The birds are migrating northward as spring progresses, and so are the artists. Jennifer Monson is director of a dance troupe that’s traveling up the Mississippi flyway along with migrating ducks and geese and arrived this week in Cedar Rapids. At a national performance conference she met Legion Arts’ John Herbert, and she came to visit and line up nature centers including one called Wickiup. The group’s performances try to illustrate the migratory patterns of the birds, and show their real and metaphorical relationship to people. Monson’s also partnered with grade schools and other groups, and some Iowans will get to perform with the traveling dancers. There’s a “flocking dance,” but she can’t afford to travel with a whole “flock” of dancers, so she invites artists, girl scouts, dance students and other locals to join in. The “Bird Brain” dance road tour up the Mississippi flyway is not the first nature trip for Monson and her dancers. They followed the gray whale migration up the west coast in 2001, performing in national parks, parking lots and city streets, and then followed the osprey migration back southward, down the east coast from Maine to Cuba to Venezuela, dancing at every stop. While not many artists try to migrate with birds, Monson says the movement of the living things stirs feelings in many people. A lot of people find both nature and art hold something mysterious and “uncontainable” and she says many artists are inspired by nature, as she’s most inspired by the phenomenon of navigation. This tour will take the dancers on from Cedar Rapids after this week, to stops in Chicago, Minneapolis, Duluth and Canada. After a resting period to try and translate all her travels to a piece that can be performed in the theatre, Monson plans one more dance expedition — following a small migrating bird called the wheat-ear from the arctic circle southward through Europe. For more on the tour and its Iowa stop this week, click on “birdbrain” at the Legion Arts website, http://www.legionarts.org/
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