FORMAT

Digital video

ARTIST

Degenerate Art Ensemble

In the Summer of 2020, in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, we created The Invitation, a meditation on the human relationship to the natural world, to Animist practices, and our connection to Mother Earth. In the brief days of lockdown, the human world fell silent and the songs of the birds filled our cities. We were thinking about the ancient practices that all human societies have used to stay connected to our environment and allow us to embody the spirits of unseen realms. The film was commissioned by the Forterra Foundation who have purchased and protected 250,000 acres of wilderness in the northwester United States. It was filmed on one of these sites called the Morse Wildlife Preserve.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Degenerate Art Ensemble has shown their work throughout the US and Europe known for their large scale dance and theater projects, concerts, site-transforming spectacles and ongoing public experimentation.  Recent highlights of the group’s work include a major exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in 2011, was commissioned by director Robert Wilson to interpret his work Einstein on the Beach in 2012 and collaborated with the Kronos Quartet in 2013. Also in 2012 Degenerate Art Ensemble was commissioned by the city of Seattle to create a massive site specific work Underbelly in collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair.  The group’s 2015 work Predator Songstress premiered at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco in 2015. In of 2016 DAE teamed up with Czech rock legends Uz Jsme Doma for an epic orchestral work inspired by the group’s music at the Archa Theatre in Prague with the South Bohemian Philharmonic Orchestra. DAE’s newest work Skeleton Flower was first seen as a work in progress at the Spotlight USA Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, had its world premiere in Seattle in 2019, will be performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City in August of 2021 and will have its New York premiere in 2021.