TERRA: Bodies & Territories Activates Land as Living Laboratory and Stage
TERRA: Bodies & Territories is a work of experimental dance theater by Silvana Cardell, set in a forest with a multi-generational ensemble of women and femme dancers ranging in age from eight to 78. Performed at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, TERRA activates the land as a living laboratory and stage. This immersive, multi-sensory performance is laden with kinetic, theatrical, and sonic experiences of dance, sound, and land-based visual art.
The dancers are accompanied by a site-specific sound installation by composer Devin Arne, capturing the essence of the forested space at the Schuylkill Center by recording the sounds of plants actively moving and growing. Visual artist Sarah Kavage created art installations and props from natural materials harvested from the land for the dancers to interact with.
Choreographer Silvana Cardell is a respected figure in Philadelphia’s contemporary dance theater scene, acclaimed for the political nature of her work as well as the intense physicality of her choreography. Cardell originally established her dance company, S. Cardell Danza, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, performing at major Argentinian dance festivals. Years later, she relocated to Philadelphia, where she established Cardell Dance Theater in her Fairmount neighborhood.
Silvana Cardell developed this piece with the landscape as a collaborator:
Its forested trails, untamed spaces, and quiet insistence to be heard shaped the choreography from the very beginning. This is land that has been disturbed and restored, that holds both history and hope. Creating TERRA there allowed the dancers to move with the land, not just on it.
The forest became a mirror to unveil the buried, the reclaimed, the alive. At the heart of TERRA is a dialogue between bodies that can create life — just like the land. The earth gives birth to the nonhuman, to all living things, and we are part of that same cycle, that same rupture. We open our bodies — and life bursts out of them. We are part of the same rhythms, the endless exchange between life and death. Our bodies are not separate from nature — they are nature. But both women and land are also at risk — taken, violated, treated as resources to be controlled and extracted. There is a long, painful history of domination woven through the soil and carried in our bodies. The forest, like the body, remembers. And yet — it resists. It regenerates. It insists on life. In TERRA, we listen to that quiet resistance. We embody it.
Catch a performance of TERRA at the Schuylkill Center from June 13–15 and 20–22.
To learn more, visit schuylkillcenter.org.
Major support for TERRA has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from Georgian Court University, and the 2025 Creative Sector Flex Fund, a program by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
