Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute
present
SOIL: FIELD of AWARENESS
An Immersive Performance-Ritual by Marina ‘Heron’ Tsaplina
Saturday, September 26 & Sunday, September 27, 2026 at 4PM
Penny Bridge, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute presents SOIL: FIELD of AWARENESS, an immersive performance-ritual by Marina ‘Heron’ Tsaplina, joined by a cast of eight performers and a network of interdisciplinary collaborators, on Saturday, September 26 & Sunday, September 27, 2026 at 4PM at Penny Bridge in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A $22 donation is suggested.
TICKETS
$22 Suggested Donation
Taking place at the origin point of the historic Greenpoint oil spill along Newtown Creek, SOIL: FIELD of AWARENESS invites audiences into a deep sensory encounter with the ecological history and living environment of the place.
Through Butoh, puppetry, sound vibration, live drumming, and music, participants are invited to become the voice, movement, and witness to the soils and waters of Newtown Creek.
Presented as NYC Climate Week draws to a close, the work creates a space for audiences to slow down and attune to the ecological rhythms of soil, tree, water, stone, and bone — connecting the human nervous system to the larger environmental systems that sustain us.
SOIL:FIELD of AWARENESS is created by Marina ‘Heron’ Tsaplina, in collaboration with a cast of eight performers and a mycelial network of artists, practitioners, and community partners.
The project approaches performance as a form of ecological listening, using the body, vibration, movement, puppetry, and sound to cultivate awareness of the histories held within land and water and of the relationships between human and more-than-human life.
RUN OF SHOW:
Entrance: 4:00 PM
Slow Trash Choreography Start: 4:30 PM
Slow Trash Choreography End: 5 PM
Opening Ceremony: 5 PM
Performance End: ~7:15 / 7:30 PM
Butoh-Puppetry:
Oscar Suh Rodriguez
Ashley Ragus
Moira Zhang
Stephen Carrington
Marina Heron Tsaplina
Musicians: Cal Fish, Chai Smith
Drummer: Paul Nabil Matthis
Sound Vibration: Gisela Sanders Alcantara
Producer: Caitlin Adams
Costume Designer: Normandy Sherwood
Technical Director: Daniel Wendlek
Fabrication Team:
Samia Cohen
Fan Kong
Ofelia Mangen
Marina Heron Tsaplina
SOIL:FIELD of AWARENESS is presented by the New York Butoh Institute.
Marina ‘Heron’ Tsaplina is a Russian-born, NYC-based award-winning artist, writer and teacher whose work centers the intelligence of the body in environmental healing, medicine, and disability through puppetry, Butoh movement-meditation, ritual, and collective making.
She is known for her boundary-breaking artistic vision that forms new languages of performance. Her work “defines its own terms” (Duke Arts) and is “creating a new language of theater.” (Claudia Orenstein). Achille Mbembe, one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism, described her work as “breathtaking, deeply playful and incisive.”
Her vision to connect the public to the intelligence of the soil and Earth brought her to Butoh. She merges Butoh and puppetry animation, and her place-based performance work “deepens conservation efforts by helping people connect to the unseen world.” (Larry McDermott, Algonquin Elder; Executive Director, Plenty Canada).
Tsaplina’s work has been presented and supported by Duke Arts, Carolina Performing Arts, Penn State University, Georgetown University, La MaMa, Dixon Place, Urban Soils Institute, The Poetry Foundation, Orion Magazine, and many others.
Marina’s medical training curriculum, Your Body is Medicine, brings embodied artistic practice into medical education to restore the intelligence of the body in the Western medical paradigm. She holds a Master’s in Bioethics and Medical Humanities and was a Kienle Scholar in the Medical Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine (2016), co-founder of Reimagine Medicine at Duke University (2018-2020), and was an invited Artist-in-Residence at Henry Ford Health (2024-2026). She was awarded the 2024 Nancy Staub Award by UNIMA-USA and her work is also featured in the 2026 USA Today bestselling medical memoir by Dr. Rana Awdish.
Tsaplina is a conservatory-trained performing artist who trained with master teacher Kari Margolis for seven years, in addition to studying at the Ernst Busch School of Puppetry Performance in Berlin, Sandglass Puppet Theater, Pochinko Clown, and Vangeline Theater.
This program is made possible in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, wth support from community partners Urban Soils Institute, Newtown Creek Alliance, North Brooklyn Parks Alliance, Noo Arts, Holes in the Wall Collective, and grouphug magazine.
PHOTO CREDITS:
Top photo by Walter Wlodarczyk
Second photo by Alisha Richards
Last photo by Robert Zimmerman
ALT TEXT:
Photo 1:
Seven performers pose among lush greenery in an outdoor garden, wearing sculptural earth-toned and metallic costumes and manipulating small handmade figures suspended from curved wooden rods and strings. At lower left, a seated musician plays the flute; at lower right, another performer in a striped woven garment sits with one hand on her chest and the other on her abdomen. Warm afternoon light filters through the trees, creating a theatrical, dreamlike tableau.
Photo 2: Artist kneeling outdoors on a bed of wood chips, surrounded by handmade fabric and sculptural objects, during a participatory performance in a wooded urban setting.
Photo 3: A group of participants seated in a circle onstage beneath a large suspended sculptural installation made of paper, rope, fabric, and hanging objects during a workshop or performance.