Dancing in the Face of Place: Environmental Dance and Eco-Phenomenology
-Environmental dance is concerned with the human body’s relationship to the landscape and environment, including the other-than-human world of aniamls and plants.
-Type 1: Site-specific dance workss that are improvised at or choreographed for, particular locations.
-Type 2: Dance theatre works for the stage that mediate some aspect of the natural world or qualities of a particular place
-Type 3: Somatic education, dance training, and movement reserach that occur either wholly or partially outside of the studio.
-In terms of the 3rd type, environmental dance should deepen appreciation of natural world, but also generate new ecological knowledge and explore environmental values.
-Discussions of environmental ethics are not a luxury.
-Sustainability is a reductive notion that grows out of an egoist tradition since it emphasizes the continued meeting of our present needs rather than those of the planet as a whole.
-Environmental dance enables those who do it, and arguably those who witness it, to perceive values in nature by disclosing our being as a part of nature (by exploring human kin aesthetic consciousness of non-human nature).
-To return things to themselves enables a return to primal unity.
-The dance should allow more than an intraworldly experience. If some approaches reduce the environment to a ready-to-hand posession (agriculture), then the dance should be an enjoyment of and an open-handed non-possessiveness towards the environment.
-Open-handedness can be seen in the commitment to repetition and the awareness of such; should bring a constant attentiveness and loyalty to all things and relationships, even the humblest and last spectacular.
-Encourages a paradigm shift: no pretense of purity, just connectedness and chiasmatic intertwining.
-The dancing body develops into a symptom of the landscape (bodyscape or body topography).
-Environmental dance offers liminology: knowledge of the boundaries of thinghood, and the way in which those boundaries are breached in the lived experience of place. One does not begin and the other ends, the human skin can be like a pond surface or forest soil, not a shell so much as a delicate interpretation. Person and the environment are continuous.
-Dancing with the consciousness of how the environment might witness us.
