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Native Skywatchers – Kapemni Dance
Saturday | May 20, 2023 | 3:00 pm–3:30 pm
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Kapemni: As Is It Above; It Is Below
At the Doorway of Light, Sound, Space, and Movement
Join us for a storytelling motion media dance performance featuring D(L)akota and Ojibwe Indigenous astronomy with immersive, experiential, interactive animation projection art, and sky and Earth soundscapes. The performance explores the D(L)akota teaching Kapemni, which translates “As it is above, it is below” (trans. Albert White Hat Sr.).
Students in the Dance Program at South High School tell the story through movement that “we come from the stars” and perform their interpretation of the Kapemni concept, as shared by Annette S. Lee, in this collaborative piece.
This project is a collaboration between Native Skywatchers and South High School’s Dance Program and its All Nations Program, supporting students to lead Native narrative change. Dance team led by Instructor Nancy Nair, Animation and Sound Design by Annette S. Lee.
About the participants
- Kapemni Dance is a collaborative project of Native Skywatchers together with South High School. Native Skywatchers brings together Western and Indigenous science, drawing on the principle of Etuaptmumk, or Two-Eyed Seeing—an approach that utilizes both the strengths of Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing, and Western knowledge and ways of knowing.
Kapemni Dance is a part of Native Skywatchers’ “We are Stardust” research and programming initiatives
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- Annette S. Lee is director and founder of the Native Skywatchers research and programming initiative. She has over three decades of experience in education as a teacher, university instructor, teacher educator, program administrator, professional visual artist, and researcher. She is mixed-race Lakota and her communities are Ojibwe and D/Lakota.
Find other exciting interdisciplinary Native Skywatchers projects at the intersection of SCIENCE-ART-CULTURE here:
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See Native Skywatchers at the Bell Museum’s Statewide Star Party 2022:
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Native Skywatchers sponsors for this project include the Heising-Simons Foundation, South High Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, We are Still Here Minnesota, and the Bell Museum.