Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Embodying Eco-Consciousness: Somatics, Aesthetic Practices & Social Action, Dec 2021

A photo essay reflecting on Stony Creek Collective – a multi-art form project in response to the destruction of the South-East Australian foothill forests. In 2019, Australia was in an extinction crisis. In the summer of 2019/2020, 85 per cent of Australia’s south-east forests burnt. Billions more plants, animals, birds, insects, lizards perished. Clear fell logging, removing all living things from the forest, resumed six months later. My flat surfaces all laid down in the cool dirt. I dance, she photographs. How to live with this ruin?

The United States has a long, shameful history of destroying the culture of its Indigenous people. This poetic reflection narrates an experience of mine at the ancient site of the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. This UNESCO World Heritage Site, open to visitors and closed during sacred ceremonies, provoked a somatic shift in me. I chose to write about the shift using the intimacy of poetic language to blur the boundary between self and environment, human body and Earth body, subject and object. For there to be a change in how humans regard the environment, it seems helpful to hike into the wilderness and sleep under the stars, an embodied experience that can heighten perceptions, which then informs the language used to write about the natural world.

This artist write-up gives a brief summary of somatic and creative insights that emerged through exploring movement improvisation with the various natural biomes of North America. These creative explorations spanned two years of living and improvising, as immersed as possible, in the forest, lake, tundra, swamp, grasslands, river, desert and rain forest biomes. At the end of the write-up are links to three video-dances: the first two video-dances explore movement improvisation as a co-creative process with the river and then with the rain forest biome. The third video, which focuses on the forest biome, layers text from my personal journal writings with photos taken of the movement improvisations with the landscape.

Stages of Tectonic Blackness is a many-staged performance project and video piece tarrying with the paralleled processes of dehumanization and extraction, emergence and rebellion, as sustained by Black bodies and rock bodies. In our cultural moment so racked with urgency, Stages of Tectonic Blackness invites those engaging in the work to move slowly in order to feel more deeply into this time. As a durational practice of Black queer resistance, this work prioritizes Black experience, Black time, Black bodies and our racialized relationship to the earth.

User-Friendly-Guides Series (hereinafter UFGs, 2019–present) is a series of on/offline movement-based workshops that were developed by Ludic Collective. This practice specifically focuses on exploring various perceptual, sensorial and bodily strategies to position oneself in relation to other living organisms. Our wish is to propose an uncanny realm, where morphological differences and perceptual gaps overlay with shared evolutionary histories between us and the other organisms. We hope the UFGs will encourage the participants to de-centre their perspectives when encountering other-than-human beings or interacting with their environment in everyday life. For this issue of JDSP, we are sharing three audio-visual works (‘Planthuman’, ‘Embodying the watery beginnings of animals’ and ‘The arms of an octopus’), as well as a series of audio-only versions of somatic workshops. The viewers/participants are free to engage with our work in any way that feels relevant to them.

This contribution presents six Performative Video Tutorials, which were created in response to Bruno Latour’s ideas about the terrestrial. The video tutorials combine the DIY character of tutorials with geopolitical and philosophical reflections through the use of somatic practices. Notions such as grounding, folding and dwelling are being taken from the theoretical work of Latour and tested as scores for somatic work. The viewers are hereby invited to shift their attention through bodily and sensorial experiments, and to witness possible effects on their ways of thinking.

In the heart of the capital, Hackney Marshes is an oasis of country fields, which have been spared from development as a common land. The field behind the Lee Valley Ice Centre is a shelter for so-called weeds, dandelion, nettle, mugwort, plantain, cleavers, cow parsley, yarrow and many others. This is where we found our habitat. Claire rooted her movement practice in this spot in 2017 and saw it grow and blossom when she started to collaborate with Dominique in 2018. Each month of the year and throughout the seasons they meet. Claire moves. Dominique resonates. The accompanying film is a first glimpse into the accumulated (and still being filmed) material, which is currently being shaped into a four screen installation.

Fluidity, somatic awareness, expressive arts, practices of embodiment, aesthetic response and wonder all inform the ground from which my poetry arises through deep listening. The connection to the fluid aspects of the inner landscape experienced through the soma is at the heart of my video poem ‘Rain in the Marrow’; it is also a poem celebrating the resilience of my feminine lineage at a personal and collective level. It is this fluid feminine resilience found in water that, in turn, expresses and may inform our relationship with the Earth and the web of life. I have had many teachers who have pointed the way, including Emily Conrad D’Oud, founder of Continuum Movement®; Anna and Daria Halprin, founders of the Tamalpa Institute and Life/Art Process®; Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, founder of Body–Mind Centering®; Paolo Knill, one of the founders of Expressive Arts Therapy®.

Review of: Suomenlinna | Gropius: Two Contemplations on Body, Movement and Intermateriality, Paula Kramer (2021)

Axminster: Triarchy Press, 168 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-91374-324-6, p/bk, £17.50