In this edition of the 92nd Street Y's Tell Me Why podcast, host Julian Fleisher talks with Hilary Easton, native New Yorker and choreographer (she started her dance training at the Y at the age of 10), who will be presenting the world premiere of her witty, sensuous new dance-theater work, The Reclamation, at this year's Harkness Dance Festival in February.

Easton has been thinking about the connections and confusions between humans and nature. She looks at the way we romanticize the natural world while we fear and defile it, and at what sorts of corrections result from our interventions and abuses. In The Reclamation, the stage space (with its limitations) is a microcosm of our small planet, where dancers (Alexandra Albrecht, Michael Ingle, Joshua Palmer and Emily Pope-Blackman) and actors (Steven Rattazzi and Jean E. Taylor) vie for livable territory - and find it diminishing. The tension between man and the natural world is not straightforward - humans are not purely bad, nature is not always innocent, and the dance goes in some surprising directions.

The podcast offers both her serious and fun sides, even revealing her Jackson (Michael or Janet) preference.

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