Bodies, Rivers, Rocks and Trees: Meeting agentic materiality in contemporary outdoor dance practices

Becoming a tree with a tree

“…Recent interest in vegetation within somatic practices and performance can be exemplified by initiatives such as 'Dance for Plants' or by artists performing with trees like Anna Rubio and Jatun Risba, to name only a few in this expanding field. Most artist-researchers within dance and movement that I have discussed with, like Paula Kramer (2012) or Ciane Fernandes (2014), are interested in the environment more broadly.…”

Movement as Matter: A Practice-Based Inquiry into the Substance of Dancing

“…Although he does not draw substantively on the literature that I have outlined, citing an aversion to the “onto-phenomenological drive” of object-oriented philosophies, he does engage with the work of Bruno Latour insofar as it pertains to nonhuman actants (36). For a wholehearted embrace of new materialist perspectives, and a discussion of their implications in practice-based dance research, see Kramer (2012).…”

Somatics: Practices Toward Developing Environmental Empathy

“…As somatic practitioner (and student of Reeve, Poynor, and Prapto) Paula Kramer (2012) argues, moving in this way, with awareness, in nature, is not a 'letting go' of constraints aligned with western studio and stage dance contexts. It is not a 'return to nature' that 'easily results in leaving the body behind rather than making use of its capacities for creative expression, for being present, engaged, and alive,' but rather 'an embodied and receptive engagement' in confederation with the natural environment, which together with the human mover creates a distributed agency of movement and performance-making (2012, p. 91).…”

“…It is through this sense of confederation (Kramer, 2012) with nature, developed through an embodied cognitive refining of sensory perception in the environment, that I hypothesise ecosomatic practices develop environmental empathy. As Bettmann (2009) argues, connecting with nature, whether through somatics or not, requires developing embodied knowledge that is shared with all entities-echoing paradigms of embodied and situated cognition.…”