Project III x Embodied Earth: PULSE
PULSE attendees in front of Embodied Earth’s photo installation
Stella Milinich’s down-tempo, bassy beats echo at a comfortable level through the Living Gallery’s space in the lead-up to Project III x Embodied Earth’s event, PULSE. I had received a warm welcome and a hand-drawn wrist stamp at the door in sparkly pink gel pen, yanking me violently back in time to a vanilla-scented late millennial girlhood. The swirly design stood in stark contrast to the usual blocky black venue prints that decorate my wrist and end up streaked across my face the next morning—I think of the afternoon I woke up with a Basement camera sticker somehow affixed to my ribs.
The party-goers at PULSE are a friendly, art-school chic group. A rainbow strobe illuminates the room and the informational photo display on the gallery’s walls. Images of the dancers—veiled in black sheer, pointe shoes on, with defiant expressions—cover the walls. The display builds an argument about the sustainability of dance, an art form that is “rooted in connection rather than consumption.” The evening is a collaboration between two organizations: Kasey Broekema’s performance studio, Project III, and Nicole Jackson’s climate-focused arts organization, Embodied Earth. As I read through the descriptions decorating Jackson’s photo display, I felt compelled to raise the question: What is the conceptual framework that ties these projects together? Hidden behind such notions as “archive” and “sustainable creative economy“ is a profound philosophical leap: the assumption that dance is inherently sustainable because it is, as the photo display claims, “organic and universal.” But what does it mean for an art form to be “organic”? Does an organic art form give us stable ontological ground to call that form sustainable, or is there more work that needs to be done to examine these terms?
Still of dancers John Crim (left) and Colton Dane (right) during their duet, choreographed by Kasey Broekema
As the program begins, a projected image appears on the back wall, giving a full minute of countdown before Project III’s lineup of dance films. The first film, Momentum, flashes between images of Broekema in an empty art studio, dancing with abandon on top of the foldable tables, tutu-clad ballerinas port-de-bras-ing around a crumbling church, and a troupe of dancers in skin-tight concert blacks improvising around drag queen Jacob Powers. The next work, VOID, features Broekema, holding come-hither eye contact with the camera as she grinds on the walls of an anonymous club. The last film, well, yes, features a montage of rehearsal footage from a pas de deux between Broekema and collaborator John Crim.
As the film credits roll, Crim and dancer Colton Dane begin a slow circle around one another. To the sound of Milinich’s electronic and bass-guitar riffs, the pair trade improvisational solos until Crim makes sensuous contact with Dane’s lower back. Dane, in a sheer corset accentuating willowy shoulders and sweeping arm gestures, is pulled and lifted valiantly by Crim. Sweeping around one another, they dance until Dane is left flat on the floor. Crim reaches for their prone body, then walks away. The room erupts into applause, and the artists take their bows. Plant Papi’s friendly, House-y set starts up, and the audience rises and begins dancing with a kind of enthusiasm so rarely on display in commercial club spaces. The room is warm, congratulatory, and ready to party.
Embodied Earth founder Nicole Jackson (left) and Project III founder Kasey Broekema (right)
In the aftermath, however, I kept returning to the event’s premise: the relationship between sustainability and dance. Following the performance, Broekema relayed to me that the event was made possible by a Columbia fellowship that both she and Jackson had received, and that many of the resources engaged in the films, such as the location for the first film, Momentum, were free or donated to the project. Pulling upon institutional resources and making creative projects possible through exchange are necessary pathways toward creating art, but they don’t necessarily constitute sustainable economies. As recent events, such as the NEA’s shifting funding priorities, have proven, institutional funding can be frequently subjected to larger-scale shifts in power. While it can be true that “community replaces capital,” to implement this on a larger scale is particularly difficult and involves generating economic opportunities to which all artists have access. So too are the mediums and techniques that artists engage in worthy of examination when addressing political themes. The use of a ballet vocabulary felt curious in juxtaposition to the evening’s theme; as a 2015 FiveThirtyEight article proclaims, “Raising A Ballerina Will Cost You $100,000.”
While I don’t believe that artists should be responsible for fixing society’s ills, I do hold us to the standard of solving the problems we set out to solve, to root our solutions in real problematics faced by real people, and take a step further to reflect upon the mediums that we choose to work with. As Andre Lepecki writes in his article, Choreopolice and choreopolitics, there is a profound question at the heart of performances that seek to be in conversation with political issues: how do we move politically? When we weld meaning on to empty aesthetic signifiers—when we move, but we do not move politically—we risk not heeding the warning that Walter Benjamin issued in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” namely, that art can do the work of projecting change in society “without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” If artists strive to call attention to the urgent issues facing the creative economy today, we are responsible for choreographing that attention carefully.
PULSE was presented by Embodied Earth and Project III at Living Gallery on November 16, 2025.
