Narrator: On this episode of "State of the Arts," Jersey City-based artist Deborah Jack fuses film and poetry in immersive video installations exploring shifting coastlines from the shores of her native Sint Maarten and beyond, including New Orleans, where we met up with her.

Jack: Whenever I'm around the coastline, I'm always thinking about what happens when that water goes past that line.

Narrator: Artists Syd Carpenter and Jack Larimore team up to create a work of public art at Rowan University called Batsto Homestead.

It pays tribute to the Pine Barrens.

Carpenter: The magic of this is is to find emblems that are evocative of place.

Narrator: And Stravinsky's "Firebird," a collaboration between New Jersey Symphony and Nimbus Dance, reinvents the story, using Icarus and a young girl from a troubled family.

Pott: And they built wings fashioned out of feathers that they explore in their dance and an ammunition belt, a symbol of violence and warfare.

Narrator: "State of the Arts" -- going on location with the most creative people in New Jersey.

[ Music plays ] Announcer: The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and engagement in the arts since 1966, is proud to co-produce "State of the Arts" with Stockton University.

Additional support is provided by... And these friends of "State of the Arts" -- [ Music plays ] Pott: This is a true collaboration between the New Jersey Symphony and Nimbus Dance.

We started this project over a year ago, and from the beginning had many questions about what shape it would take.

And so to be here over a year later at NJPAC with the full orchestra and to see it take shape on this wonderful, grand stage is really overwhelming for us.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Applause ] [ Music plays ] [ Cheers and applause ] My name is Samuel Pott.

I'm the artistic director and founder of Nimbus Dance in Jersey City.

We've always been very invested in the community and innovation, experimentation in the arts.

And that's what Nimbus is all about.

Zhang: I always find Sam Pott very inspiring as an artist.

I always get really intrigued by his ideas.

When we had the centennial two years ago, we commissioned, also, a choreography from Sam with Nimbus.

That was the "Appalachian Spring."

And Sam himself was one of the members of the Martha Graham Company.

Sam had the special connection.

So we're lucky.

We had such a great response from the audience.

We got noticed by the Boston Symphony artistic director, and he invited us, me as a guest conductor, also, the company, the Nimbus company, to Tanglewood two summers ago.

So this was actually the second time I would say, the "Firebird."

Pott: We've created a new version of Stravinsky's "Firebird" that tells a story of a young girl from a family in turmoil and a spiritual vision of Icarus and the ways that they come together to seek flight and freedom and escape from violence and hostility.

[ Music plays ] Firebird was one of the creations that emerged out of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

Mikhail Fokine was the choreographer, and Stravinsky was, of course, the composer back in 1910.

The story line was derived from a very old Russian folk tale.

It has a long history of variations on the choreography and different famous dancers having performed "Firebird."

You know, while it's kind of a fun, fantastical fairy tale, when we were approached about this project by the New Jersey Symphony, we thought it was an opportunity to think about other ways we might conceive of what a Firebird is and ways that it might tell a story that could connect more directly to the world today.

[ Music plays ] We've told a story about a young girl trapped in a family that is in turmoil, very high-stress, high-anxiety.

And this girl just wants freedom.

She just wants to escape.

Hutton: There's this Icarus character that for my character, the girl, gives kind of a sign of, like, hope and freedom.

She eventually has a vision of him and meets up with him.

Pott: Icarus and this girl meet, and they build wings fashioned out of feathers that they explore in their dance, and an ammunition belt, a symbol of violence and warfare, that comes from the household of the girl, from her father.

Mansor: So, my role as Icarus, I would describe my role as an enigma.

We have this story of someone who gains his freedom in the original myth and then uses that freedom to fall so, so far.

[ Music plays ] McCall: So, I play the brother in Firebird.

It is a part of a dysfunctional family.

I am someone who is witnessing their parents fighting a lot.

There's a lot of hostility, a lot of, you know, emotional abuse here and there.

And yeah, basically, me and my sister are kind of going through all this turmoil that our parents have kind of put us in, in their own realm.

Curd: I'm the mother of this family.

We have a little bit of a dysfunctional household, a lot of pressure on the children especially, a lot of pressure from the father figure.

And I think I'm very caught in the middle of being stressed by my husband, but then taking that stress and putting it on my own children in return.

We all have very clear characters, and in portraying those characters, we need to be really true to our physicality and how we are approaching the choreography.

McCall: There's a lot of internal work and how that internal work kind of affects the outer, external factors of our movement.

♪♪ Pott: And I think the story that I've seen there is, like, you feel horrible about yourself.

You turn to your mother for support.

Find a connection to him.

He goes.

And one.

Better.

Just be awake to the moment.

Let it in, rather than feel like you need to emote in some way.

There we go.

Okay.

Awesome.

Yeah.

That was it.

McCall: There's a lot of moments where I'm getting pulled or, like, I'm, you know, feeling really uptight or really restricted.

Curd: Some of his movements are very doll-like, almost like a marionette, being controlled or doing things that maybe his parents want him to do.

Pott: Your job is to experience the fullness of the movement of what's happening.

It's their job to see how horrible this is, that these two siblings are fighting in this way.

You don't have to be intense.

You just have to experience the moment.

Mansor: The thing that I really respect about Sam is that he's not afraid to ask questions that he doesn't know the answer to.

And so it's a little bit of just sitting down for the ride and following the thread.

Pott: The more delicate you can be with the joints... [ Music plays ] ...the more it will feel like the movement of a feather.

Creativity works in wonderful ways sometimes, and we've just found with this project that the music, the story lines have just meshed and matched up.

[ Music plays ] Zhang: More and more.

More.

Second, always walk.

Pott: When Xian Zhang, the music director of New Jersey Symphony, gets in front of the orchestra and conducts, I think of her like the best dancer, the most pure dancer, because she responds so clearly to the music.

[ Music plays ] This is a true collaboration between the New Jersey Symphony and Nimbus Dance.

And so rather than have the orchestra in the pit, out of view, the choice was made to have the orchestra onstage, with the dancers directly in front.

Zhang: They have actions, and, also, they have this, like, a sliding board.

I do have to watch a couple places.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] I really think this is a long-term collaboration.

This is ongoing, and I hope this keeps happening.

That will be really exciting.

[ Music plays ] Pott: This whole project has just been such a testimony to the value of collaboration in the arts.

It's wonderful to see the New Jersey Symphony and NJPAC and now Nimbus joined forces and really produce something collaboratively that shows the quality and excellence of artistic work that's being done in New Jersey.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Cheers and applause ] Narrator: What's happening where the water meets the land?

Next up, artist Deborah Jack focuses on how it's changing.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] Jack: The coastline for me has always functioned conceptually as a site of arrival and departure, salt water and seawater.

thinking of salt as a material that corrodes and preserves.

I'm always interested in sort of the duality that nature presents.

Whenever I'm around the coastline, I film.

I'm always sort of, like, gathering images of the edges and thinking about what happens when that water goes past that line.

Sea-level rise is impacting lands throughout the world.

There's micro erosions that are happening.

What does that shift for all of us?

[ Music plays ] So, the last part of the chapter is...

Currently, I'm a professor of art at New Jersey City University.

Working as an artist, and I think, also, with young artists also keeps me kind of like perpetually a student and always wanting to know and just being curious.

[ Music plays ] I made two trips down to Louisiana.

To me, New Orleans served, really, as an interesting site to project from.

[ "When the Saints Go Marching In" plays ] It's a very vibrant community.

It's fertile ground for imagination, I think, here.

Like, just driving down the street, you see so many people are engaged with so many different ideas.

[ Music plays ] So, the work I have in Prospect.6 at the UNO Gallery, "A Sea Desalts," is a six-channel video installation with sound, as well as nine still images, and text.

[ Music plays ] Prospect came to me because they knew my work was already dealing with issues around climate change.

Lash: Prospect is an international art triennial.

It's the longest one of its kind in the U.S., in that it's made of 21 venues, all around the city of New Orleans -- everything from art museums to art on the shores of the Mississippi.

Each cycle, we welcome many hundreds of thousands of people to the city of New Orleans in celebration of art.

The theme of this year's iteration is "The Future is Present, the Harbinger is Home."

New Orleans is living in close proximity to climate change.

A harbinger people think of as a threat, right -- something that's looming, in the future.

But we love how the origins of this word hold the word "harbor," to prepare a space for others.

It is the one that has to go forward in advance.

[ Music plays ] Deborah Jack's piece brings together the cost of human intervention, with footage from Sint Maarten, Maine, and New Orleans, and shows a sense of interconnectedness, which is absolutely the key to our collective survival.

[ Music plays ] [ Waves crashing ] Jack: Where the river and the sea meet is where they each cease to be.

In between intertwining wetlands, in reverent making and unmaking.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] The whole idea of "A Sea Desalts" had to do with sort of, you know, the melting of the polar ice caps was leading to sort of, like, sea-level rise as the planet gets warmer.

Hurricanes function almost like as a natural sort of, like, cooler to the planet.

And so the warmer the planet, the more the hurricanes sort of increase.

[ Thunder rumbles ] Kolker: We took Deborah to an area called Neptune Pass, which is an area that we've been studying, looking at various river systems or various wetlands and marshes and how they're changing.

And so we helped collect some of the video that's in her installation.

I love seeing the natural world in action.

Deborah's installation does a very powerful job of showing that sea-level rise and coastal change is something that people all across the world should be thinking about.

I thought it was really thought-provoking to see that in combination with scenes from other places.

Louisiana, in many ways, is one of the first areas to experience extreme weather from climate change.

The kinds of things that we experience here are the kinds of things that people all over the world, including places like New Jersey, will experience in the years ahead.

As a scientist and as an educator, I try to do everything I can to help people relate to the natural world.

But there's also a role for the arts to reach people in a way that science can't reach people.

And I think that there's a real role for artists like Deborah Jack and others to communicate the story of our changing planet.

[ Music plays ] Jack: The science is there, but it's like how do we feel living in these spaces?

[ Music plays ] Growing up in Sint Maarten and the Caribbean, having gone through several hurricanes in my lifetime, I think it lingers.

It resonates more.

[ Waves howling ] I remember going through Hurricane Luis in '95 and really not dealing with it, and then not until Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, sort of, like, watching that devastation.

That's when I had an emotional response to what had happened to me.

[ Music plays ] There's a moment when people are interviewing someone who's lost everything and lost their house.

And that moment, that look in their eye, is one that always will tear me up.

[ Music plays ] So I think art is a really powerful tool.

I'm drawn to trying to think about pulling out sort of like feelings, because I think that's the human part.

That's where we connect to things.

Even though I work with a variety of media, filming something is probably my default.

As a kid in Sint Maarten, I was always interested in that, like, rectangle and what could happen in that space.

There's a sort of experiential component to the moving image, and in my case, to, also, then, the multiple screens.

[ Music plays ] Editing a multi-screened installation is always challenging.

A lot of times, it's about thinking about these screens or having a conversation with each other, conversating and having a negotiation, so to speak, visually.

Having multiple screens forces you to be a bit more active.

You have to move through the space, sort of forced to sit with it and sometimes look at it more than once.

When I'm making work like this, it's always, you know, tricky.

I try not to be didactic.

I'm not trying to preach.

And I think I want people to feel a sense of something.

Because the world is changing, the emotions are also changing.

As we make work about climate change, it can always feel very doom.

Dr. Alex Kolker told me about how Neptune Past had gone from about a 175-foot waterway, expanding into like 800 feet wide.

Here I come, thinking about land loss, and here was nature building land.

I'm trying to be more and more careful in terms of, like, having hope in the work, not sort of like a frivolous sense of hope, but, also, just thinking that, yes, there is, also, this opposite, that nature takes, but it also provides.

I want the people who come to see my work to at least come away compelled to sort of, like, ask some questions about the landscape that they're in.

I think when land is so vast like it is here in the U.S., the minute you're, like, in a more inland area, it's easy to forget, like, what are the edges really about?

What is happening at your edges?

Narrator: From shifting coastlines to the Pine Barrens.

Up next, Jack Larimore and Syd Carpenter create a tribute to the preindustrial time.

Larimore: Rowan University sits right at the edge of the Pine Barrens.

Students coming into Rowan are so close to this amazing thing, I don't think they all really sort of realize it's a very unique ecosystem.

Carpenter: And it has this distinct history to it.

Its so much had to do with making things.

It was preindustrial.

For me as an artist, it's an ideal source of content.

Narrator: Rowan University is right next to the New Jersey Pine Barrens, over a million acres of protected forest.

that's a unique part of the state's heritage.

Rowan's new student center building celebrates this legacy with Batsto Homestead, a public-art installation by renowned artists Syd Carpenter and Jack Larimore.

Salvante: The concept for the student center was the idea of a meeting place, a community place that was also inspired by our cultural and natural assets in our region.

Larimore: Syd and I loved the idea of responding to the space through the lens of the Pine Barrens.

But that was a stepping-off point.

[ Music plays ] Because the interplay of these things with this thing.

Narrator: The artists took the name Batsto from a village that's now restored as a historical site.

But their work refers broadly to the many villages of the Pinelands that are long gone.

With Batsto Homestead, they created a piece that pays homage to the natural world -- the trees and other vegetation of the Pines -- and to the people who live there.

Carpenter: You know, having that hat there, Larimore: Then the other piece of it was, what might we have that would talk about the culture?

And we decided that that would be artifacts.

And almost as if which happens in the Pine Barrens, you could be hiking along and just find the remnants of an old building.

Salvante: Syd tends to investigate the history of a community, and then that leads her into what objects and what kind of art she will then make from there.

Jack, to complement Syd's practice, he's motivated by the elements that he's encountering, and he lets the elements then inform him and direct him and motivate him forward in what he wants to do.

Carpenter: The magic of this is to find emblems that are evocative of place.

The hat itself is evocative of who might have worn the hat.

And then you look at it, "Well, that's a pretty distinctive hat.

Never saw one of those before."

But it has a certain sense of time about it.

Each object hopefully begins to get the viewer to ask some questions.

Going into the Pine Barrens, there were different plants that thrived in that environment, and cranberries were one of them.

As a sculptor, I get to play with the idea of clusters, or the notion of cranberry.

Narrator: Syd created her ceramic sculptures using South Jersey wild clay, which was hand-dug and processed by fellow ceramic artist Alan Willoughby and his team.

She then fired them inside Alan's traditional woodburning kiln.

Carpenter: We're wood-firing, which is what would have been occurring in the actual kilns in the Pine Barrens.

Every one of those kilns has its own fingerprint.

You're working with fire.

You're working with wood and ash and air -- things that play a part in what the final object looks like.

You take it out of the kiln, but you still don't know it.

What kind of gifts did the kiln provide for you?

Larimore: One of the interesting species in the Pine Barrens that would be good to call attention to would be the Atlantic white cedar.

That would really work within the space, 'cause they're very tall, vertical guys, you know?

So they can really reach up into this 50-, 60-foot-high space that they're gonna live within.

Narrator: Jack's Atlantic white cedars were harvested responsibly from an area where the changing habitat no longer supports them.

He stripped the trees of their branches and bark, but kept their magnificent height.

Larimore: Final part of the installation is just gonna be to bring these trees in and sort of slide them into their tree stands -- massive, steel tree stands much the way you would with a Christmas tree.

[ Music plays ] Salvante: Jack's work is very vertical.

It's majestic.

It directs your eye up to this beautiful, pinewood ceiling.

And, then, at the base, in the planters, you find Syd's ceramic sculptures.

They are fired in a way where they retain their clay color, earthy looking, almost bronze-like.

Larimore: There's an abstraction of a building we needed in order to give the artifacts a little bit of a place to be related to.

Salvante: It could have been a house.

It could have been a place of business.

It could have been a place of worship.

But in all of those types of buildings, there's community.

There are people coming together.

[ Music plays ] Carpenter: Anyone walking up to it can bring their own narrative to it.

So that means over time, as successions of students come to this place, the narrative continues to evolve depending upon who's standing in front of it.

Larimore: Any of those students within 20 minutes can actually get to the place that we're talking about and see what it was.

And so if we could just tickle that interest to go have that experience, you know, job well-done.

Narrator: That's it for this episode of "State of the Arts."

See more stories and sign up for our newsletter at StateoftheArtsNJ.com.

Thanks for watching.

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