Conversations: Above and Beneath, An Ode to Women Artists
Mount Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA
Detritus dance performs a site-responsive dance installation in dialogue with women artists in Mount Auburn’s landscape, past and present. Detritus dance activates the landscape of Mount Auburn Cemetery through a site-responsive, roaming contemporary dance installation entitled “Conversations: Above and Beneath.” Inspired by Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s “Conversations”, a series of assemblies between 1839-1844 of Bostonian women who sought alternate means of education when it was formally denied to them, our “movement salon” pays homage to the radical 19th-century Bostonian women artists of significance in Mount Auburn’s burial grounds. Our performance interweaves the connected narratives of writer Margaret Fuller Ossoli; poet Maria White Lowell; actor Charlotte Cushman; sculptor Edmonia Lewis; and historian Hannah Adams. We seek to bring these women’s stories into dialogue with our own across place and time, and in doing so help to reshape the ways we publicly memorialize women’s stories. This performance will make stops at: Maria White Lowell’s gravesite, the Hygeia Statue, Hannah Adam’s gravesite; Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s cenotaph, and Hazel Dell. Attendees are encouraged to wear…