Anyone who has traversed a rope bridge knows that the structure changes with each step. The bridge responds to the walker, and the walker, in turn, reacts to shifts in the bridge. That simple symbiosis plays out on a grand scale in Noli Timere, an aerial performance that fuses dance, sculpture, circus arts, music and engineering.
Created by choreographer Rebecca Lazier and sculptor Janet Echelman, the production places eight dancers in two voluminous nets suspended in the air. Accompanied by a score from Québécois composer Jorane, they tumble, dance, swing, hang and roll from one vibrantly colored net into the other as four riggers maneuver the structures like marionettes. The sculpture becomes the ninth dancer.
The spectacle, called by one reviewer “a collision of art forms like no other,” comes to the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hanover, N.H., for two performances on Friday and Saturday, October 9 and 10.
“This piece for me is about what it means to move in a world where the ground is no longer solid,” Echelman told Seven Days. Noli timere is a Latin phrase that means “Be not afraid.”
Six years in the making, Noli Timere took the two Guggenheim fellows into new territory. “I’m a ground-based choreographer,” said Lazier, professor of the practice in dance at Princeton University and acting director of dance at the school’s Lewis Center for the Arts. The dance world had no technique for performing in a net, she said.
Echelman, founder and lead artist of Studio Echelman in Boston, sculpts, as she likes to say, “at the scale of buildings and city blocks.” Her massive net installations have hung over streets, plazas and waterways on five continents. But she had never put people in them. The wind had been her choreographer.
The two met at a conference in 2018 and were enamored of each other’s work. As Lazier recalls, they immediately began to wonder what it would be like to put humans in Echelman’s suspended environment. At their first workshop, they hung a massive net in an atrium at the University of Washington. “We had dancers step into it,” Lazier said, “and the moment you saw their gesture ripple across the whole form, we both had an ah moment, to see something that’s usually invisible made visible.” At one point during development, they brought together engineers, graduate students, dancers and a mathematician.
Audience members may see the resulting work as a metaphor for the impacts humans and their environment have on each other; as an illustration of the “butterfly effect,” which suggests that small changes produce unpredictable outcomes; or as a visualization of people’s constant search for stability.
“We would think about negotiating in precarity,” Lazier said. “How do you create stability? And one of our big discoveries was, stability is community … It actually comes through that act of caring for each other.”
The performers, who come from dance and circus backgrounds, must constantly remain attuned to each other. “They have to be alert at every moment, because every move they make is impacting someone else, and it’s unfolding, and it’s always changing,” Echelman explained.
“That sense of caring, literally, for their safety is in each other’s hands,” Lazier said.
Lazier encouraged viewers to set aside the interpretive angst that dance performances sometimes generate in audiences — questions such as What are they doing? What does it mean?
Instead, bring wonder and curiosity, Lazier suggested: “That permission to allow your imagination to see multiple meanings and create your own is important to us.” ➆
This article appears in October 7 • 2026.
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