The Land of Tears
"Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity."
― Pema Chödrön
You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.
― Brené Brown
Life is tragic. We live lives of incredible hardship, heartache, sorrow and struggle - and after an incessant battle through a fierce existence, there is no happy ending. From school shootings and terror attacks, domestic violence, refugee camps, and the cutthroat intensity of bipartisan politics, to global warming, birth defects, cancer, freak accidents, and now pandemics, life is a brutal battle. Even our attempts at creating something lasting with art or discovering something profound with science are, in the end, mere meager attempts to mask our angst in a cold, dark universe.
Yet, through it all, through all of the strife and the trauma, we have one another - and this vital recognition can be the greatest solace. Our humanity allows us an incredible aptitude for compassion and empathy. However lonely we may feel, we are not alone. We are connected. We are kin. We can understand the pain in our friend’s tears and help bring them out of suffering and into laughter and love. We can wrap our arms around the dying. We can bring food to the starving. We can listen to the forgotten. It is our greatest gift - this ability to understand each other’s anguish, to relate and to share the experience together. In The Land of Tears, we are not alone.
Written by: Keith Sutter and Devin Copeland
The Empathy Series
In a world plagued by continued chaos, empathy - one of our species’ most important survival techniques and one of humanity’s finest traits - is more important than ever.
Although we’re all individuals with unique struggles and experiences, our human ability to relate to one another's battles, and our willingness to respond to these hardships with action and understanding, could be our greatest solace in life, as well as our biggest hope for a bright future.
Within this series, each environment intends to inspire an existential question in regards to empathy, while each dancer’s reaction comments on one of our many shared emotions. My interest lies in the dark and light nature of the universe and our relationship to those forces - especially in terms of how we face them alone and together.
“Empathy is... communicating that incredibly healing message of, ‘You’re not alone.’”
― Brené Brown