TOWARDS AN ECO-EMBODIED PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICE IN DANCE AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
By Dr Raffaele Rufo
The boundaries of our bodies are porous and permeable. I have learned this lesson by practicing, teaching and performing Argentine Tango, Contact Improvisation and other forms of improvisational dance (like Body Weather) and somatic movement (in particular the Feldenkrais method) across Europe and Australia for more than twenty years. Through these practices I have learned how the experience of touch works as a perceptual gate to somatic awareness, creative expression and radical interconnection.
“Why do we dance - and why should we dance? Because movement is the fundamental way in which reality exists - an evolving sensible, responsive and participatory experience of bodily becoming. And dance is a life-enabling way of moving that connects us with the potentialities of the body as integrated with the sensuous world and with the sense of who we are. ”
Touch is a gate for being moved and nurtured by a richer and surprising relationality with our inner world and with the larger world in which we are radically embedded. Indeed, somatic-improvisational touch reveals how the inner and the outer are nested into each other in an ecology of embodiment that exceeds the individual boundaries of our human flesh and extends our responsiveness to the flesh of the world.
The more we learn from our kinaesthetic, tactile and affective senses – from bodily-mind-spirit experience – the more we become able to challenge the assumption that each of us exists as a solitary individual, isolated from communal encounters with the (more-than-)human worlds in which we are radically embedded. My processes of inquiry into the ecologies of embodiment interweave eco-somatic listening and awareness, improvisational attention and composition, phenomenological “deep” description and reflexivity, videographic embodied research and storytelling. Through this collaborative work, I have been developing and elaborating a range of movement, dance and theatre-led tools, techniques and perspectives of relational embodiment and emplacement. These are ways to engage creatively and critically with the institutional barriers between artistic, pedagogical and scholarly practices which underpin colonialist-capitalist-neoliberalist cultures and societies. These barriers are stifling our capacity to envisage and sustain the emergence of a multiverse of non-Anthropocentric pathways towards liveable futures.
“Now it is the time to re-embody ecological connections so that we can embody with more integrity the desperate needs for ecosocial justice.”
Practice-led artistic and philosophical approaches can facilitate and activate the emergence of constructive and caring responses to ecological crises by helping us engage them as crises of perception - and by helping us engage the crisis of perception as an ecological crisis. The problems that we see outside are nested in the forms of alienation from our senses and from the sensible ecosystems we depend on physically, mentally and spiritually. This is an alienation we have been experiencing for centuries. We have been indoctrinated, if not forced into a rhetoric, an economy, a politics, a life style and even a metaphysics of separation. And the cost of this alienation has been even dearer for the peoples of the world who have been discriminated and killed because of their assumed inferiority in the light of industrial, technological and military progress. Now it is the time to re-embody ecological connections so that we can embody with more integrity the desperate needs for ecosocial justice.
To move in this direction we need to develop and share ways to recognise and celebrate how the movement of ideas and the words through which we language the experience and objectivity of the sensible world are nested in our felt sense of movement. Knowing and being are nested in the movement of our tactile-kinesthetic-affective body, of the other bodies that touch us and that we touch, and the feltness of the biosphere in which we are immersed in a constant living process of mixture and metamorphoses.
“We need to develop and share ways to recognise and celebrate how the movement of ideas and the words through which we language the experience and objectivity of the sensible world are nested in our felt sense of movement.”
As bodily-minded artists, dancers, performers, theatre practitioners, somatic educators, pedagogues, scholars and curators we are increasingly aware of the threat of not only being disconnected from each other in the human-built environment, but also of how the sustainable co-existence between the human species, the other species and the natural environment is being endangered by industrial extractivism and blind technological utopianism. The undergoing global ecological crises call for a new perspective on dance and the embodiment arts more in general as a counter-cultural force capable of inspiring ethical and sustainable living by foregrounding the centrality of eco-consciousness and eco-relationality in our practice. Re-engaging the role of artists in society as grassroots agents of eco-kinetic knowledge, eco-social justice and cultural change requires a deeper practical and conceptual understanding of how human and other-than-human somatic intelligences and perceptual patterns are interconnected in the felt experience of moving in, with and as nature.
“The undergoing global ecological crisis calls for a new perspective on dance and the embodiment arts as a counter-cultural force. ”
We need to genuinely engage with the ways in which our bodily presence or bodying experiences have an impact on the embodied presence of other humans and also of nonhuman living beings and systems. We also need to engage with the ways in which, at the same time, we are touched by others and the bodily earthy ground and influenced in our sense of self and movement. However, from the narrow perspective of mainstream contemporary culture, movement is too often associated with the mechanical, goal-oriented image of a body controlled by the brain and deprived of intelligence and spirituality.
The limited and distorted understanding of body and movement as instruments of the mind and of mainstream economic, political and cultural discourses does not support a deep ecological commitment to eco-social justice and biodiversity. To awaken and instigate the biophilic proclivity of the human species, and the possibility of living more justly with each other, we need to raise awareness on how the health of the planet and of our society is intimately interdependent with the health of our bodily-minded inner and outer relationships.
“We need to raise awareness on how the health of the planet and of our society is intimately interdependent with the health of our bodily-minded inner and outer relationships.”
To argue that humans are not separate from each other and from the earth but a part of it is not enough if we do not really come to terms with the coextensive life of body and mind. If we treat our bodies as instruments rather than as sources of knowledge, health and well-being that have a value in themselves, how can we stop treating others and the earth as an instrument of our selfish interests and of the unsustainable political economies of global capitalism?
Eco-embodied art practices and dialogic forms of knowledge offer a rich and textured terrain in which our intuitions and aspirations for liveable futures can connect and evolve across the specificity of different disciplines, perspectives and languages. We can start by giving credit to what eco-embodied arts can help us achieve individually and collectively. We need to seek embodied ecological connections as ways to face struggles and evolve the way we live. We need to find ways to support and value eco-embodied arts as a marginalised field of research, expression and collaboration with a greatly underestimated transformative potential for society as a whole.
For references and quotes from the text of this page, cite Raffaele Rufo, 2024, ‘Towards an Eco-Embodied Philosophy of Practice in Dance and the Performing Arts’, www.raffaelerufo.com