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Introduction

Dancing in a New Place

Dancer and photographer: Ben Brouwer The Tutu Project (2003)

Understanding Body

In the past century, dancers and movement practitioners have seen a revolution in attitudes about the body—from the Cartesian view of body as object (or machine) to body as subject in dance—through experiential anatomy, bodywork, and performance research. We have also tracked some of the cultural, scientific, and religious history that got us into the dilemma of this dualism from the start—separation of mind and body, separation of humans from the rest of the natural world. As the mechanistic worldview gives way, dancers are in a unique position to encourage an understanding of body as part of Earth. Humans co-evolved with the rest of our planet—we are not separate or superior. Yet this is not the familiar perspective. We as dancers are reteaching, relearning, what was once obvious at an experiential level: the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.

Understanding Place

In my view, place is space known through direct experience in the body, involving sensation, thought, memory, and imagination. Place exists both outside the human body and inside that marvelous membrane we call skin. Relationship to place is a process of assimilation—it takes time. It is through our interaction with specific landscapes and buildings that our movement patterns, perceptual habits, and attitudes have been formed. Architect Yi-Fu Tuan describes it this way in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience: “Place is security, space is freedom. We are attached to the one and long for the other. […] What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”¹ As dancers, we hold both place and space in our awareness as we work, rooting us in the moment and opening us to unseen dimensions.

Principle of Interconnectedness

Although there are many definitions of place, certain modes of writing and dancing enhance our understanding that humans are part of larger systems. As humans feel the reciprocity and vitality that come from opening ourselves to natural systems, we see that we are intricately involved with the air, water, animals, plants, and soil. The stream you enjoy after a dance class is inside you, resonant with the blood coursing through your veins—not as metaphor but as material, substance, or matter. That’s the essence of ecology: interconnectedness. That’s also the thinking we can encourage in our lives and in our creative investigations. If site work focuses on place only as backdrop for our human stories, we have missed the point—that we are embedded in something larger.

Relevance of Dancing

How can dancers bring the dimensionality we know in our bodies to our relationship to place? Contact improvisation, release work, the discipline of Authentic Movement, and many other investigative movement practices have contributed to conscious, skillful bodies and luscious dancing. Yet the dance field on the whole remains separate from the larger discourse about preserving the Earth systems that support our lives. Why? Perhaps it’s because we still don’t think that what we do as dancers has impact. Environmental activists are energized by the immediacy and difficulty of what humans have to do in the face of global environmental challenges, with climate change as a key issue. They also know that the arts are essential to the discourse; scientists can’t change human hearts and actions by statistics alone.

I feel that dance, in particular, has a unique role to play in rehabilitating humans’ relationship with Earth. We need both a cognitive (mental) and an experiential (embodied) understanding to make a change in behavior. Drawing on the depth and detail of our research and experiential knowledge, dancers bring an embodied, integrative, cross-disciplinary perspective to contemporary issues. Are we ready to engage with others in visioning new possibilities?

Encountering Grief

Once we genuinely embrace the principle of interconnectedness between body and Earth, we can often encounter grief, along with a full spectrum of emotions that come with an empathetic resonance with natural systems. If we recognize that we are part of Earth’s body, then we feel more intimately the damage we’re doing, and we may initially be overwhelmed. All the layers that we have encountered while rehabilitating our individual and collective relationship to body are present as we bring our awareness to place—from anger at the damage inflicted by an objectified view, to the ecstasy of union. Eventually, bringing attention to place grounds us in a larger context, takes the edge off separateness, and can move grief and anger into action. Layers of understanding connect so that all we have learned as movement practitioners can be released into a larger dialogue.

Creating Community

Dancers often have complex relationships to place: moving every few years, spending much time on tour, maintaining a nomadic mind state where home is primarily in the body. The egoism and hyperindividuality so prevalent in America—the idea that you are the center of the Earth and everything should rotate around you—runs counter to the process of contemporary dancing and dance making. The requirement among dancers today for increased awareness—of the body, and of others within collaboration—shapes people who really think and move differently from the cultural norm. The sense of ourselves as separate from the culture at large, as well as from our local communities, can create a feeling of alienation, unless we recognize ourselves within a larger context. Macro and micro perspectives—zooming in and zooming out—let the aperture of perception move close as well as find distance, enhancing both a local and a global relationship to place. In this process, we develop communities with shared sensibilities beyond political boundaries. Dance networks create new ways of interacting, new relationships to community.

Taking Our Place

Where we focus our attention affects what we perceive. As dancers, we attend to the body as the medium through which we experience the world. As we open our senses to the world outside and to the world inside, we come to recognize them as one. From this perspective, without changing anything else, we are dancing in a new place. And there is no prescribed response; new forms, new visions, will emerge.

Experiential knowledge of body is essential in this time of disembodied rhetoric and environmental destruction. My hope is that we can and will inspire each other to keep going with our investigations, to connect knowledge of body systems with Earth systems, to see what comes, and to articulate our findings. Like climbing a mountain for a larger view, dancing offers the opportunity to feel refreshingly small while engaging with something grand. Locating ourselves in place, we can appreciate the moment, recognize what we have to offer, and step forward to face the challenge through dancing and dance making.²

Andrea Olsen