NVC Dance

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 passionate purpose, as Founding Artistic Director of Dancing Earth - initially motivated to create opportunities where there were almost none, for successive generations of global Indigenous and Native American performing artists as intercultural ambassadors and conduits for social change. Since 2021 Dancing Earth has re-articulated into inter-cultural creations, with BIPOC and mixed heritage humans dancing by, with, and for the earth. Collaboratively with community creatives, she cultivates innovative movement language as an evolving intercultural expression, rooted in body as source of knowing, making theater as 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, and to Norway, France, Ireland. Other honors include YBCA Creative Corps, A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, Catalyst Initiative from Center for Performance and Social Practice, Arts & Social Change Award from Arts and Healing network, Costo Medal for Education Research and Community Service, NACF’s first Dance Fellowship for Artistic Innovation, New Mexico School for the Arts Community Leadership Award, National Dance Project Production/Touring award. Rulan's work values movement as an expression of collective and collaborative eco-somatic worldviews, with dance as a functional ritual for transformation and healing.

TEDx talk: To dance is to live. To live is to dance | Rulan Tangen | TEDxABQ