Choreographic Practices - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018

Embodied ecology is a functional philosophy, a model for how we participate in the choreography of our own experience. Applying ethics and principles to the material nature of the human endeavour, embodied ecology utilizes scientific information and methodology in distinctly subjective, artful ways. In this article I explore the confluence of themes emerging from the practical discipline of permaculture as described by David Holmgren and my own practice of somatics. This didactic scholarship is guided by a unifying ecological world-view: we are living systems.

Endings are a perennial challenge when creating any temporal art form. This article is a reflection of the nature of this problem in the context of site-specific work. We are using this term according to Mike Pearson’s definition as cited by Wilkie: a performance ‘conceived for, mounted within and conditioned by the particulars of its site and the people it finds there’, but in our case the focus is on environmentally responsive site-specific work, work that is generated with and for a site’s ecological and historical and cultural systems and patterns. We propose that the problem of the ending, in such a context, is linked to problems of place-attachment, and ironically, for us, our reflections were generated in a site far away from our own place.

Timothy Morton claims that hyperobjects – things ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’ such as global warming, the total sum of all the nuclear materials on earth, a weather system – have completely altered how we think and experience, forcing us into confronting the fact that we must relate to them as fellow objects. In this article I argue that Body Weather-based dance practices, developed by Japanese dancer Min Tanaka on his Hakushu farm in Japan between 1985 and 2010, attempt to form corporeal and kinaesthetic relationships with hyperobjects through training dancers to sensitize their bodies to their existence as part of what Morton calls the mesh. I discuss two Body Weather-related projects: Morleigh Steinberg’s 2004 film Height of Sky about Oguri’s two-year danced investigation of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts of Southern California, and my own work in North Texas, Into the Quarry. This work, I suggest, provides a model for how to develop a radically different relationship with our environment, one based on the mutual interconnection of interobjectivity.

During the summer and fall of 2016, artist Jill Sigman and dramaturg Chelsea Adewunmi engaged in a creative and dialectic process as part of the project Weed Heart. Weed Heart was a multi-faceted work that dealt with questions around what we can learn from weeds, the plants we marginalize, and how those plants are related to the histories and power dynamics of human populations and the human destruction of the planet. Their work involved conversations around the resonances between weeds and humans, studio work in which Adewunmi gave Sigman feedback on movement improvisations and choreographic structure, and analysis of an ongoing video blog that wove Sigman’s personal story together with plant histories as part of the performance. The performance album that follows contains textual and visual artifacts from this process: Adewunmi’s reflections on Weed Heart, Sigman’s thoughts about her goals for the project, as well as photos from the performances. The reader is invited to approach this album in a nonlinear way in keeping with the rhizomic nature of the process and performance.

This paper or ‘pattern of thought’ seeks to clarify the relationship between a somatic practice that has evolved from studying movement and the process of change in nature, complexity thinking and models of sustainable performance. In this search for sustainability, choreographic practice is taken as a term applicable to daily life as well as to artistic performance and the article goes one step further to enquire how somatics and radical citizenship can come together through engaging with notions of regenerative performance.

This article with artist pages is a self-reflection on danced engagements with land and lineage. In performing with elemental nature and at historical sites, I met my own broken memories of colonized land and severed ties to ancestral lands. These pages feature images of two performance series taking place in and near Montréal city, a cosmopolitan hub of the French province of Québec, Canada. Wise words from storytellers, artists and scholars in the field of Indigenous knowledge (Sto:lo and Anishinaabe nations) guide my textual narrative, and issues of ethical ethnography compel its performative embodied inquiry.

This article explores seaweed from biological, historical and aesthetic perspectives through performance. Dancing in wild places: Seaweed and ocean health is a 40-minute project based on travels and dancing at seven seaweed sites internationally including California, France, Ireland, Iceland, Nova Scotia, Florida and the Florida Keys. Discussion about the challenges and opportunities of linking artmaking and environmental projects is interwoven. A multi-layered format combines informational narratives with performance texts, video links and visual images, amplifying the interconnectedness of ecosystems and including humans as part of nature. The process engages the ecotone between knowing and not knowing, a place of heightened possibility. Amidst current environmental challenges, seaweed reminds us that every discipline has a role to play in the restoration of ocean health. Dance helps us feel; as we feel we care – becoming caretakers of Earth, caretakers of body. Movement is primary in knowing ourselves and the world. Our bodies remember.

In this article we argue that the power and politics of the arts is a way of raising awareness and responding to the globally shared problem of climate change. We illustrate how climate change is integral to a choreographic practice that inheres in: the performing body, which moves while it thinks, feels while it imagines and senses as it understands; and the intercultural dance performance Melting Ice. At the core of this article is a view of epistemology that is embodied, artistic, practical, reflectively dynamic and adaptive to the conditions in which knowledge is created, such as our journeying into Melting Ice. This choreographic practice and performance explores the radical harmony or solubility of the body in all that we do not call the body. The impact of this practice manifested itself primarily when looking back at how the dancers were learning, becoming and being icebergs, and in the act of labelling the choreographic practice of dance-making, the process gives rise to activism.

This article sets out to describe an eco-somatic improvisational danced encounter with the ruins of a 150-year-old migrant dwelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. Interwoven into the description of the project are ‘author’s notes’ as she makes links with the crisis of homelessness and displacement of refugees driven from their homes by war and famine. She asks what it means to reside, dwell or take up residence in a new place; how we might perform our belonging or our alienation; what it might mean to relocate, rebuild a sense of home and what remains of this sensory world amongst the ruins that might be uncovered through improvised dance. Finally, she suggests the ways in which intuitive danced engagement with particular space/place might reveal sensuous narratives of the past, supporting current practices of site-based intuitive somatic improvisation as valid academic practice-based research methodology. The research brings together the voices of writers from performance theory; somatics; phenomenology; social geography; architecture, archaeology and visual media; and those of the author as participant observer and the dancers as inquiring artists.

Part narrative, part documentation, and part choreographic score, this article emphasizes the empathic imperative of spending time over time in nature. Choreographer Merián Soto shares her early experiences with Branch Dancing, a form that ‘came’ to her while approaching stillness, balance, and invisibility in the Wissahickon woods in Philadelphia, and branch dancing’s first major work, the One Year Wissahickon Park Project, consisting of 16 seasonal performances in nature in 2007–08.