betterArts welcomes Mark Bankin and fellow dancers to Better Farm for a micro residency this week as they work on their latest project, supported by a New York State Choreographers Initiative designed to help choreographers develop their choreographic skills by providing them with resources to advance their creative practice. The 10 dancers will be practicing on the Better Farm campus through Friday, and offer a free “live rehearsal” this Thursday at 6 p.m. Bring a dish to pass if you’d like to stay on for a dinner with the performers following the event.
The project is described as “a choreographic exorcism staged on living grass” that emulates time-lapse solar cycles of sunrises and sunsets, where environment and choreography form a single, immersive system. Rooted in folk-dance structures and ritual procession, the piece develops a polyphonic movement language built from repetition, call-and-response, and chain formations that transmit across the ensemble like a living network. Motifs circulate, fracture, and recombine, producing states of entrainment, trance, and collective synchrony. Drawing on biomimetic systems, animist cosmologies, and posthuman theory, the work frames nature as both archive and agent: a field that stores memory, rewrites bodies, and dissolves individuality into cycles of time, fertility, and entropy. The result is a pastoral that turns unstable—simultaneously ritual, contagion, and perceptual landscape. The movement blends legible signs from medieval portraiture gestural symbolism to sign language and infused with somatic triggers—yawning, hypnotic loops, itching—designed to entrain the audience into a shared trance state. This work is dedicated to the memory and methodology of Dr. János Fügedi, whose unprecedented work in folk dance notation provides the structural DNA for this exploration of how movement is archived, transmitted, and ultimately reclaimed by the Earth.
More about Mark, a choreographer and dance diagram specialist. His work has been presented at Fondation des États-Unis (Paris), Hošek Contemporary (Berlin), Power Station of Art (Shanghai), and The Tank (NYC). He’s a commissioned choreographer with notAmuse Theater, Dances We Dance, ACUD Theater Berlin, and The Why Collective, and has danced with Yoshito Ohno, Gekidan Kaitaisha, and Tetsuro Fukuhara. Mark studied with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch at the Folkwang School and received a Fulbright for his MFA at the Conservatoire de Paris. His work has been described as “grotesque and beautiful—sometimes both at once” by Malini Singh McDonald at Theatre Beyond Broadway.
