brooke smiley | 2020 Native Launchpad Artist, 2019 AIP Fellow

ARTIST WEBSITE

Tribal Affiliation: Wa-zha-zhe (Osage)

Artistic Discipline: Dance, Earth Art, Somatics

CA

I am an American Indian Wa-zha-zhe (Osage) body and earth artist. I invite collaborative spaces of remembering with ritual and artifacts to tell stories of the land and the bodies that live here. My social practice spans the disciplines of dance improvisation, earth art, public sculpture, and somatic education (BMC®). I guide choice, agency, and comfort in the body with intentional space for difference through collaboration, workshops, performance, film, and exhibitions. A background in contemporary, post modern dance, sustainable architecture, and repatriation dialogues, my choreographic and earth works are embodied acts of change, catalyzing deeper awareness for evolving environmental, indigenous, and social justice realities. The transdisciplinary nature of my work derives from the complexity of who I am, the communities I am from, and in service to. These include the Osage Nation, Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, Coastal Chumash, Tarahumara, Havasupai, and Indigenous relatives. My integrity and professionalism is rooted in my experience as a dance educator (UCSB), licensed California contractor, certified Superadobe earth builder, Somatic Movement Educator BMC®, and Trauma Therapist SE® (in process). I bridge healing resources and experiences for American Indian, Indigenous, and non-native peoples to listen, learn and grow new worlds together. I am a member of the UCSB American Indian and Indigenous Collective Academic Council, the International Somatic Movement Educators and Therapists Association, Body Mind Centering® Association (BMCA), and Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. I hosted the BMCA conference at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2019 with the theme “Self and Other,” and bridged local Chumash relatives in welcoming an opening ceremony and Plenary session. As an educator I have developed curriculum for the following courses at UCSB in the Theater and Dance Department: Dance Improvisation, Composition, Embodied Antaomy, Pedagogy, Somatics and Social Justice: The Evolving Indigenous Embodiment, and Earth and Body: We are the Material. I earned a Masters of Arts in Performance Studies with Distinction, with improvisational research published at TrinityLaban (London), and Dance Research Forum Ireland. I hold a BFA from CalArts, and engaged dialogue as a leader to the Cal Arts board of Directors. My choreographic work and artistic residencies have taken place in festivals world wide including centre d'art passarelle as supported by La Becquee Festival European de Danse in Brest, France, Ritual and Research in Massachusettes, and Genesis Project at Sea and Space Explorations in Los Angeles. I have toured and performed with the leading contemporary dance companies including the Michael Clark Company (London), Fabulous Beast Dance Theater (IE), and Ventura Dance Company (CH), in venues which include the Tate Modern (UK), Barbican (UK), Arts Center Melbourne (AU), Black Box (IR), Tanzhaus (CH), Queensland Performing Arts Centre Brisbane (AU), Grand Theater of the City of Luxembourg (LU) and REDCAT (US) amongst others.

Autobiographical performance solos are improvisational, spoken word, and address identity, generational trauma, shame, and healing. Larger group dances incorporate post modern improvisational scores, and are environmentally and culturally responsive to re-indigenization and creating new earth markers. I often am on faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2017 and 2018, I led two separate reconstructions of Anna Halprin’s seminal protest piece ‘The Paper Dance’ from Parades and Changes (1965), and Simone Forti’s Huddle (1961) and Slantboard (1961) in performances at Hunter College, New York Public Library, University of California at Santa Barbara, Trinity Laban (UK), and Cal Earth. My recent earth work Permission to Heal, a Superadobe lifesize Venus of Willendorf made in situ downtown State Street, Santa Barbara as part of the 2018 State of the Art Gallery Exhibition, and was built with people recovering from addiction, people living without homes, children, and my mother.