{"id":27024,"date":"2026-01-24T22:06:37","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T03:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=27024"},"modified":"2026-01-25T12:14:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T17:14:06","slug":"noli-timere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2026\/01\/24\/noli-timere\/","title":{"rendered":"Janet Echelman\u2019s Dazzling Net Sculptures Lift Aerial Dance At ArtsEmerson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Janet Echelman is probably the most successful living artist affiliated with Greater Boston. She and her team at Studio Echelman, based in Brookline, have advanced fiber art into the arena of grand public sculptures, weaving dazzling nets suspended above parks and plazas, often lit with glowing colors, so that they appear like psychedelic interstellar jellyfish hovering over our cities, come in peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A career retrospective, \u201cJanet Echelman: Radical Softness”<\/a> at the Sarasota Art Museum through April 2026 shows the scope of her art\u2014with public installations from Singapore, Sydney, Shanghai, Santiago and Beijing to San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Seattle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019s lived on and off in Boston, studied at Harvard and Lesley University, taught at MIT, served on Harvard\u2019s Board of Overseers, though of late she\u2019s based in Florida, where he was born in Tampa in 1966.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for all her longtime Boston connections, her art isn\u2019t often seen around here. She\u2019s currently got a net sculpture on view at the lobby of the MIT Museum<\/a> in Cambridge through 2027, and she had a giant net suspended above Boston\u2019s Greenway in 2015<\/a>. Echelman hints that she\u2019s got a permanent artwork planned for Cambridge. \u201cI think it\u2019s not yet publicly announced,\u201d she tells me. \u201cBut it\u2019s coming soon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, Echelman has devised a pair of red, green and blue nets, sort of like wondrous giant mesh pillowcases, that dancers and aerialists from Montreal scamper and climb and roll and fall across, up to 25 feet above the stage, in \u201cNoli Timere,\u201d<\/a> an aerial and sculptural spectacle developed in collaboration with New York and Nova Scotia choreographer Rebecca Lazier that arrives at ArtsEmerson\u2019s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston from Jan. 29 to Feb. 1, 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is a new project in every way and a more ambitious collaboration than I\u2019ve ever dreamed,\u201d Echelman says of the show, which debuted at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, last February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Rehearsal
Rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNoli Timere\u201d (Latin for \u201cBe Not Afraid,\u201d also a reference to her friend, Nobel Prize-winning Harvard professor and poet Seamus Heaney\u2019s last words) addresses \u201chow we navigate an unstable world\u201d and the \u201cfragile beauty and urgency of human and ecological interconnectedness,\u201d according to an ArtsEmerson press release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dancers moving across the shifting nets to music by Quebecoise composer Jorane might be seen as a metaphor. \u201cWe impact the world and the world impacts us,\u201d Lazier says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2018Noli Timere\u2019 is the culmination of a long artistic search to express how to navigate a world where the ground is no longer solid \u2013 and how to do this without fear,\u201d Echelman says in the press release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Echelman and Lazier began developing the performance in a workshop at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2019 (\u201cThis could have been a terrible idea: humans in nets,\u201d Lazier remembers), then a workshop at Princeton University, where Lazier is a professor, that began in January 2020 and was cut short by covid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is so timely because the world is so unstable now,\u201d Lazier says they thought at the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe never imagined how unstable the world could be,\u201d Echelman adds now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNoli Timere\u201d is performed by a cast of eight\u2014plus riggers. The on-stage dancers and aerialists perform in duos, sometimes rolling around embraced, sometimes with one walking on net and the other hanging below like a reflection, and in whole cast gangs, running and swinging and climbing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI see the net itself as a dancer,\u201d Echelman explains. There are \u201cfour backstage riggers who dance the net like a marionette with pulleys.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNothing I planned ever worked,\u201d Lazier says of developing the choreography. The nets hamper movement. So the show required new invention. \u201cYou can\u2019t be decorative,\u201d she says. \u201cEverything has to be focused on getting somewhere or helping someone get there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lazier says, \u201cYou can\u2019t understand the physics of it without being in it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9 Greg Cook 2026 or the respective creato<\/em>rs.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Rehearsal
Rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Rehearsal
Rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Rehearsal
Rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Rehearsal
Rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Rehearsal
Rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Choreographer
Choreographer Rebecca Lazier (from left), sculptor Janet Echelman and producer Gregg Parks at rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Rehearsal
Rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Rigger
Rigger at rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Riggers
Riggers at rehearsal for “Noli Timere” at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Jan 24, 2026. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Janet Echelman is probably the most successful living artist affiliated with Greater Boston. She and her team at Studio Echelman, based in Brookline, have advanced fiber art into the arena of grand public sculptures, weaving dazzling nets suspended above parks and plazas, often lit with glowing colors, so that they appear like psychedelic interstellar jellyfish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27039,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,109,110],"tags":[473,1346],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27024"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27024"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27056,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27024\/revisions\/27056"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}