BIRDHOUSE

artists in residence at PFAC

Pillow Fort Arts Center is hosting dance/performance collective BIRDHOUSE for a week-long residency and will offer a free movement workshop on Sunday, June 30th at Bushel Collective, daily open rehearsals throughout the week and a Work-in-Progress showing on Saturday, July 6th at Pillow Fort Arts Center.

On the first day of the residency (Sunday, June 30th), BIRDHOUSE director Raven White will lead a free, open-level movement/improvisation workshop at Bushel Collective. In this workshop, Raven will lead the group through a series of meditational movement improvisations. She will invite each person to accept themselves and reunite their mind and body. While we are taught through our lives that our bodies are shameful and that we must move a certain way, the workshop aims to provide a new way of considering self, the mind-body, and the daunting-yet-infinite possibilities presented by improvisation. Raven cultivates a space in which humans can move with freedom.

For the rest of the week, community members are invited to join the BIRDHOUSE artists for their morning improvisational session at the dance deck at Pillow Fort Arts Center from 9-11am Monday, July 1st through Friday, July 5th. Improvisation is the core of the BIRDHOUSE creative process and they start every rehearsal with an extended improvisation. Each day will be led by a different BIRDHOUSE artist, each with their own entrance into improvisation. Community members are free to drop in for whichever days they can and are encouraged to join for multiple days over the course of the week.

For both the workshop and the open rehearsals, people are welcome to observe if they do not wish to participate.

The daily open rehearsals will be followed by creative time for BIRDHOUSE, where each artist of will create a small piece with the rest of the collective. The residency will culminate in a public showing of what BIRDHOUSE created during their residency, hosted on the outdoor dance deck at PFAC on Saturday, July 6th.

Many thanks to our community partner, Bushel Collective, for providing space for and hosting the opening event in this series!

Click here for individual event pages and registration links.

About Birdhouse

BIRDHOUSE is a community of activist artists who move their body-minds in performance and installations to change conceptions of humanity. 

BIRDHOUSE’s works deal intimately with the human body, the implications of the body on identity, and the many ways in which we see and are seen, erase and are erased. They aim to uncover the essence of humanity within everyone by breaking down the classical format of audience watching performers into something much simpler: Humans being humans with each other. BIRDHOUSE works from a place of improvisation and communication so that the performers are always themselves before they are something else, using their community as a microcosm to investigate the realities of the human condition. 

BIRDHOUSE creates and performs in galleries, theaters, public forums such as the World Trade Center Oculus, and non-traditional spaces like cafés and apartments, always with the intent of bringing ourselves and others into a deeper place of empathy and understanding of each other’s experiences. 

This project is made possible with funds from the Delaware County Arts Grants and the NYS DanceForce.

The Delaware County Arts Grant is a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered in Delaware County by the Roxbury Arts Group.

The NYS DanceForce is a partnership program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.