion. The kids, enthusiastically directed by Tawanda Chabikwa, who had been on hand at the school all week working with the kids, moved, shuffled, danced, lounged, chewed gum and resisted. A group of kids wearing the seagull hats drifted across the far side (from where I was standing) of the quarry, looking a lot like people on a forced march. Contrast that with the girls with the wings, rehearsing and planning what they were supposed to do: "first we lean this way, then that way, we bend down, run around ...lean." And then they did it.
For a moment they seemed airborne, their white vinyl wings streaming out behind their arms as they circled and settled. Like birds.
Another group had one girl in a seagull hat perch on top of a platform of 7-grade bodies. She leaned out. Mia wanted to see what it would look like with wings as well as a hat. Her moment aloft was brief, but startling.

Welcome

Welcome to the blog for Q2: Habitat, the second multidiscipline production staged in the historic granite quarries of Stonington, Maine. Q2 is a sneak peak of this in development story from artists Alison Chase, Mia Kanazawa, Nigel Chase; and our community at Island Heritage Trust’s Settlement Quarry. The original production, Quarryography, took place in August 2007 at the Settlement. Check out the video below.

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