Propelled Animals embeds innovative and provocative art in unconventional spaces, through a process of workshops and participatory performance that challenges systems of privilege and oppression. Propelled Animals is organized as a collective run by members in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Burkina Faso. The members are a culturally diverse group of visual artists, dancers, scholars, musicians, and designers. They co-create and travel with the art “work” process. Mobility is essential to the work, widening the public conversation, on location and between centers, around anti-racism, gender inclusivity and environmental justice. Propelled Animals’ goal is that individuals realize the efficacy of the body, resilience, protest, and radical tenderness as strategies against institutional racism and violence.

The Project

For their LabX residency Propelled Animals is creating a new art work, titled UNLOCK: or how to practice the freedom of joy. The narrative for UNLOCK specifically prods the local conscience of the body politic, by building on the BlackLivesMatter and WaterIsLife movements. 

To create context for UNLOCK, Propelled Animals is developing companion talks (transmitted virtually, and when safe also in-person) about environmental justice, urban sustainability, racial equity, gender equity, and their impact on Nature and climate change. The members are also training with Black American and First Nations leaders, to ensure workshops meet the needs of communities on their terms. 

For additional context, HCL in coordination with Propelled Animals is exploring as a potential collaborator in Chicago Thomas E.S. Kelly, Bundjalung-Yugambeh, Wiradjuri and Ni-Vanuatu man. Kelly is the McKnight International Choreographer in Residence at The Cowles Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2021. HCL is discussing with Kelly a range of options to share his interdisciplinary practice, connecting UNLOCK and the Indigenous geographies of history, songlines, and protocols of the unceded land in Queensland, Australia where Kelly lives. He is an independent artist and member of BlakDance, an Indigenous led collective working for dance sovereignty, and in the service of Indigenous collaborators and communities everywhere that promotes creative exchange and public discourse using the standards in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The length of the LabX residency is multi-year, in order to support Propelled Animals to plan, develop, experiment and produce UNLOCK as a tour-ready process. Propelled Animals is developing a process that factors in the ways people move physically and socially, encouraging mobility across neighborhoods for the workshops (virtually until indoor gathering is safe), and an outdoor gathering for a performance march, as the UNLOCK culmination.

UNLOCK in Chicago is anticipated to be fulfilled over three phases. It is embedded in the neighborhoods of Washington Park and Woodlawn, and extends to nearby Jackson Park on the lakefront, HCL partner sites in Hyde Park-Kenwood, and the HCL studio in Pilsen. The touring version of UNLOCK is being designed as a shorter residency and for similar large metropolitan centers, including Detroit, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. 

From Propelled Animals 

At the root, the project deploys the transformative power of art. It is site, participant, and Nature responsive, considering the unique lived experiences of each element involved. UNLOCK is a kinesthetic, sonic, visual, and aural experience using performance to empower people and communities. This activation occurs inside the body, between bodies, and in relationship with the Earth. It is a powerful tool for coalition building and fighting systemic oppression and climate change. Workshops call on participants to build, create, and discuss harmony and dissonance together. To understand the power of collective joy, pain, sorrow, healing, and growth. 

In Chicago, UNLOCK looks to the abundance of green spaces offered by the south side — parks, trails, and Lake Michigan. We recognize the capacity of communities to mobilize and share through movement, protest, music, dance, visual art, and the spoken word, interrogating daily life and readdressing the familiar. Our goal is to include people of all backgrounds, ages, and abilities. Nature permitting, UNLOCK participants travel from the lagoons of Washington Park to the lots and the beachfront of Lake Michigan. 

Artist Bio

Propelled Animals are Esther Baker-Tarpaga, Barber, Boubacar Dijga, Raquel Monroe, and Heidi Wiren Bartlett. The members are incubated artists with Headlong Studios in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Propelled Animals has been presented for six site-specific performances by University of Iowa and Englert Theatre (Iowa City, Iowa); Wassaic Project (Wassaic, New York); Grinnell College (Grinnell, Iowa); and Lynden Sculpture Garden (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and has been in residence at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University (2019), and the Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2020). Propelled Animals is recipient of a MAP Fund grant for the project TRANSMISSION, and has received additional support from the Iowa Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest, and The Puffin Foundation.

Esther Baker Tarpaga, Cofounder (Philadelphia), is originally from Colorado and a performance artist-choreographer and filmmaker. She co-directs Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project, a transnational performance company based in Burkina Faso and Philadelphia. Her performance work has toured to Tamadia Arts Festival (France); Bali Spirit Festival Ubud (Indonesia); InOut Festival Bobo Dioulasso (Burkina Faso); and CECUT Tijuana and El Lechon Ilustrado Guanajato (Mexico). National engagements include LabBodies LighCity Baltimore, The Wassaic Festival New York, BAAD!ASS Women’s Festival Bronx, Panapoly New York, the Kelly Strayhorn Theatre Pittsburgh, Earthdance Mass,and The Englert Theatre Iowa City. 

Her dance films have screened internationally and she is a published scholar. She holds an MA and MFA from the University of California Los Angeles, has taught at Princeton, Temple, University of the Arts, and The Ohio State University, and was a Grant Wood Fellow at University of Iowa. She is a member of the International Interdisciplinary Artist Consortium, toured with David Rousseve/REALITY, and collaborated with Guillermo Gomez-Pea/La Pocha Nostra. An Artist in Residence at Marin Headlands in 2013, she is also a recipient of a NY Live Arts Suitcase Fund, BETHA Grant, and was a US Cultural Envoy in Guinea, Botswana, and South Africa. She is a member of Philly Dance for Justice and co-founder of Meredith School Anti-Racist Group.

Barber, Art Director & Cofounder (Detroit), recently graduated Cum Laude with an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. Barber uses interdisciplinary art practices to articulate various testimonies within and surrounding Black America. His most recent awards include a Stanley Grant from the University of Iowa and Alonzo Davis Award from Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Selected exhibitions include the Englert Theatre and Levitt Gallery (Iowa City, Iowa); the Museum of Science and Industry and Ignition Project Space (Chicago, Illinois); Public Artwork on Atlanta BeltLine,  the Rialto Theatre, and Mason Murer Gallery (Atlanta, Georgia); the Lexington Theatre (Kentucky); and Gallery 4731 (Detroit, Michigan). Barber is a 2020 artist-in-residence at the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. 

Boubacar Djiga, Core Collaborator (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso), is a master musician born in a griot family in Burkina Faso. He is a master Jeli Ngoni player, a traditional guitar from West Africa, and renowned multi-instrumentalist. Djiga was the lead Djembé drummer and composer for the national ballet of Burkina Faso, and is a permanent faculty member at EDIT in Ouagadougou. He is the founder and artistic director of the acclaimed band Kundé Blues. He has recorded and toured with Smarty, Dafra Kura, Rido Bayonne, Bil Aka Kora, Alif Naaba, Abdoulaye Diabaté, Issouf Kienou, and Awa Melone and others. He is currently touring with Dafra Kura and Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project.

Dr. Raquel Monroe, Core Collaborator (Chicago), is an interdisciplinary performance scholar, and artist, whose research interests include black social dance, black feminisms, and popular culture. A PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, her scholarship appears in the Journal of Pan-African Studies, and in the edited volumes Queer Dance, solo/black/woman: Performing Black Feminisms, and The Oxford Handbook: Dance and the Popular Screen. She is completing a manuscript that investigates how black feminist politics emerge through the dancing bodies of black female cultural producers in popular culture. In 2015 Monroe received the Excellence in Teaching Award from Columbia College Chicago, where she is an Associate Professor in dance.

Heidi Wiren Bartlett, Creative Director & Cofounder (Pittsburgh), is an interdisciplinary performance artist from the Great Plains. She was recently nominated for the United States Artists (USA) Fellowship, and is recipient of an Iowa Arts Council Project Grant for her work which is concerned with the portrayal, oppression and subversive existence of women in America today. Her work has been exhibited at Grace Exhibition Space and Panapoly Performance Space (Brooklyn, New York), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, New York), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and PROJECT PROJECT (Omaha, Nebraska), DFRL8R and Ignition Project Space (Chicago, Illinois), Arts + Literature Laboratory (Madison, Wisconsin), and Yellow Door Gallery and Moberg Gallery (Des Moines, Iowa). She holds an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa, and has been a visiting artist at Concordia University (Seward, Nebraska), Iowa State University (Ames, Iowa), Lafayette College (Easton, Pennsylvania) and Carnegie Mellon University Qatar (Doha, Qatar). Bartlett is currently an instructor and Art & Creative Director at Carnegie Mellon University.