ACH, NESSIE
DANS!
Keith Haring, Untitled(1987) https://www.artchive.com/artwork/untitled-dance-keith-haring-1987/
Living in a world of systemic injustices, genocide, ecocide, climate collapse.
Freeze? or Feel? And dance a way out (which is also dancing a way in). Dancing for the sake of movement. Following a urge.
We treat our bodies, the way we treat earth and other bodies. As disposable, zones of sacrifice and waste bins.
What if, we treat our bodies as sites of mourning and transformation, a place to honour loss, celebrate joy, to come home to.
Dancing together - by synchronizing thinking, feeling and experiencing - becomes more than a tool to regulate stress, but a way to cope, heal and bond - our relationship to ourselves, others, earth. Dance as teacher = earth as teacher. Dancing ourselves out of prison. Dancing a way out. Dancing together is developing a collective heart
Preguntando caminamos = preguntando baillamos
Dance, specifically dance improvisation in groups as a practice of attention and relational shapeshifting (Manning, 2007; Little 2014).
Movement doesn't arise from willpower, but from a response to the world around us. Responsibility - response-ability - our ability to respond to what is available at the moment, is... being sensitive towards what is now and anticipate what is yet to come, moving in between the know and the unknown attending to tiny shifts while not losing track of overall action (Foster; Kimmel et al 2018; Little 2014).
The overall action as threads that we are weaving together, that is pulling us onwards. The power to initiate and create distributed. To dance together is to move the relation into something new, our reinvent it. In order to do so, is being sensitive towards the multiplicity of relations.
Dance improvisation messes with linear time, is shows how past, present and future inter-are.
A dance improv piece exists only once, and cannot be re-created. How does this relate to the act of planting a tree ('under whose shared you not expect to sit')? Which is often described as being an utopian act or an act of hope for future generations.
Soil
Soles
Soul
Connecting our soles to the soil, allows for us neing radically honest in listening to the body and how it wants to move
Entrusting ourselves to earth, soil, allowing gravity to do its work
The joy of dancing barefeet
Questions
But... does and/or to what extent does dance improvisation reflect the hierarchies and inequalities of the worlds we dance in? How are our bodies and dances entangled with liberation or oppression? How can DI become a site of collective resistance, a practice of solidarity?
Yiel
ding