Their hands in the dirt: How Kazuo Ohno and Stephanie Skura cultivate dance practices and alterity from nature

As city-based artists, Kazuo Ohno and Stephanie Skura each create for themselves excursions into ‘nature’, which are departures from their daily modern, urban lives, plus fecund sources for their artistic practices. Ohno and Skura are part of the tradition in dance of turning to and connecting with nature, but are distinct from it in their practices – and the effects in the practitioner – of embodying and ‘becoming’ images. Paradoxically, Ohno’s and Skura’s embodiment of imagery from nature cultivates experiences of alterity, which yields aesthetics of inclusion.