Rulan Tangen

Rulan Tangen is a creatrix : dancer and dreamvisioner. After an international dance career in ballet and modern dance, opera, circus, film and TV, she survived cancer to discover her purpose, as Founding Artistic Director of Dancing Earth – passionately creating opportunities in contemporary dance where there were almost none, for successive generations of Native American and global Indigenous performing artists as cultural ambassadors and conduits for social change. Collaboratively with artists and community members, she cultivates innovative movement language as an evolving cultural expression, rooted in body as source of knowing, creating theater as contemporary ritual for transformation. Recently awarded the Kennedy Center Citizen Artist fellowship for Service, Justice, Freedom, Courage, and Gratitude, her own ancestral lineage includes Kampampangan/Pangasinan of Luzon Island in Pacific archipelago of Philippines as well as to Europe’s Norge and Eire. In 2021, Rulan gracefully stepped sideways to welcome company artist into DE cooperative leadership, “While I explore my purpose at mid-life, by deepening my commitment to movement for Movement building, as energetic connection with all my relations – human and beyond – on behalf of adaptive continuance of humans to earth as we spin in climate crisis. Expressions of bio-culture diversity of our ecosystem have been the teachers of my greatest mentors , and will guide me organically to my next dreamvisions of the futurity I create by my creative being .”

She has been awarded the 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, 2016-17 Santa Fe Art Institute’s Water themed artists residency, 2016 Catalyst Initiative from Center for Performance and Social Practice, 2015 Arts & Social Change Award from Arts and Healing network, Costo Medal for Education Research and Community Service, the first Dance Fellowship for Artistic Innovation by NACF, New Mexico School for the Arts Community Leadership Award, National Dance Project . Rulan’s work values movement as an expression of collective and collaborative eco-cultural worldviews, with dance as a functional ritual for transformation and healing. She believes in this form of dance as continuing the link of culture – from ancient to futuristic – and culminates in her vision for her contemporary dance company: Dancing Earth of inter-cultural innovative creations.

More about Rulan here: TEDx talk : “ To dance is to live. To live is to dance” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOOVohQUrzg