BRATTLEBORO-Forecasts and Findings, an interdisciplinary dance created by choreographer Michael Bodel and collaborators, will premiere at New England Youth Theatre on Flat Street on Friday, Feb. 28, at 7 p.m. Additional performances will follow on Saturday, March 1, at 4 and 7 p.m.
The work integrates movement, object theater, a live soundscape, and 100 pounds of grain.
The project centers grain as a material, as a choreographic character, and as a metaphor for knowledge and needs. The dance creates immersive and abstract worlds with complex choreography involving small and giant sacks of grain. It explores how, throughout human history, grain has been gathered, gleaned, and cataloged, or hoarded and lost.
The creators of the piece explain evolving relationships of the performers, and their actions with grain, show how humans can either protect or neglect knowledge and sustenance - how we can care for or neglect one another.
The project was awarded a 2025 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and has been developed over three years with previous workshop showings at the Junction Dance Festival and Phantom Theatre.
The performance piece is conceived and directed by Bodel with choreography and performance by Bodel and Jessica Trout-Haney. Intertwined is a sound score composed and performed by Finn Campman. The electronic score is played live and devised from samples of grain, weather sounds, natural instruments, and excerpts of the BBC's "Shipping News" radio forecast. Campman also guided the creation of object theater using the sacks of grain throughout the dance.
Bodel is an interdisciplinary dance artist based in southern Vermont. His projects often integrate puppetry, object theater and text, and his process involves collaboration, research into disparate areas, and play. He is currently the Vermont Dance Alliance's 2025 Resident Artist developing the institute for folding: a cardboard choreography of human wonder and neglect.
The full-length dance work includes devising labs across the state in spring 2025 and will culminate in a statewide tour to be announced in May. Bodel has also been supported as a SEED Resident Artist by the Vermont Performance Lab, a Here Artist Resident and Dream Music Puppetry Resident (2011), and a St. Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab Residency.
His other works have included dances choreographed to oral histories of immigration, a pageant set in an apple orchard, and a puppet opera of Bellini's La Sonnambula. As a dance scholar, he writes about pageantry, place, and choreographic objects. He works at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth and lives with his family in Putney.
Finn Campman (sound and object theater) is a Putney School alum and studied printmaking, poetry, and literature at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1991 he joined Sandglass Theater, and founded Company of Strangers, whose production Moth and Moon won an UNIMA Citation of Excellence. He has toured much of the world performing his theater work, and for four years was an Artist in Residence at The Hall Farm Center for the Arts and Education. Recently, he has been focusing his creative energy on painting and electronic music with his band, The Brothers Chorizo. He has taught English and art at Hilltop Montessori School for 21 years.
Jessica Trout-Haney (choreography and performance) is an aquatic ecologist and a postdoctoral researcher in the Biology Department at Dartmouth. She says she has always loved merging science with the arts. She received her bachelor's and master's at the University of New Hampshire, majoring in zoology and German, with minors in dance and music, and received a master's from Villanova University and her doctorate in biology at Dartmouth, while studying Arctic lakes in Greenland.
As a dance artist, Trout-Haney focuses on tap, contemporary, and aerial dance forms. She has been a member of the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble since 2016 and teaches dance at The Dance Collective in West Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Following the premiere run at New England Youth Theatre, the piece will be available for touring in fall 2025.
To find out more and to buy tickets for Forecasts and Findings ($15–$25), visit mbodel.net.
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