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Spacial Awareness

On the final weekend of August, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park presented Anna Sperber’s Bessie award-winning dance “Bow Echo” during the opening day of its 2026 Annual Festival. Conceived for a large-scale, outdoor environment, “Bow Echo” premiered in 2021 on a rooftop in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Earlier this summer, it was presented outdoors at Lincon Center’s Hearst Plaza as part of the Dance Encounters series. Here at Kaatsbaan in New York’s Hudson River Valley, it has been transposed on and for a similar-sized area in a bucolic mountain field.

Performance

“Bow Echo” by Anna Sperber

Place

Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, Tivoli, NY, August 29, 2026

Words

Karen Greenspan

“Bow Echo” by Anna Sperber. Photograph by Deborah Lopez

Four performers wearing black pants and shirts and bright red sneakers traverse the field singly or in various groupings, frequently making full crossings. They walk, run, leap, kneel, roll about, and sometimes just stand still, arms stretched wide, taking in the vastness of the open space. There is a quiet drama when Paul Hamilton adopts this wide-armed stance facing upstage. He descends into a held grande plié staring out at the unmown fields seeming to stretch time. Then he moves on, leaping a short diagonal, rolling in the grass, and standing to perform a windmill action with his arms. He looks toward the entrance point and with his gaze welcomes Sperber to join him in the big space. 

They make their way back to their entrance point and each pick up a large black banner. Crossing the field with the purposeful energy of band majorettes, they whip the banners in giant arcs in rhythmically coordinated patterns. The range of sounds as the fabric snaps through the air from its dynamic manipulation creates a unique soundscape amidst the grass, trees, sky, and expanse. 

As the two exit, two more dancers (Emma Judkins and Dorchel Haqq) replace them. The vocabulary expands with a quick flicking motion followed by a gentle arm swing and rebound. Only the sounds of the natural environment and an occasional distant train accompany the dancers as they perform their established movements and explore different spatial relationships with each other. 

The quartet proceeds to pick up large black cowbells. Crossing the field back and forth, they swing their arms, ringing the bells, echoing sounds like a church bell tower at the hour. Although the work has a durational bent, interest builds with new geometric floor patterns—a four-square in the central space and the new sound, along with the movement required to produce it. In a reductive turn, they suddenly stand in place just swinging their arms to continue the sound until the pendular arm motion comes to a rest and the bells are silent. 

“Bow Echo” by Anna Sperber. Photograph by Deborah Lopez

“Bow Echo” by Anna Sperber. Photograph by Deborah Lopez

After disappearing momentarily to collect the next prop, the dancers reemerge each dragging a large panel of black Marley flooring behind them. Striding back and forth across the field, they grasp one edge around their waists, wearing the material like big skirts with long trains. They stretch their arms upward and the panels look like giant capes. As they turn upstage and face the expanse, the dancers close one edge around their heads and seem to disappear inside triangular tents.  Throughout this sequence, the material grazes the grass and makes a subtle sweeping sound. This is a moment where the specific environment noticeably affects the sound produced. Indeed, in a trailer for the original rooftop performance, one can hear that the dancers’ feet treading on the rooftop surface produces a very different sound from what you hear when they dance on a grassy field. 

In this choreographic exploration around the manipulation of large-scale objects and materials to generate sound, the produced sound is an extension of the dancers’ bodies and physical movements. The sound is the dance—or at least a major aspect of the dance. And as the dance expands into this sonic dimension, one is drawn to listen to it like a sound meditation.

Sperber explained that when she made and performed the dance on the rooftop, she was motivated by the desire to offer an experience of expansiveness and generosity in response to the containment and isolation we were all experiencing during the height of the pandemic. “Bow Echo” is a visual and sonic collaboration that responds to and revels in the offered space.

Karen Greenspan


Karen Greenspan is a New York City-based dance journalist and frequent contributor to Natural History Magazine, Dance Tabs, Ballet Review, and Tricycle among other publications. She is also the author of Footfalls from the Land of Happiness: A Journey into the Dances of Bhutan, published in 2019.

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