Directed by Melecio Estrella, BANDALOOP’s LOOM is a trilogy of large-scale, outdoor public vertical dance pieces that deepens and challenges our perspective on the art and industry of textiles. Bringing together a collective of performing artists, climate scientists, regenerative textile artists, a visual technologist and creative riggers, the evening length piece turns a building’s façade into a giant loom where stories and dances interlace.

LOOM blends ancestral weaving mythologies, traditional techniques of fabric creation, expressions of the ecological and social impacts of a globalized textile industry, and the influence of technological fibers that connect and divide our digital lives into a dynamic performance. Estrella’s collaborators include 9th generation Nigerian weaver and costume designer IB Bayo, theater artist Chibueze Crouch, composer Ben Juodvalkis, visual creative technologist Osman Koç, and BANDALOOP dancers and riggers. The result of this multi-layered collaboration is an evening of dance theater featuring spoken word, vertical dance, fabric manipulation, film segments, and original music.  As vertical dance is a form that relies on state-of-the-science woven nylon climbing ropes, LOOM locates BANDALOOP’s core technical framework in a textile lineage.   

As one of the largest polluting industries in the world, fraught with devastating globalized labor and farming practices, the impact of clothing and fashion is often overlooked in our modern consumer lifestyles. The fallout of our textile consumption will be dealt with for generations to come. LOOM juxtaposes this large-scale ecological crisis with the timeless cross cultural power of fabric to hold, comfort, adorn and sanctify the human experience. Fabric stories are drawn from the swaddling blanket, the altar cloth, the death shroud, and the fishing net. LOOM also weaves in the community building and therapeutic aspects of handmaking techniques; the focused rhythms of stitching, knitting, spinning and weaving of fiber into cloth.

Surrounding the evening length performance of LOOM are multiple opportunities for community engagement. In addition to a public facing carbon footprinting of the project as a whole, sustainability strategist Catherine Botrill and Estrella present online story circles on climate movements in the arts sector, highlighting nature based solutions in cotton supply chains and high impact sustainability measures in the fashion industry. LOOM carbon footprint data is shared publicly through BANDALOOP social media platforms. Any of LOOM’s elements can be used as a short-form activation, including an excerpt of the full performance and engaging an audience with a lecture/demonstration.