The Arts and Healing Network is pleased to announce that Marilyn Wood is the AHN award winner for 1999. With this award, we honor and acknowledge Marilyn's outstanding achievements in combining the arts with community celebrations across the globe over the past thirty years.Marilyn is a dancer/choreographer who "choreographs cities." Her celebrations bring the entire community together to experience the vitality and diversity of its arts energy in a unique experience of spectacle and participation in the heart of their city.
Marilyn is Director of the International Center for Celebration whose mission is "to discover the role of celebration as a vital element within our global community and to promote the creation of new celebrations that nurture the essence and spirit of peoples everywhere." This New Mexico-based organization facilitates and trains others to facilitate city celebrations that revitalize a sense of community, reinvigorate "spirit of place," renew creativity toward a shared goal, and reinfuse fantasy, color, imagery, movement, sound and spirit into the heart of a city.
Waterside Plaza Celebration 1974, New York City
A recent example of their work is the Dia del Rio Cross-Border Celebration that took place on the US/Mexican border at Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, TX. It was a visionary, bi-national public art event with an ecological as well as a community-oriented focus. Among its goals was to link the creativity and energy of two cities and cultures, and to reconceive the endangered river Juarez and El Paso share. This all-day event included community-generated bridge installations and banners, sculptures, story-telling, poetry, music, dance, and blessing ceremonies. There were creative installations such as that of storytelling fish, a fifty-foot inflatable designed to allow 50 children at a time to enter for river stories.
For more information about the International Center for Celebration, email mwoodicc@aol.com or call 505-984-2230.
Listen to Marilyn Wood speak about her work by using this audio player below.
