Celebrating 5 years!
Inaugural years with Tony Award Nominated Performing Artist Marlies Yearby and British Visual Artist Carol Sorhaindo joined IN CONVERSATION to speak about health and wellbeing.
April 16, 2022
Plants, Textiles and Fragments: Humans and Nature Journeys of Wellbeing
Marlies Yearby is an artist, choreographer, and director with a global perspective who has created work across various platforms including theater, film, and diverse multimedia. She is the Tony Award Nominated Choreographer of RENT, Drama League Award! recipient for the Los Angeles production of RENT, and a Dora Award Nomination for the Canadian production of RENT. Her work was licensed for RENT the movie, and she is the choreographer of the CINECAST of RENT. Brown Butterfly a multimedia celebration of the life and times of Muhammad Ali “The Greatest” as Director and Choreographer. Yearby co-created the concept with Composer Craig Harris with great critical acclaim. Ms. Yearby received a Helen Hayes Award nomination for her choreography for Oedipus Plays at Washington Shakespeare Theatre in DC. A Bessie Award Recipient for her choreography on Stained written by Lisa Jones and Alva Rogers. She choreographed Shay Young Blood’s Talking Bones; Penumbra Theater MN, Rita Dove’s Darker Face of The Earth; Guthrie Theater in MN, Writer Sekou Sundiata’s Mystery of Love; American Musical Theater Festival in PA.
Ms. Yearby has developed a creative process called “In Our Bones Technique” as an acknowledgment of the legacies, lived experiences, memories, and day-to-day energies ever-present in moving bodies at work. Ms Yearby is also the author of Seed Awakening On The Eve of Blue, which explores and examines human interaction with food.
“As an artist I have a fascination with plants, textiles and fragments. Unravelling historical threads appeals to my investigative nature. My processes are an entangled mix of historical and site exploration, journal and creative writing, textiles, painting, and sculpture.
Reflection on the fragments I am left with to weave my story which feed creativity: texts from archival sources, tales of Indigenous, African and European lives, crumbling mortar, living plants, decomposing leaves, red soil and entangled roots.”
Carol Sorhaindo is a visual artist with an MA in Creative Practice and a diverse portfolio career. She draws inspiration from nature, cultural heritage and landscapes with particular interest in plants on deteriorating mill sites in Dominica where she currently lives. Having lived in both the UK and Dominica, entangled roots and transatlantic history which combines African, Dominican and British influences are of key importance to her praxis. Her research and passions include botanical histories inclusive of ethnobotanical and traditional uses of plants as food, medicine and art and craft materials. She enjoys close observation of plant growth, gardening, botanical drawing and explorations of natural dyes and earth pigments for textile applications.
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