Candice Salyers

Duration:

3 minutes, 2 seconds

Dancer and multi-disciplinary artist Candice Salyers traveled from Mississippi to explore and record in Acadia National Park during all four seasons of 2019. (Choreography & Performance by Candice Salyers. Text by John Muir. Music by Peter Jones.)

• Bonus Audio: Candice Salyers

  
  

  Intending originally to make her video more accessible for blind and low vision visitors, Candice Salyers wrote and recorded a detailed description of each unfolding scene that further illuminates her connections to Acadia across all four seasons in 2019.

  Credit / Author:

  Courtesy of Candice Salyers

  Audio Transcript

  Hi, I'm Candice Salyers and I'm a dancer and artist-in-residence at Acadia National Park. The following video highlights some of my performance research in different landscapes and seasons in the park.

  Moving in the landscape was an act of discovery for me. So I'm going to share with you a description of each moment that also offers insight to what I was learning in each environment.

  This video includes text by John Muir and music by Peter Jones.

  I am five feet seven inches tall and have dark blond hair and a slender build.

  In the first moments of this video, I am wearing a white dress the billows behind me as I face an expanse of sky and ocean. The environment around me moves. Waves crash. The wind blows my hair and my dress and the sun shimmers on the water. But standing on a snow-covered rock overlooking the ocean I remain still.

  Slowly these words fade into the picture, "Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad. All scars she heals, whether in rocks, or water, or sky, or heart."

  The scene fades and then opens again, this time in the autumn on the carriage roads that stretch out beyond Hulls Cove. The bright red leaves on the trees line the gravel and rock pathway of the trail and hover above me in my bright red dress.

  As I turn slowly to the left, my right arm stretches out with an open, upturned palm. These words descend to the base of the path, "I've never met a discontented tree."

  As the scene changes again, it reveals summer in a moss covered forest. A pair of birch trees stands in the foreground while I am deep inside a grove of towering pine. I am dressed in black pants and a shirt so that I am mostly a silhouette within the trees.

  Standing on my left foot, the top of my right foot presses into the earth below me. Facing a tree to my left, my hands are clasped overhead framing my face. As my right hand slips through the grasp of my left, I slowly bend backwards into the opening created as my right arm unfurls. My knees bend to help my body descend.

  When my right ear tilts towards the earth below while my left palm presses up toward the sky. Before my right hand touches the ground, I curve my body forward over my left knee and both arms reach out behind me like wings.

  As my fingertips pull me into standing again may hands seem to motivate the movement behind the following words that appear on the screen, "The wrongs done to trees are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief. But when the light comes the heart of the people is always right."

  The next scene opens with me standing on a sloping brown rock in the ocean surrounded by giant jagged rocks emerging from the water and only a tiny figure in the midst of this enormous landscape. In a royal blue dress and white wraps on my shoulders and head, my clothing mimics the blue and white of the water, while I embody the movement reflecting the crashing waves around me.

  My arms are in a circle behind my back and gradually lengthen out to both sides and forward billowing up in front of my face. As my elbows and hands descend like a splash of water that is beaten against the shore and is now subsiding. The ocean continues to roll over the rock on which I'm standing. My hands now come to my left hip as my torso and head curve slightly towards my open palm. My right hand draws a line from my left hip to my right hip as my eyes and head follow my left arm in a long arc looping into the air around me and then overhead.

  Opening my heart XXXX, both arms now reach up in union to curve and descend forward like a cresting wave.

  The words read, "Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."

  The final scene returns to winter at Acadia, but now on the snow-covered carriage roads that stretch out from the Brown Mountain Gatehouse. Evergreen trees stand on either side of the path and my white dress blends into its snowy surroundings. My head turns slowly over my left shoulder, before I begin to turn my whole body, whirling slowly to the left. As my arms rise to the side it soon becomes a V shape, and finally come together as it gently circles overhead to the last refrains of the music.

  And the text reads, "The snow is melting into music."

Candice Salyers

Candice Salyers, of Hattiesburg, MS, is a dancer and multi-disciplinary artist whose work integrates text, poetic images, and movement to create both intimate and large-scale installations and performances. Her dance work has been shown in landscapes and stages in the U.S., U.K., Estonia, Ireland, Spain, Hungary, Morocco, and the Czech Republic and has been supported and presented by residencies and theaters including Redfern Arts Center, Vermont Performance Lab, Ko Festival of Performance, Bates Dance Festival, Arte & Ecologia (Spain), ACSL (Armenia), and Green Olive Arts (Morocco). She was one of 10 US artists selected to participate in an international exchange between National Dance Project (US) and Culture Ireland (IE). Her Ph.D. work explored intersections of dance performance, feminist theories, and environmental philosophy, and she also holds an MFA and MDiv.

Her recent solo performance project explores different physical and conceptual perspectives on female sainthood and includes dances created for both landscape and stage spaces. Candice was awarded a Choreographic Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her choreographic and performance work and a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Association of University Women for her writing. She also pursues dance performance as a means of humanitarian service and international peacebuilding. She was recently one of the first dancers invited to speak at the Society for European Philosophy, and her publications include contributions to Tanz, Bewegung, und Spiritualität, The Journal of Environmental Philosophy, and the Journal of Performance and Mindfulness. Visit her website

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