Dance and sculpture defy gravity in ‘Noli Timere’

Remember the fluorescent sculpture floating above the Rose Kennedy Greenway in the summer of 2015?

As If It Were Already Here was the work of Janet Echelman, a sculptor who creates monumental, suspended works that respond to the immediate environment. In 2022, the Boston Society of Architecture awarded the piece a medal that honors “the most beautiful piece of architecture, building, monument or structure within the City or Metropolitan Parks District limits.”

This week, Echelman returns to Boston with a sculpture suspended on stage.

“Noli Timere” is an aerial performance featuring eight dancers moving within and around Echelman’s custom-made net, reaching up to 25 feet in the air. The performance makes its Boston debut at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre Jan. 29–Feb.1, opening this year’s portion of ArtsEmerson’s 15th anniversary season.

“Noli Timere” is the culmination of a five-year collaboration between Echelman, director and choreographer Rebecca Lazier, composer Jorane, engineers, performers, riggers, and designers.

The collaboration began in 2018 when Lazier and Echelman met at an arts and engineering conference at Princeton University, where Lazier is a professor of practice.

“Gee, I’d love to work with her. Do I have the guts to go ask her?” Echelman said with a smile, recalling her reaction to Lazier’s performance.

Lazier, also a fellow Guggenheim recipient, choreographs experimental dance work, often in collaboration with musicians, engineers, and visual artists.

In 2020, Echelman and Lazier co-taught a course at Princeton where students, dancers, engineers, sound artists, and Broadway safety consultants collaborated to create textile structures for dance. When the pandemic hit, they continued their collaboration over Zoom. Lazier and her team of dancers in Quebec would experiment with movement on the net. They sent Echelman videos, and she would suggest ideas to evolve the net.

“I had to learn a whole new way of making sculpture,” said Echelman. “If we're going to find this new language, what are the letters? It required a completely new syntax, but also a new alphabet.” The dancers’ weight, their ability to traverse the net with their hands and feet, and Lazier’s artistic vision were some of the many factors that Echelman considered.

“I don’t think my choreographic practice has changed to this degree,” said Lazier. “I usually choreograph works that have some openness and give some agency to discover within. In this work, it's both the most precise because you have someone's life in your hands, and yet, it's never the same twice. Because the dynamics of the net might be that you have to use your right hand or your left hand, you can’t necessarily always know it’s exactly this.”

Ultimately, Echelman landed on two 40-foot by 30-foot braided fiber sculptures suspended by a dynamic rigging system. “There are eight dancers, but there are four additional professionals who work behind the stage to dance the sculpture like a marionette,” explained Echelman. “I think of the sculpture as a dancer, the ninth dancer, but just as a differently scaled organism.”

During a rehearsal ahead of the show’s debut, two dancers grasp for each other through the upper net, holding eye contact. One crawls above and the other dangles below, holding onto the net and to the arms and legs of the other. Each slight movement reverberates across the entire sculpture. Six dancers lie in parallel below, bathing in a giant textured shadow.

“Noli Timere,” the Latin phrase for “be not afraid,” was Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s final text to his wife before he passed. To Echelman, the phrase characterizes our interconnected relationship with our ever-changing planet, asking, “What does it mean for multiple human beings to coexist in a world that is not fixed, not solid, that is moving, precarious at times? And every time you move or your neighbor moves, they have changed the literal shape of the world under your feet.”

For Lazier, “Noli Timere” also represents the fearlessness in pursuing a singular idea. “Dare to dream.  Dare to care intensely about something, dare to value it so much that you will stick with it over a long time…What if we take one idea and just keep interweaving it? Keep checking it, keep pulling through it, keep making that community that can make that together. And that's really what this piece has become,” she said.

“Noli Timere” premiered last year at Princeton and has since had 10 performances across six states.

This week’s performances are especially meaningful for Echelman, who has lived on and off in the Boston area since 1983. “ Boston is the place where the world opened for me. I came here as a 17-year-old college freshman, scared to death of arriving at Harvard, and I've come back here at different times in my life,” she said. After graduating college, Echelman returned to the Boston area for graduate studies, fellowships, residencies, and her studio practice in Brookline. Among the audience will be Echelman’s friends, colleagues, early teachers, and two children.

Lazier and Echelman hope to continue showcasing “Noli Timere” around the globe. Upcoming performances include Sherbrooke University in Quebec and the Singapore Festival of the Arts in May.

Five performances of “Noli Timere” are scheduled from Jan. 29-Feb. 1 at the Emerson Majestic Cutler Theatre. Two performances will feature post-show talkbacks on Jan. 30 and 31 to learn more from the creative team and performers.