Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer

Rulan Tangen

Rulan Tangen's dance journey centers around the founding of DANCING EARTH CREATIONS (DE) in 2004. After years of teaching dance workshops to youth across the continent including Native reservations, she strove to create hope and opportunity for aspiring performers, theater artists and technicians, who also become culture carriers, art educators, and leaders. 

Her professional experience spans international ballet, modern dance, opera, circus, film and television production including includes NYC’s Michael Mao Dance, and Peridance Ensemble; Canada’s Karen Jamieson Dance and Banff Aboriginal Arts under direction of Marrie Mumford; Littleglobe’s Memorylines Opera; and Wise Fool New Mexico’s One Solstice Circus; Marin Ballet, Catskill Ballet Theater, Redwood Empire Ballet and New York Grand Opera, Bones Aboriginal Dance Opera, TRIBE with Director Raoul Trujillo and Choreographer Alejandro Ronceria , and Northern Plains traditional powwow dancing through her adopted Lakota family..

Surviving cancer to discover her leadership purpose, Tangen continues to teach extensively across the Americas, including community centers, cultural gatherings, institutes of higher learning. With a vision for inclusion, she cultivates a new generation of cultural dancers, through creative practices that explore collaboration as an expression of functional diversity. Some students are selected to dance professionally with the company, crediting the work to have empowered their explorations of identity, the role of creativity in advocacy for messages, and their scope of artistic aspiration. Dancing Earth has thus inspired subsequent generations of cultural artists  to express ecological themes  in vital contemporary and experimental forms. She is recipient of Kennedy Center’s 2018-19 Citizen Artist fellowship, for Service, Justice, Freedom, Courage, and Gratitude .

A dreamvisioner and creatrix, her work values movement as an expression of plurality of ancestral and futuristic worldviews, interpreted through dance as functional ritual for transformation and healing, and the energetic connection with all forms of life on earth. Of heritage including Kampampangan/Pangasinan of Luzon Island Philippines, and Norsk/Eire Europe, she has recruited and nurtured new generations of innovative cultural dancers and holds the belief that "to dance is to live, to live is to dance."