Kizuna Dance 

Founded in 2014, Kizuna Dance is an international repertory ensemble that blends streetdance with contemporary floorwork to create dances that celebrate the Japanese culture. With over 15 years of Japanese language study, Artistic Director Cameron McKinney focuses each work around an aspect of the Japanese culture. His work has been recognized through a U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellowship, a Choreographic Fellowship from the Alvin Ailey Foundation, an Individual Fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council, support from the Rader Foundation for Young Artists, and through commissions from numerous institutions across the country and abroad.  ~ The company has performed nationally and internationally at prestigious institutions and festivals such as The Japan Society, Performatica, the Let's Dance International Frontiers Festival, Gibney Dance, and Movement Research, among many others. In July 2019, the company had its French premier at the International Choreographic Festival of Blois on the National Stage, "La Halle aux Grains" in Blois, France. Committed to outreach, the company engages with every tour location it enters, connecting with community members through post-show discussions, lecture demonstrations, open rehearsals, masterclasses, student performances, and professional workshops. Kizuna Dance has lead workshops and residencies in fifteen states and internationally in Japan, Mexico, France and the UK. ~ The 2019 season also featured the launch of Kizuna Dance's Culture Commissions Initiative. The goal of this new initiative is to engage emerging choreographers in a research-based creative process around the Japanese culture. The first inaugural awardee, LajaMartin (Laja Field and Martin Durov), had their work KYOSHO premiere at Middlebury College in November 2020. This commission provides Kizuna Dance with a unique and elevated platform from which to continue to build bridges between American and Japanese artists and audiences.

About the performance: MISOGI draws inspiration from the earth’s natural elements, with water as the main focus. The work explores the Shinto practice of misogi, or washing the body with water for ritual purification. The work will include both solos and ensemble elements in multiple spaces of the NOoSPHERE Arts outdoorstages, guiding the audience through the expansive outdoor space for a striking socially-distanced dance experience.

Dancers: Cayla Simpson, Isaac Martin Lerner, Kimiko Tanabe, Marija Obradovic, Mallory Galarza, and Malena Maust 

Lenna Pierce

Musician LENNA PIERCE (aka Meaner Pencil) Meaner Pencil is a Dark-Folk singing cellist who draws on Celtic and Slavic traditions as well as her background in classical music to create songs which glorify and illuminate everyday struggles. Having studied chamber music under the world-famous Chiara Quartet, and having collaborated in the creation of various DIY and punk spaces in the Great Plains, she became a busker in order to find a place to sing that would transcend petty scenes and provide her with material sustenance. The underground cathedrals of the New York subway system have provided her with both complete artistic freedom and the most brutally capitalist test of her artistry. In 2015 she toured internationally and completed an artist residency at a former monastery in France. She is profoundly grateful for the love she has received and given through the medium of music.

Fritjof Capra

Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., is a scientist, educator, activist, and author of many international bestsellers that connect conceptual changes in science with broader changes in worldview and values in society. A Vienna-born physicist and systems theorist, Capra first became popularly known for his book, The Tao of Physics, which explored the ways in which modern physics was changing our worldview from a mechanistic to a holistic and ecological one. Published in 1975, it is still in print in more than 40 editions worldwide and is referenced with the statue of Shiva in the courtyard of one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research: CERN, the Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva.

Over the past 30 years, Capra has been engaged in a systematic exploration of how other sciences and society are ushering in a similar shift in worldview, or paradigms, leading to a new vision of reality and a new understanding of the social implications of this cultural transformation.His most recent book, The Systems View of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), presents a grand new synthesis of this work—integrating the biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions of life into one unified vision. Several critics have suggested that The Systems View of Life, which Capra coauthored with Pier Luigi Luisi, Professor of Biology at the University of Rome, is destined to become another classic.Capra is a founding director of the Berkeley-based Center for Ecoliteracy, which is dedicated to advancing ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education, and serves on the faculty of the Amana-Key executive education program in São Paulo, Brazil. 

The main focus of Capra’s environmental education and activism has been to help build and nurture sustainable communities. He believes that to do so, we can learn valuable lessons from the study of ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms.