Elemental Awareness, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles and Priscilla Marrero / Still from video by Geoffrey Jones / Image courtesy of the artists

Growing a Green Heart

led by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles
With Priscilla Marrero, John Butler, Caroline Davis, and Center for Art Education and Sustainability (CAES)

Set aside some time on a Sunday afternoon to disconnect from busyness and reconnect with the ecosystem you are a part of! Join us for "Growing a Green Heart", a three-hour experiential community gathering-walk-movement-drawing workshop at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, where participants are invited to become ONE with its ecosystem, and thus for us to develop deep connections with it that can lead to advocacy for our borough's green areas and for the future of Tibbetts Brook.

In this experience, participants will engage art as a transformative process, leading them back into Nature and while highlighting the personhood of rivers, trees, and fields, to name a few.

"Growing a Green Heart" encompasses:

• walking in ways that develop mindful awareness and focus

• moving our minds-bodies away from technology and with our immediate surroundings

• engaging in performative exercises that seek to move participants from empathy to compassion for Nature, but also to awaken Nature within us.

• At the end of the session, participants will be invited to join in a plant-based meal.

We hope you’ll join us in this transformative experience….and let your heart turn green like the Park! This event is appropriate and open for all ages.

This will be an in-person, socially distanced event following COVID safety protocols.  Tickets are limited to allow for appropriate distancing, so while this is a free event, registration is required.

In order to allow for the cultivation of awareness and immersion, we ask that you please commit to attending the entirety of the three-hour program.

Growing a Green Heart is an experience conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, combining choreography, pedagogy, and performance art, resulting in a multidisciplinary engagement to be presented with CALL, Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, The Interdependence Project, and the Bronx Council on the Arts . This project is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the Bronx Council on the Arts. Nicolás will be working with Argenis Apolinario and Geoffrey Jones to document this experience in photograph and video. This project is also made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and administered by the Bronx Council on the Arts.