2021
72 Seasons engages with ballet history to envision the same passages of time demarcated by seasons for the twenty-first-century. Initiating the project in the Lurie Garden within the City of Chicago’s Millennium Park, the movement-based piece brings together a group of dancers in acts of utilitarian choreography.
The movement of the dancers, informed by practices of tending, foraging, and propagating, positions an ethos of sustainability within its score. Rethinking humans’ relationship to nature within the context of Chicago’s prairie landscape, the title of the work is derived from the Japanese calendar—a changing of the world that is divided into micro-seasons known as kō, each lasting around just five days. With seasons such as “fish emerge from the ice,” “mist starts to linger,” “caterpillars become butterflies,” “distant thunder,” “swallows leave,” and “rainbows hide,” the minute description of ecological phenomena in this calendar comes closer to a sense of time that is lived instead of passed.
Departing from a Western vision of phases, where the division of all perceptible change in our environment is collapsed into four categorical types, Fernandes encourages a deeper observation of humans’ relationship to the natural world.
Photographers: Dabin Ahn, Sophia Lee, David C. Sampson
Curated by Ellen Hartwell Alderman & Stephanie Cristello
Costumes by Rad Hourani
Dancers: Katlin Bourgeois, Kara Hunsinger Brian Martinez, Michelle Reid, Meghann Wilkinson