Performances
Go Between (Flatlands-Rapenburg)
a ritual for listening to the land
Movement & Visual Design by Jill Sigman
Voice & Electronics by Kristin Norderval
The Hague International Sound Art Festival, curated by Loos
January 30, 2026
Video by Viktoria Nikolova
For this performance, Sigman and Norderval explored colonial connections between the Netherlands and the occupied Lunaape land that has come to be called New York. By working with soils from the Flatlands neighborhood in Brooklyn and the former island of Rapenburg, now part of Amsterdam, they connect the dots between Henry Hudson's colonial voyage and the first Dutch farming community in what is presently Brooklyn, New York.
Go Between
Movement Performance & Scrolls: Jill Sifah Sigman
Musicians: Joe Bruchac (Abenaki drum and flute), Miguel Frasconi (glass), Angus McCullough (flugelhorn), Dominique Vivian (accordion)
Pitney Meadows Community Farm in Saratoga Springs, NY
June 6, 2026
Curated by Improv Spaces
What does the soil remember? In Go Between, I make marks on paper by dancing with soil. I collect soils from charged sites in our colonial narrative and my personal lineage and move with them-- documenting our silent dialogue with my body, surfacing stories of colonization, ecological issues, and migration. In this iteration of Go Between, I worked with the sandy mineral soil of the farm and researched the history of the land it constitutes-- homeland of Mohican, Mohawk and Abenaki Indigenous people, colonized by the Dutch in the early 1600s, then by the British, and farmed by many. In addition to cultivated crops, weedy plants have grown here with all of these human inhabitants. The barn in which I performed also served as a slaughterhouse for animals. This performance was a way of listening to this place and its soil – noticing its details, reflecting on its history, and better understanding the ways clear cutting, climate change, and other ecological forces affect soil, crops, and food supply.
Sponsored by Improv Spaces, Pitney Meadows, and Arts, Letters & Numbers. This project has been supported by the Saratoga Arts Community Regrant, Price Institute, Mellon Foundation, and the Rutgers University-Newark 2026 Chancellor’s Seed Grant.