About

Clouds Gathering is a container for the development and exchange of experimental practices, pedagogies, and acts of liveness within the expanded field of performance. The Gathering began in the summer of 2019 as a weekend-long performance festival featuring movement workshops, conversations, and performances. After a prolonged COVID pause, we return to the mountain for a second, longer, and more intimate Clouds Gathering. Over the course of this five-day conference, we will build a provisional society, living with one another and playing with new proximities and emerging appetites. 

What kinds of attention do we need to harness in order to attend to each other’s needs, desires, and asymmetries? What is the rhythm of presence? How might we trouble the commons? What is this we and how do we want to inhabit this togetherness? 

Without distinction between performers and audience, and a loose collaborative structure, Clouds 2021 decenters creative products and “finished works.” Instead, we prioritize the often unseen effort of experimentation, communal care, and hanging out. 

Clouds is an incubator for new relational practices that might migrate into a world emerging from COVID-19. We invite you to propose shared experiences, structures, and desires of any nature, and to explore ideas that do not fit neatly into pre-conceived vehicles for presentation. 

Crisis is not distributed equally and neither are resources for recovery. As the world begins to blip back online, what urgencies persist past the pandemic? What urgencies precede the puncture of crisis? We attempt to direct what we have towards better collective needs. Clouds invites the less clear work of attuning to what we may need and not yet be able to ask for. Clouds burst open and rain soaks the world. What comes next?

Clouds Gathering 2021 is an opportunity to converge, to take each other in, and to play within our temporarily shared ecology towards a sense of collective abundance.

Land Acknowledgement

We honor and acknowledge that the area we now refer to as New Lebanon sits on the unceded lands of the Mahican and Lenape peoples; and we pay respect to Mahican and Lenape ancestors past, present and future. Land Acknowledgments often stand in for actual decolonization work, and we commit, as visitors, to respect, care for, and give back to this land and its ancestors, as well as to our fellow visitors. We acknowledge that we benefit from the colonization of this land, and are committed to resisting imbalance and dismantling the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.

Clouds is produced by a team of artists affiliated with Mount Lebanon Residency. We are hosted by the land, history and generosity of the Shaker Museum and the Abode of the Message in New Lebanon.