Artists Learn and Share: Ellen Smith Ahern

In the Artists Learn and Share series, NEFA connects with grantees to learn more about the impact of the grant on their work. In this blog, Ellen Smith Ahern describes her experience with the New England Dance Fund. New England Dance Fund is currently accepting applications through September 13, 2024. 

In October 2020, I stole a morning away from my family and the absurdity of remote elementary school (how did we all do that?) to hike/stumble up Mt. Moosilauke. Things got loud in my head as I struggled to focus on each stone and each breath, and eventually that noise became instructions for a dance: make a trio with two humans and one more-than-human body, listen to animal sounds, write a book of the future. By the time I got home, I was buzzing with that weird, joyful clarity familiar to so many of us who build creative work - “I think I know what I need to do!” And while the clarity has gotten fuzzy and even lost at times since that day, the weird joy has only grown.

I’ve had the amazing fortune to collaborate with dance artist Kate Elias (WA), musician and writer Pete Dybdahl (GA), musician and artist Jacob Elias (NY), and poet Josina Guess (GA) to build Vulture Sister Song. This interdisciplinary performance envisions a future in which human and more-than-human beings move together, where a migrating herd of sculptural lanterns (alternately resembling constellations, shape-shifting creatures, and a cluster of glowing eggs) interact with humans and live music to explore the vibrant possibilities of interdependence. Through folk music structures, electric lullabies, poetry, fable and even a recording of Josina’s teenage son, our performance opens a book of the future that accounts for the past and depends upon the voices of a wide community. This community has come to include artists, poets, writers, and environmental educators beyond our onstage ensemble, offering workshops, readings, and densely packed zines to accompany live performances in grange halls, galleries, community centers, and theaters.

It’s been my hope and sometimes my struggle over the past four years to build a project that shelters these voices and bodies, exploring what they share and what makes them different. In a funny/perfect mirroring of form and function, a work celebrating interdependence has grown from a solitary hike in the woods to a whole ecosystem of interconnected artists, environmental educators, and community members. A 2022 New England Dance Fund (NEDF) award was crucial to developing these interdisciplinary layers. NEDF support allowed us to host and film a live event of memoir/reflection, live folk music, and environmental education from partner Vermont Institute of Natural Science, the film of which we’ve since rescreened in multiple venues and the model for which we continue to revisit with a widening array of cross-disciplinary contributors, from Jayashree Krishnan’s Vedic vulture art in Seattle and the Vulture Festival hosted by the Athens-Clarke County Landfill in Georgia, to upcoming partnerships with Queerlective in New Hampshire and the Georgia Writers Museum and the Steffan Thomas Museum of Art in Georgia.  Many of these contributors’ work also continues to reach audiences through the zine, which is now in its 4th printing in English and Spanish, with support from the National Park Service, 4Culture, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.

I’m sharing these layers of engagement here to celebrate them and all the rich, unfolding relationships they represent - as dance artists we’re so often sitting alone in front of our computers, trying to force words upon work that thrives beyond language or even in spite of language, trying to feel connected and hopeful in an arts funding system that isolates and discourages. When I consider the web of relationships my work feeds and depends upon, I feel like I can begin to imagine and build more expansive possibilities for making, funding, and sharing art. I’m trying to be real about the limits of dance alone in my lived experience and in my largely rural community, where getting expansive and multidimensional beyond dance itself has become a way of staying with dance and strengthening dance. 

Partnering with NEDF to support beyond-dance dimensions of our performance project has, in turn, circled right back to dance itself, deepening layers of meaning as we perform, and enabling us to connect with a wider community than I know my dance work alone would have gathered. NEDF helped seed this growth - I hope it can do the same for other folks making weird, joyful, boundary-pushing art in New England. Reach out and connect with me to learn more about my experiences with regional grant opportunities!