FINAL NOTICE
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Final Notice is a new, multi-year site-specific interactive mobile app collaboration between choreographer/dance educator Danielle Russo and creative technologist Henry Holmes. Final Notice seeks to combat Climate Change on the Brooklyn riverfront, explicitly emphasizing public health and environmental threats to neighborhoods with Superfund and Brownfield sites. Development of this project consists of two distinct stages: community collaboration through youth S.T.E.A.M. programming (I), and construction and production (II). Ultimately, Final Notice will culminate in a free, four-day, outdoor launch and performance series in Brooklyn riverfront parks in Fall 2021.
PROJECT GOAL
We believe the organization of public performance art—the mobilization of bodies disrupting, yet investigating everyday shared spaces—is a larger, collective social choreography with the potential to establish long-standing change for more equitable solutions and policy making. Founded on a trusted community engagement model, Final Notice is about building long-lasting, authentic relationships and inter-borough coalition to support Brooklynites who are affected firsthand by the political negligence and environmental racism attached to Climate Change. Final Notice strives to invest in vital youth voices, invert systemic and inequitable power dynamics, and raise awareness about Climate Change through the virtue of art and technology.
BACKGROUND & IMPETUS
Defined by the EPA, Superfund and Brownfield sites are areas contaminated by hazardous waste posing risk to human and environmental health, and requiring long-term rehabilitation. Several East River tributaries and industrial sites became Superfunds and Brownfields due to decades of oil, ink, and mercury dumping. Demonstrated by Superstorm Sandy, Legacy Pollution at these sites will continue to be exacerbated by Climate Change. This unprecedented floodwater will carry contaminants into residential areas at unsafe exposure levels. According to the DEC, sea levels will rise 50 - 75 inches by 2100 and submerge East Riverfront properties. Yet, Mayor de Blasio’s current protection plan focuses on Manhattan.
Utilizing action research methodology, we are partnering with two Brooklyn community centers founded on social and environmental justice and youth leadership platforms: El Puente Williamsburg Leadership Center and Red Hook Initiative (RHI). Both locations sit on coastal Superfund and Brownfield sites, and have implemented grass-roots programming to rouse local attention. These industrial and post-industrial districts are storm-surge zones but most importantly, they are home to minority and low-income, immigrant communities who are caught living in a paradox of extreme invisibility and visibility under the current administration. Studies show that Latinx and Black neighborhoods in Kings County are at a 65% higher possibility to experience the extreme weather patterns, events, and air pollution caused by Climate Change. Conversely, they are subjected to slow and/or absent response from the city. Additionally, said communities are inundated with immediate threats such as ICE raids, deportation, and police misconduct. Further, corporate real estate development [entangled with local politics] has led to hyper-gentrification and rent increase, causing rapid displacement.
El Puente is home to The Global Justice Institute and Green Light District which hosts practitioners from across NYC for modules concentrating on arts for social justice, cultural sustainability, and community organizing. It is the co-founder of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, leading a diverse community coalition to limit the activities of radioactive and hazardous waste storage facilities in North Brooklyn. Additionally, El Puente is Brooklyn’s most comprehensive Latinx center for art and culture, based on an “arts for social change model” in which the arts serve as the primary vehicle for personal and social transformation. Similarly, Red Hook Initiative’s Youth Leadership Program utilizes participatory action research to define neighborhood issues and propose solutions for social justice and sustainability. We are working with the on-site programming staff at El Puente and Red Hook Initiative, including Urantia Ramirez and Shy Richardson (Leadership Center Program Directors, El Puente), Leslie Velasquez (Manager of Green Light District, El Puente), Ericka Media (Director of Adolescent Programs, Red Hook Initiative), Natisha Romain (High School Program Manager, Red Hook Initiative), and Tarik Bell (Education Manager and Freedom School Branch Director, Red Hook Initiative).
STAGE I: Community Collaboration — Research & Resource Sharing
Stage I of Final Notice includes two, virtual, six-week collaboratories with youth leadership interns at RHI from July 6 - August 14, 2020 and at El Puente from September 14 - October 23, 2020. As volunteer [unpaid] teaching artists, we are introducing a S.T.E.A.M. curriculum where the coalescence of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics will provide access points for guiding scholarly inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. Right now, we are running “Digital Archaeology & Interactive Storytelling” in partnership with the Freedom School of the Children’s Defense Fund at RHI. Together, we are researching the historical to present-day narrative of these neighborhoods and creating an interactive mobile app experience in response to the serious neighborhood effects of Climate Change — ranging from personal storytelling to growing scientific data. Through creative research, we examine how the interactive dissemination of both past and living histories can mobilize a community and/or foster awareness around an urgent public matter. Each week, we meet and exchange with a local environmentalist, conservationist, historian, activist, or community organizer to broaden our research practices and local engagement.
This free cross-platform mobile experience will be led by Henry Holmes and will be designed and built in close relationship with the Youth Collaborators. Using geofencing, augmented reality, and related techniques, data research, personal youth narratives, and community interviews will appear on users' screens and play through headphones according to a user’s real-time movement and location. For example, information on Red Hook historical landmarks—such as Lenapehoking farmland, Red Hook’s “Tin City” Hooverville or The Red Hook Houses—will exist alongside current neighborhood voices, as well as Climate Change data and local, actionable solutions immediately relevant to the user’s surroundings. This curriculum and its creative process confronts historical erasure, encouraging participants to challenge methods for archiving, reporting, and representing these neighborhoods, emphasizing the importance of decolonization and anti-racism in content sharing. In doing so, personal history and storytelling modules stress self-authorship and reclaiming narratives — particularly championing Youth Collaborators, many of whom are Black and Brown adolescents whose lived experiences have been directly impacted by the histories and concepts investigated in our collective research.
Project development, with particular emphasis on the completion and free public dissemination of the app, will continue with El Puente this fall, and with technologists through the remainder of 2020. Prioritizing partnerships with El Puente and RHI aligns with our deep belief in local art activism that responds to a neighborhood-to-nationwide epidemic. These partnerships will foster opportunities for young artists to experiment and develop their craft alongside professional artists and technologists. All Youth Collaborators are paid for their participation through their community center’s youth development and employment training program for career exploration in the arts, health, social justice, and environmental advocacy.
STAGE II: Constructing Dances for Disruption
Following youth residencies, Stage II will concentrate on the organization and development of research culled in the field. This will focus on the continued development, testing, and completion of the mobile app design and content. Additionally, this will include its public launch and campaign for open public use, as it will be deployed to both Apple and Google Play stores for free download and ongoing availability. Alongside the making of the mobile app, collaborator Danielle Russo will be working with dancers Roya Fereshtehnejad Carreras, Jason Collins, Kayla Farrish, and Christine Flores in the making of three large-scale cyclical dances. She will construct meticulously dense, high-stamina chains of solo, duet, and quartet material. With each revolution, these dances will accumulate in content, size, and locomotion — both echoing and tangibly marking the anticipated 80-year land recession of the Brooklyn riverfront when performed on site. Collectively, we will analyze and hone the structural language and configuration of these dances in direct correlation to the scientific, historical, and social research gathered.
Please note that this timeline and curriculum has been adjusted from its original timeline and format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For the sustainability of this project and continued safety of its collaborators, we decided to build the mobile app in 2020 versus 2021 [during which time, all performance-based work is slated to take place]. As a result, Stage II will now include a second round of youth collaboratories in Summer 2021. This round will focus on performance as a mechanism for protest and community-building. Ultimately, the material generated by Russo with her team of professional dancers and teaching artists will stand alongside the performance and technology work of Youth Collaborators in a free, four-day production in Fall 2021. Moreover, these choreographies will methodically activate the mobile app initiated by the project in Stage I.
Final Notice is sponsored in part by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) and the Coronavirus Dance Relief Fund administered by Dance/NYC.
Danielle Russo, Project Director & Choreographer