"Working with Dancing Earth recently has helped me EVOLVE and stay on the cusp of what is being done, and more so, what is possible by learning from collaborators about the latest tech/implements. The CONNECTION to other amazing beings and having space to be heard and hear each other was HUMANIZING... we all were able to assure each other that we still have each other and that we are stronger together... not only as collaborators, but as community, as FAMILY."
- Lumhe Micco Sampson, Mvskoke/Seneca

photo © AMT Productions

Statement of remixed identity, community work, and creative process

As lifetimes of racist, capitalist, colonialist injustices- and the violence and planetary degradation they have led to- are brought under mainstream attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, we- as a mixed-heritage dance company engaged in inter-cultural creative processes, acknowledge the privilege we hold to advocate and support our diasporic global Indigenous communities. We look to you- our friends, our elders, and our communities with whom we have nurtured relationships for decades- to continue this work with us so we can bring the healing, connection, visibility, and creative energy needed so profoundly at this time. Our work is not defined by one identity or heritage. Through collaborations of inter-tribal and inter-cultural artists and community members, our danceworks are designed to address vital awareness for the wellness of the planet and all our relations.

Dancing Earth Creations was birthed from Artistic Director Rulan Tangen’s vision to serve the collective story of “WE.” Our inter-tribal and inter-cultural collaborators have grown our community-led dance works into platforms for global Indigenous worldviews and cultural exchanges, protocols, multi-disciplinary arts and story sharing, environmental stewardship, and advocacy for diverse perspectives in all spaces.

We are a small but far-reaching grassroots, project-based cultural contemporary dance organization, collaborating with a convergence of artists, farmers, cultural advisors and activists at multiple locations. We serve communities, creating eco-dance productions under the guidance of elders who advise appropriate themes for widespread sharing- including diversity as well as sacred land and water - for the health and wellness of all people and the planet.

“Now, I feel so confident, inspired, and ready to take on anything.
I am going back to the rez to try to get things going—film, theater, art, dance. We need it.” 
– Raven Knight, Jicarilla Apache

Director Rulan Tangen comes from a richly complex, mixed heritage. She has lineage from Luzon Island in the Pacific, and from different parts of Europe. She is also, through ceremonial adoption as a "Hunka Lakota," in relation with Lakota peoples, and has been claimed as a relative by Kainai and Anishnaabeg/Métis families. This is a complex heritage, woven through a lifetime of Indigenous relationship building, accepted responsibility, and earned respect, as well as through bloodline to peoples in the Philippines occupied and colonized for hundreds of years by Spain and the U.S. (Link to extended identity statement.)

Her work transcends the personal, as it centers the inter-personal, a creative force that is collective- rooted in the nurturance of relationship-building. Rulan's dance journey centers around the founding of Dancing Earth in 2004. After years of teaching dance workshops to reservation youth, she strove to create hope and opportunity for aspiring performers, theater artists and technicians, who also serve as culture carriers, art educators, and leaders. Dancing Earth has thus inspired a new generation of Indigenous performers to express their culture in vital contemporary and experimental forms. Rulan values movement as an expression of Indigenous worldview including the honoring of matriarchal leadership; dance as functional ritual for transformation and healing; the process of decolonizing the body; and, the animistic energetic connection with all forms of life on earth. She holds the belief that: “To dance is to live, to live is to dance.”

Artists from more than 28 global First Nations have co-created with Dancing Earth, including inter-tribal and international collaborating artists. Through visceral love, leadership, and connectivity, the identity of Dancing Earth is in our relationship-building. Intercultural contemporary dance is our way to connect, heal, discuss, and engage- to create and redistribute power in the wake of a devastating history.  This is a fluid, collective model, a collective vision: Artists and community collaborators are invited to co-create, to shift dominant society’s understanding of diasporic Indigeneity as a relationship to the land we are on. Gathering as individual artists, we create experimental, ecologically-based dances that reflect our rich cultural heritages while exploring our identities as contemporary Indigenous peoples, and our unique creative process empowers participants to contribute creatively and culturally.

Many of our artists credit their experiences with Dancing Earth to empowering their confidence and expanding their aspirations, growing opportunities as cultural ambassadors while touring, and stepping into as well as policy or advocacy work in their communities: Anne Pesata, BA in Environmental Policy with a minor in Peace and Conflict Studies, subsequently worked as a Community Health Representative with the Jicarilla Community Health & Fitness Center, spearheading a variety of different programs to serve her community; Natalie Benally (Diné), first Native Programs Coordinator, Girls Inc. of Santa Fe; Lupita Salazar, XicanX dancer/permaculture farmer: Agricultural Programs Director with the Northern Youth Project, as well as teaching theater with Moving Arts Española; Talavai Denipah Cook, descendant of the Hopi/Dine/Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo people, with a degree in Environmental and Organismic Biology, who has achieved a Master's Degree in Tropical Conservation Biology and Environmental Science at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.

Thanks to support from our friends, communities, and foundations, we are able to directly support Native and Indigenous artists, culture carriers, and communities with funds for their creative time, programs designed for specific community needs, and advocacy for Indigenous perspectives in state forums, arts, universities, and more. We operate as a flat organization, where all staff and artists are paid equally, and we prioritize honoraria for cultural advisors/collaborators participation and guidance. Dancing Earth is respectfully based in Ogha Po’Ogeh – occupied Tewa territory known as Santa Fe, NM and Yelamu – occupied Ohlone territory known as San Francisco, CA. Thank you, for joining our vision to support Indigenous dance and related arts, to encourage and revitalize awareness of bio-cultural diversity through artistic expression, for the education and wellness of all peoples.

We, who are part of Dancing Earth, emerge from different, and often mixed communities - Indigenous and beyond. As a company that includes intertribal and intercultural people, we are never on the ancestral land of everyone in the company, and so strive to live and work as respectful settlers. Our programming is designed in consultation with widely-respected culture carriers who are intimately aware of their communitys’ needs, and believe that Indigenous contemporary dance provides crucial linkages within cultures, from the ancient to the futuristic. Our approach to traditional knowledge-sharing is accessible enough that it allows people of every background to begin to examine, understand, and move beyond the many and varied experiences of erasure/separation from Indigenous cultures and identities that colonization has created globally.