Norah ZShaw

Norah Zuniga Shaw is an interdisciplinary performance artist, writer, facilitator, and creative director. Her work has been presented throughout the US, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Sadler’s Wells, London; the Chicago Humanities Festival; and at the Wexner Center. Her essays, poems, and interviews have appeared in Choreographic Practices, Performance Research, and Motion Bank, among other journals, platforms, and publications. She is a vocalist for the Sonic Arts Ensemble, professor in Ohio State’s Department of Dance, and Director for Dance and Technology for the department and Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, where she cofounded the Motion Lab in 2005 to foster innovations in performance and technology. She has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards and continues to offer public lectures, workshops, and performance installations internationally. Read more

Concept, editing, and sound design: Norah ZShaw
Postproduction animation: Taylor Olsen
Postproduction sound: Paul Hill
© 2022

Upwelling converges paths with two other works that emerged during 2020:

UnchartedTerritory
Animations and virtual journey sketches: Vita Berezina-Blackburn

and

The Sonic Arts Ensemble
Networked Performance improvisations
Directed by Marc Ainger

James Croson: piano
Scott Deal: vibraphone and percussion
Fede Cámara Halac: electronics
Oded Huberman: laptop
Jacob Kopcienski: altered saxophone and electronics
Berenice Llorens: guitar
Joe Sferra: clarinet
Norah Zuniga Shaw: vocals and body percussion
Ann Stimson: flute
With special guest 
The Honorable Elizabeth A. Baker (new renaissance artist) 

Gabri Christa
Improvisation/incantation on the beach
Staten Island, New York

Jack Gray
Distance dances, beach walks, Hawaiian chant, rituals with Atamira Dance Company 
Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Marianne Kim and Bondo
"I see myself better when this thing is off"
Drawings, videos, and sound
Tempe, Arizona

Jen Rae
"Days between two days floating"
Images, sounds, and video
Melbourne/Naarm, Australia

Michael Morris
Reading bell hooks's All About Love
Columbus, Ohio

André M. Zachery 
Reading Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s “Hapticality, or Love”
Images, sound, and video
Brooklyn, New York

Jazelynn Goudy 
“Hands up don’t shoot”
Images, sound, and video
Boston, Massachusetts

Sandra Babli
Reading Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival”
Munich, Germany

Naree Vachananda
Reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time
Melbourne/Naarm, Australia

Kaustavi Sarkar
Odissi dancing
Charleston, South Carolina

Awilda Rodríguez Lora
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Susanne Martin 
Berlin, Germany

Ale Jara
Cologne, Germany 

Peter Chan
Columbus, Ohio

Katherine Borland
Columbus, Ohio

Ben McCorkle
Columbus, Ohio

Kathryn Nusa Logan
Overbrook Ravine, Ohio

Sara Wookey
London, England

Carol Brown
Melbourne/Naarm, Australia

April 2020

Dear New Friends, Old Friends, Dear Ones All,

I’m feeling called to connect with you and to create a PRACTICE of sharing audio and other digital traces with each other for the month of May. I've been talking with each of you about this a little already in different ways and now would like to weave us all together in a community of practice if it feels compelling and nourishing to you.

The Basic Idea
Share with each other audio or other digital registers of this period of time, wherever we are, as we are living into the long, middle period of the novel coronavirus pandemic; a period of unknown duration and uneven energies that I sense will require sustainment, endurance, deepening strength and a readiness akin to what Bebe Miller calls "keeping our weight at risk," ready to move in any direction. And I'm eager to know how you are thinking, coping, moving.

We might call this collective practice our own version of QUARANTINE DIARIES; diaries in movement and choreographic thinking, records, journal entries, registers, archival snippets from our lives, our lived environments, our daily impulses that can serve as nourishment for each other and body time (as Nancy Stark Smith of blessed memory often said) to help us to stay the course. And we can share them with each other via a WHAT'SAPP group. I’ll call it TRACE: artist friends entering into exchange of audio diaries during the middle days of pandemic.

A few more musings: I'm thinking also about Susan Rethorst and Ralph Lemon's Living Room Dances. I'm thinking how a lot of the “liveness” that we can enjoy during social distancing is about good audio, about conversational practices as surrogates for our regular practices. I'm thinking about Tonya Lockyer's Speakeasy practice, where we take the spotlight and ask for witnesses while we speak from the hip, in the moment, in a process, sharing references/anchors/links and reaching for radical, vulnerable presence over polish and prep. I'm thinking that we are all "working without a net" and there is so much space for experimentation and need for incantatory offerings; I'm thinking about walking and radio ballets and silent discos and audio walks in the tradition of Janet Cardiff, Tactical Media, peripatetic authors, and of course the Situationists.

How to participate:
I've been experimenting with this a bit, and I put my first two offerings up on a budding What'sApp group for this project. The first is a walking practice that I learned from Simone Forti called Notice What you Notice and the second is more like a long voicemail while out walking in nature, a practice that is keeping me sane at present. I'm loving making these and I'm hoping you will too.

Join me? Witnesses welcome as well as makers. Do what feels good. What nourishes you. Whatever your energy allows right now. Low Fi, tattered, in process, nothing fancy, full of love.

As adrienne maree brown says, Less Prep, More Presence!

I've invited this group of folks because each of you has had a powerful maker-presence in my life and I feel called to connect with you and connect you to each other. You are welcome to invite others. If you’d like to participate let me know and I’ll add you to the What’sApp group.

Love to you all!
Norah