Insectageddon: A collective performance & call to action to celebrate and help save our pollinators.

These pieces, curated by NOoSPHERE Arts’ dance partner CreateART, bring attention to the ancient evolution and epic migration of the imperiled monarch butterfly while highlighting the opportunities in urban areas to support these creatures through the restoration of critical habitat - even in highly industrial environments.

An immersive dance & music performance among the wildflowers of industrial Greenpoint inspired by the migration of monarchs from their overwintering home in Mexico up to Canada and back again each year. In reflection of the butterflies’ itinerary, we commissioned site-specific works created and performed by choreographers/dancers from these two endpoints.

Kingsland Wildflowers joined this interdisciplinary partnership to uplift artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña's two-day, world-wide collective performance and call to action Insectageddon by hosting A Monarch’s Journey.

Insectageddon seeks to inspire a closer look at the important role insects play in supporting the greater web of life, and the devastating loss of their populations around the world due to human interventions including industrial farming and habitat destruction.

View the High Line's Celebrating Insects Booklet, released for their month-long Horticulture celebration, written in collaboration with our very own Lisa Bloodgood, Director of Advocacy and Education with Newtown Creek Alliance.

WE ARE NATURE: A Monarch’s Journey | Sep 25-26, 2021
Presented by Newtown Creek Alliance and NOoSPHERE Arts in collaboration with CreateART
as part of citywide Insectageddon events sponsored by The High Line, NYC;
also featured in CEC ArtsLink’s Art Prospect Festival 2021: Forms of Unity

Choreographed and performed by Erick Montes (Mexico) | Rebecca Margolick (Canada) + Dasol Kim
Specially composed music: Katy Gunn
Narration text written by Lisa Bloodgood read by Georgia Usborne
Creekside Coda: Alexandre Barranco

WE ARE NATURE Summer Rooftop Series

NOoSPHERE Arts annual rooftop series combines arts, environmental activism, and community building. Set in a surreally beautiful nature sanctuary sprouting on top of an ExxonMobil industrial plant on the bank of Superfund site Newton Creek, the recurring WE ARE NATURE Rooftop Series offers a combination of multiple art forms – dance, music, performance, visual art, poetry, prose, and film – addressing humanity’s place on Earth with the aim of engaging a diverse audience in environmental efforts through art.

WE ARE NATURE: Patterns of Connection - 2022

For this 3rd iteration of WE ARE NATURE, we were honored to collaborate once again with internationally renowned physicist and eco-literacy scholar, Fritjof Capra. NOoSPHERE Arts selected from Dr. Capra’s book Patterns of Connection four essential characteristics of life in all forms, around which commissioned artists created new, site-specific works. Over five public events, the art was complemented with poetically presented fact-based input from Capra in the form of readings and virtual appearances. It is NOoSPHERE Arts’ goal for the audience to walk away with the central message that we already have solutions we know will work. Rather than perpetuating the prevalent sense of doom—which only causes people to give up—NOoSPHERE Arts' multidisciplinary rooftop programming instills belief in personal agency and hope through collective action.

Water Is Life

Photo by Effy Grey