PENDLETON - Daniel Dancer is an artist who doesn't limit himself to paint, clay and charcoal when he creates. He uses living, breathing human beings in creations meant to be viewed from the sky.
Thursday, 850 students and teachers from Sunridge Middle School helped Dancer create a moving mosaic on the school's football field. Dancer's living painting depicted water breaching a dam and fish swimming through the fissure.
Dancer, founder of Art for the Sky, said the creation depicts a real-life dam - the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington state across from Hood River, scheduled for removal in 2008.
Organized chaos was the phrase that sprang from many spectators' lips as they watched Dancer choreograph his actors from a bucket extending 100 feet skyward from a truck, but that might have been too gentle a description. Dancer used a megaphone to get the excited, chattering middle-schoolers in place for their one-and-only performance.
"It looks chaotic now - it will be more chaotic later," said Kim Leslie, who helped Dancer coordinate the event, "but it all comes together - it's miraculous."
Not all of the creation was human. The dam itself was made of bed sheets wired and nailed onto the grassy surface in a 30-square-foot patch. The crack in the dam was composed of black clothing donated by The Salvation Army and Humane Society thrift stores. Bark mulch represented earth.
As a videographer and still photographer filmed from the bucket, Dancer gave the word. The group began by chanting the word "Tashawashunkatah," a Lakota word that means "flow like the water."
Around the perimeter sat a contingent of Indian drummers. The drummers, from the Nixyaawii School, began drumming in a steady beat.
On one side of the dam, kids dressed in blue began moving single file slowly through the crack.
From above, Dancer yelled, "Wider. Make it wider."
Gradually, the stream of kids thickened until they were five or six abreast. As the dam breached, Dancer shouted into his megaphone.
"Make way for the salmon," he instructed. "Make a path for the salmon."
Students, carrying colorful fish attached to three-foot sticks, made their way carefully through the water, along with a kayaker. As the fish swam, gusting wind whipped the tails and fins.
Afterwards, Dancer said the production was less controlled than usual since high winds made it hard to communicate. Still, he was happy.
"It was chaos, but it looked great up there," he said. "Sometimes you have to let go of it and let it be what it wants to be."
Leslie was in charge of the water. Afterwards, she said she struggled to restrain the youngsters' enthusiasm and channel it.
"There was some major eddying going on," she said, laughing.
"It was fun," said Jim Schweigart, 13. "We were supposed to bend over and look like water."
"It was pretty cool," said Schweigart's friend, Perry Jennings.
Other Dancer creations include a 270-foot-long sturgeon and a manatee made from 1,300 elementary children in Florida. Another depicted a volcanic eruption.
"A thousand kids erupted out of the top of a volcano," Dancer said.
Dancer, of Mosier, said his definition of art is anything out of the ordinary that makes people think about their place in the world and see the beauty.
Dancer conducted interactive workshops at Sunridge all week, coordinated by art teacher Gia Weathers. Among other things, he showed them how to take a small-scale drawing and turn it into a giant image. Today he'll share photos and video of this latest Art for the Sky event during an assembly.
The Tamastslikt Institute paid to bring Dancer to Pendleton.
Video highlights
Reader Comments Posted: Saturday, February 17, 2007
Article comment by:
SIERRA CARR
Yes, I was there and it was really fun to do and his songs were great.
