Search

recognizing ourselves in others

a performance & photography collaboration
Friday, July 26th @5:45pm
Hidden Acres Farm 
​11128 Beach Rd, Sister Bay, WI 54234
The Hidden Acres Pop-up performance will feature a unique collaboration of photography and movement-–recognizing ourselves in others.
An illuminated path of photography captures the spiritual practices of Northeast Brazil, manifesting into ​a celebration of movement. recognizing ourselves in others is a creation by life partners: photographer Meredith W. Watts and
​internationally acclaimed dance artist Simone Ferro. 
A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Simone Ferro is a choreographer, movement practitioner, somatic researcher, and Fulbright scholar. She joined the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Department of Dance in 2001 and retired in 2022 after decades serving as MFA program director and department chair. After a professional career as soloist with dance companies in Brazil and Switzerland, she completed her graduate work at the University of Iowa, a Laban Movement Analysis Certification by the Columbia College of Chicago and a Certificate as Fascia Trainer. For the past 17 years, she travels to Brazil with her husband and research partner, Meredith W. Watts, to research and document popular culture and folk festivities in the Northeastern state of Maranhão. Jointly, they have completed a manuscript on
the Leadership of Women in the Popular Culture of Maranhão and a podcast series with interviews of some 65 women leaders. Simone has just returned from Brazil where she completed a choreographic commission called Crôa to the Cisne Negro Cia de Dança.
Meredith W. Watts (photographer- recognizing ourselves in others- artist statement): "I think of myself less as an artist and more as a curious observer and researcher with a camera. In academics the term “ethnography” -- or even “photoethnography” – might describe this form of observation and documentation of human cultural practice. The simpler term “storyteller with a camera” seems more comfortable to me. These photographs were first exhibited in a show in Milwaukee entitled “Embodied Devotion” and it is part of a broader project of “seeing ourselves in others.” The images in this exhibit are the result of over fifteen years of joint research with my wife and research partner, Simone Ferro. The quality of equipment and the conditions of photographing varied considerably over that time. Of thousands of images from our research, this selection focuses on “Embodied Devotion” – spiritual practice in a culture that expresses devotion through dance, music (especially percussion), song, charismatic engagement, and even trance in which spiritual entities are embodied by participants. Sometimes the practices derive from centuries-old Church pageantry that has now entered the folk tradition as “Popular Catholicism.” The values in this project reflect my decades-long practices in the Unitarian Church and in the Buddhist tradition of the Milwaukee Mindfulness Community, honoring diversity of persons and of their spiritual practice. These values guided my thinking as I photographed these Northeast Brazil folk traditions –practice that are not primarily discursive and intellectual, but are expressed in oral tradition, music, and embodied celebration. That cultural matrix has deep Afro-Brazilian roots with elements of European culture and a strong influence of indigenous cultural practice. I am delighted to present these images as a reflection on the diversity of spiritual experience. We do not see them as images of a far-off culture, but as a manifestation of a fundamental human need for cultural and devotional expression, whether expressed in words, concepts, prayers, dance or embodied practice – a need we all share and in which we can see ourselves as we might have been in another life, another culture."
Header: Design- Charlie Stephens, Photo- xoMe studio
Top Photo: Jeff Pearcy
Bio Photos: Meredith W. Watts