Pitney Meadows Community Farm in Collaboration with Improv Spaces presents: Go Between, A Ritual for Listening to the Land
This June, Pitney Meadows Community Farm, in collaboration with Improv Spaces, invites the community into a rare and immersive artistic experience rooted in land, memory, movement, and collective listening.
From June 1st through June 5th, artist Jill Sifah Sigman will be in residence at Pitney Meadows Community Farm, transforming Bill’s Barn into an active creative studio space where visitors are encouraged to witness and engage with her artistic process as it unfolds. The residency will culminate in a free public exhibition and performance of Go Between: A Ritual for Listening to the Land on Saturday, June 6th, featuring an opening prelude at 4pm and the main performance at 5pm.
Throughout the week, community members are warmly invited to stop by Bill’s Barn, observe the development of the work, and experience firsthand how art can emerge directly from the landscape itself. Rather than presenting art only as a finished product, this residency opens the door to the process, offering a glimpse into experimentation, physical practice, and environmental dialogue as they unfold in real time.
At the heart of Go Between is a profound question:
What does the soil remember?
This question guides Sigman’s environmental-performative practice, which combines choreography, visual art, ritual, and ecological inquiry. In Go Between, Sigman creates visually powerful scrolls by dancing with soils significant to climate issues, colonial histories, and local narratives. Through movement and direct physical engagement with earth and landscape, marks are transferred onto large-scale paper scrolls, creating works that are simultaneously documentation of performance, mapmaking, and archives of place-based memory.
For her residency at Pitney Meadows Community Farm, Sigman will create a new body of work using soil gathered from the farm itself, allowing the fields, pathways, histories, and ecosystems of Pitney Meadows to become active collaborators in the creative process. The resulting scrolls will carry the textures, traces, and movements of the land, forming a visual dialogue between artist and environment.
The work exists somewhere between ceremony, performance, ecological reflection, and collective experience. It asks audiences not simply to watch, but to participate in an act of attention... to slow down, observe, and consider their own relationship to the places they inhabit.
The culminating June 6th performance will begin with an improvisatory prelude of music and sound at 4pm, inviting audience members to arrive early, settle into the landscape, and connect with the space before the performance begins. This opening experience is intended as a threshold into the work itself: an opportunity to transition from the pace of daily life into a more grounded and attentive mode of presence.
At 5pm, Go Between will unfold as a collective ritual for listening to the land, blending movement, sound, soil, gesture, and visual mark-making into a performance that is both intimate and expansive. Surrounded by the living landscape of Pitney Meadows Community Farm, the work highlights the interconnectedness of art, ecology, memory, and community.
Hosting this residency reflects Pitney Meadows Community Farm’s continued commitment to cultivating spaces where creativity, environmental stewardship, agriculture, and community life intersect. As a place grounded in nourishment, of both people and land, the farm provides a uniquely resonant setting for work that asks audiences to consider not only how we use land, but how we listen to it, care for it, and remember alongside it.
Sigman is artist-in-residence at Pitney Meadows Community Farm in collaboration with Improv Spaces, with support from the Saratoga Arts Community Regrant Program, the Price Institute, the Mellon Foundation, and the Rutgers University–Newark 2026 Chancellor’s Seed Grant. The performance will also commence the week of activities for the Global Performance + Sound Lab.
The residency is open to visitors June 1st through June 5th in Bill’s Barn at Pitney Meadows Community Farm. The culminating exhibition and performance on Saturday, June 6th is free and open to the public.
About Jill Sifah Sigman:
Jill Sifah Sigman is a queer choreographer, performing artist, visual artist, educator, and activist whose polyvalent work blends dance, visual art, ecology, and philosophy. She has a holistic vision of choreography that integrates human bodies, more than human neighbors like plants and soil, and objects that people throw away in ways that catalyze connection and care. She is the author of Ten Huts, published by Wesleyan University Press, about choreographing structures out of garbage in different parts of the world. Sigman founded jill sigman/thinkdance in 1998 to raise pressing social issues through the body. In 2016 she founded Body Politic, a program of workshops and laboratories collaborating with activists in environmental, immigration and racial justice. In 2022 she launched the Social Justice Movement Lab for artist-activists to center embodiment in social change work. Sigman has been the first Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney Dance, a Distinguished Guest Artist at the University of San Francisco Performing Arts & Social Justice program, a Rauschenberg Residency artist, a Choreographic Fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, a Movement Research Artist in Residence, and a 2025 Bessies nominee. She is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University and a member of the Global Performance + Sound Lab. Sigman was born and raised on occupied Canarsee land in Brooklyn, New York.
