Eco-Somatics


What is Eco-Somatics?

The term somatic (as a quality of bodily experience) and the cognate expression somatics (as a field of study) derive from the Greek word soma, meaning ‘the living body in its wholeness’. These terms were introduced and discussed systematically in the 1970’s by existential philosopher and Feldenkrais practitioner Thomas Hanna. Hanna’s aim was to bring together a broad range of first-person approaches to movement based on the human body as an internally sensed and immediately perceived living process of physical, mental and emotional awareness. The term ecology derives from the Greek word oikos, meaning household, habitat or dwelling place. Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with one another and with their environments. By focusing on relationality and interdependence, ecological thinking displaces the human from the center of the world and foregrounds the key role of natural elements like water, plants, minerals and gases for our survival. In doing so, it also aims to encourage our responsibility towards the planet. The emerging field of ecosomatics attends to and investigates the relation between the direct experience and knowledge of the body’s sensations and systems, which is central to somatics, dance and other embodiment practices, with the ecological understanding of and dynamic connection with the larger field of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.

For a critical introduction to the field of eco-somatics, you can read or listen to Raffaele Rufo’s public lecture at Floating University Berlin on ‘Somatic Arts and Liveable Futures: (Re-)Embodying Ecological Connections’, part of the programme (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures - Ecosomatics, curated by Berit Fisher and funded by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, 23-25 June 2022. (The lecture was broadcasted live by THF radio Berlin)

 

Upcoming Events:

ECOSOMATICS MASTERCLASS: LISTENING WITH THE PLANET - In-person and online. Rome, 5 May 2024 10-16h. Registrations are open.

 

ECO-SOMATIC SEEDS OF RECIPROCITY: THE PERCEPTUAL ROOTS OF ECOLOGICAL CRISES - Public lecture. Presented at the Italian Cultural Institute of Bucharest, 26 March 2024. Part of the ROOTS Dance Residency Project of AREAL Space for Choreographic Development funded by the Romanian Administration of the National Cultural Fund.

 

INVITATION TO IFEEA OPEN CONVERSATION AND GATHERING - Seeding the Eco-Embodied Arts Community. Thursday 21st March 2024, 19-21h. Platform: Zoom. Co-convened by Berit Fischer, Minou Tsambika Polleros, Raffaele Rufo and Thomas Kampe. www.ifeea.earth.

 

Current and Recent Projects

 

Encountering Nature as a Life-Enabling Partner

Engaging the experience of the embodied self as connected and continuous with an embodied nature requires exploring and affirming the value of sensoriality as a key gateway into knowing and being. Through ecosomatic dance practice and research, I have come to realise that movement-based sensory awareness is embedded in the radically larger (and smaller) movements of the earth. This experience is opening up a deeper and broader perceptual ground to engage the relation between dance, body and earth not only as a source of new inspiration but also as a process of meeting nature as a life-enabling partner for training and inquiry.

I approach ecosomatics in dance through conscious and improvisational training, teaching, research, performance and activism practices. I combine and integrate the experience of dance with principles and modes of inquiry of somatic movement disciplines such as the Feldenkrais Method. Somatic-improvisational dance emerges from the process of ecosomatic inquiry as a catalyst for developing and sharing a more ecologically conscious perspective on movement, artistic and pedagogical practice, knowledge and culture. This process works through the expansion of our ability to emphasise with non-human constitutive elements of the ecosystem and take action towards change.

For a philosophical description and discussion of the ecological weaving of perception through the practice of somatic improvisational dance and phenomenological naming, you can read and watch Raffaele Rufo’s multimedia essay ‘Sensing with trees: Explorations in the reciprocity of perception’, published in VENTI Journal: Air, Experience, Aesthetics, vol. 2(2), special issue on ‘Senses’, April 2022. https://www.venti-journal.com/Raffaele-rufo

“To let death become life is one thing that trees and plants can do, that other species can do, and we humans cannot do that well. We have so many problems in allowing death to become life. And it takes time, and it takes space, and it takes courage, and it takes letting go. It’s not death and life as two separate worlds. It’s death and life as continuous worlds, one interweaving into the other.”
— raffaele rufo, decolonizing perception (2023)

Human, Nonhuman and the More-than: The Eco-Somatic Dance of Perception

We could say that the more-than-human is a particular embodied ecological encounter between the human and the nonhuman  and it’s ‘more- than’ because of the way this encounter takes places, because of its qualities: they are embodied, they are ecological. This more-than-human is not a transcendental entity, it is not something other than the human and the nonhuman. But the qualities of this encounter cannot be categorised as human or nonhuman, that’s what makes it more-than: it stretches the boundaries of each of the two categories to a point where you have to think anew, sense anew to recognise that which is neither one or the other, both one and the other. So it’s the meeting between the giant snail and the human skin that can be a more-than-human encounter. The more-than requires an engagement with the skin, with the body, a vulnerability. And the (tiny) giant snail looks vulnerable on this huge human hand or skin or piece of skin as much as we might feel displaced or defamiliarised from the human in the encounter with the skin, with the body of the snail.

For a methodological description and discussion of the more-than-human in the practice of embodied research, you can watch and read Raffaele Rufo and Doerte Weig’s video editorial of ‘Ecologies of Embodiment’, special issue of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research: ‘Ecologies of Embodiment: Co-Editing with the More-than-Human’ (direct link to video article).

 

Developing an Eco-Somatic dance/performance/research practice in the State Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast (Central Italy)

After co-organising "Paths for Returning Home - Body Earth Reciprocity" with Intercultural Roots in May 2021 (co-conducted with Thiago Gambogi (UK/BR), Nathalie Mann (FR) and Valentina Vitolo (IT)), in June 2021 I moved to Ostia, within the State Natural Reserve of the Roman Cost (Italy). In this beautiful area, where the city of Rome meets the forest and the sea, I am finding the places and the inspiration to develop, in collaboration with local dancer and somatic researcher Marco Ubaldi, an individual and group-based eco-somatic practice which interweaves dance, somatic movement, performance and ecological consciousness by exploring how perception is embedded within the feltness of the human and more-than-human world. In this practice, trees, the sand and other agentic forces of Rome’s coastal natural reserve are engaged as intimate companions of sensing and becoming. My work aims to recognise and destabilise the consequences of (post)colonial/capitalist/extractivist practices of ecosocial destruction and individual alienation by revaluing the interpenetration of urban and natural environments and by addressing our collective inability to mourn the grief of disconnection and biodiversity loss. My long term goal is to create and disseminate new techniques, processes and perspectives of eco-somatic embodiment which support the development of sustainable and collaborative relationships between different forms of life and promote the role of dancers, movers and other somatic artists as grassroots agents of cultural change. On these topics, I am co-editing the special issue of JER on "Ecologies of Embodiment", I have recently presented a lecture (Somatic Arts and Liveable Futures) and a workshop (Ecokinetics) at "(Re)Gaining Ecological Futures” (Floating University Berlin) and published an essay on "Sensing with Trees" in Venti Journal: Air, Experience, Aesthetics in 2022.

“We sense the possibility of being together in a different way by recognising that the sand is our partner, that the grains of the sand are our partners, that the barks of the trees are our partners, that the leaves of the forest are our partners. And the outcome is a sense of healing, a sense of pleasure. I don’t refer to the conventional meaning pleasure but to ecstatic pleasure as a deep sense of sensorial or sensuous connection.”
— raffaele rufo, Decolonising Perception (2023)

Eco-Somatic Pedagogy: Body and Earth Are the Teachers

When I use the word body I mean the human body and the larger body of the earth in which we are radically embedded - the larger bodily community of human and other-than-human living beings and systems. Bodily perception is the medium of learning and the intensified/sensitized perceptiveness reached through ecosomatic practice is the moving-unfolding awareness of the experiential process of learning (kinesthetic tactile affective and poetic) as it happens kinaesthetically, haptically, affectively and poetically as well as cognitively.

The goals and outcomes of learning are not decided in advance and we try to suspend judgment and expectations and let the invisible obstacles to learning emerge and have their space in the experience of movement and touch. The bodily experience of perception is shaped by and through the encounter with the other participants as moving and sensing partners and with the place and the other-than-human partners like the trees, the plants, the sand, the sea, the air, the sun and the moon, the wind and nonhuman animals. Learning is shaped by and through the eco-social community in which ecosomatic practice occurs. Learning is facilitated by the ecosomatic processes, tools and techniques offered to the participants - an unfolding and detailed sensory guide to be present, attend to and respond to the internal adventure of movement as a dance with the nonhuman forces sending messages to our senses and responding in turn to our messages. Learning is an experience of intimacy and sensuousness, of porousness and vulnerability to the impulses of the world.

 

From Tango to Ecological Connections

My systematic engagement with eco-somatic practice and research was stimulated by the heightened condition of isolation and alienation associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. Before the Covid outbreak I used to dance tango two or three times a week in crowded public spaces. This involved engaging in an intimate experience of sensing and expressing my feelings with other humans, often strangers. In my dance research I have experimented with letting go of the basic conditions underpinning the tango duet: the setting of the dancehall, the specific genre of music and the separation of the roles of leading and following between the partners. When the focus is shifted away from the form of the dance and towards the improvisational experience of listening to each other through movement and touch, it becomes possible to challenge the assumption that the living source of the dance is located in two separate spheres of perception: the perceiving self and the perceivable other. The spaces between inside and outside come to the foreground as responsive players in the duet. How is the dancer’s ability and readiness to listen and respond to her partners related to ecological consciousness? Going through the distancing and isolation imposed by the Covid pandemic made this question very hard to avoid.

As part of the struggle to survive the first Coronavirus emergency, in March 2020 I started to follow the everyday drive to find green isolated places in my small city where I could be on my own or with my children to feel more alive, connected and creative. I ‘just’ had to listen and respond to the sensory inputs of the grass, of the river, of trees, of birds, of wind, of rain, of the sun and of all the other more-than-human elements of perceptual experience I had forgotten or previously taken for granted. My practical shift from dancing tango and contact improvisation to exploring movement in nature began with the everyday experience of climbing trees during the first Coronavirus lockdown. It began with the directly felt realisation that, when I am sensing a tree, I am not alone. In a moment of deep disconnection from the world, I discovered the power of climbing as a meeting with the tree and as a new possible meeting with myself. In climbing the same tree, every day, for three months, I found myself witnessing the unfolding of a state of calm and deeper presence. Through touch, smell, movement and sight my attention was drawn not only to my breath, my weight, my core, my limbs and the pull of gravity but also to the perceivable qualities of the tree as a living creature. I gradually began to realise that climbing is not just about the physical act of moving from the bottom to the top of a tree. It is an exchange. As I climb, I am demanding something from the tree and the tree is demanding something back. It is demanding my sensitivity to its structure and to the shapes, curves, textures and consistencies of its different parts. It is demanding me to listen with my senses to its height and width, to its softness and firmness, to its individuality and its connection with earth, with other trees and with the environment in which it is entangled. How can I respond to these demands by embracing the complexity of this experience as a dance with the tree? My first move was to let go of the image of climbing and to associate my experiences in nature with the larger and open-ended frame of somatic-improvisational movement. Climbing might be reduced to a mechanical, goal-oriented and human-centric view of a body moving up through the apparently inert materiality of the tree. What about the presence of the tree? How is the tree touching me and influencing my sense of movement as I climb? How is my moving body affecting its presence?

 

A Videographic Embodied Approach to Eco-Somatic Inquiry: Video Essays from the Field

These three short video essays emerged from one and a half years of improvisational-dance-led ecosomatic inquiry in the reciprocity of perceptions between humans and trees I have conducted in the protected urban forests of the north-east the periphery of Milan (Parco del Molgora, March 2020-June 2021; these video essays were attached to the multimedia essay “Sensing with Trees”, published by Venti Journal: Air, Experience, Aesthetics in 2022)

“To stay here is to become a witness: of my heart, of my breath, of this earth, of this tree. To stay here is to be witnessed: by the layers of broken branches, pieces of bark, bits of leaves of different kinds and colors, pebbles, worms and insects, moisture, and dried matter.”
— raffaele rufo, sensing with trees (2022)

Danced by the Tree: An Eco-Somatic Improvisational Practice

To investigate more deeply and more broadly the power of nature to resonate with my somatic-improvisational processes and the perceptual states that facilitate such a resonance, I have decided to pursue a more systematic and rigorous project of movement explorations in urban parks and natural settings. At the end of September 2020 I began a somatic-improvisational inquiry of my movements in and as nature. The inquiry continued for three months throughout the 2020 Autumn season and involved conducting daily movement excursions to engage the more-than-human through ‘actual, in-the-flesh kinaesthetic experience’ (Sheets-Johnstone 2011b: 158) in different natural sites. When referring to trees, I am not referring to them as independent entities separated from each other and the rest of the natural environment. Rather, I am referring to the ecosystem - the soil, the river, the air, the sun, the clouds, the wind, the grass, the other plants, the insects … and the human-built world - in which they are embedded. I worked individually within the territory of my hometown on the South-Eastern periphery of Milan - from which I could not freely move due to the anti-Coronavirus restrictions. I started with excursions to familiar parks and green areas but was then driven to explore the wilder areas adjacent to the river flowing through the town - some of which I had never visited before. The process was driven by a desire to be out there with nature every day, to step over the line of abstract thinking and meet the earth halfway with an open attitude of investigation. Be it with a warm sun and a clear sky or on a cloudy, windy, rainy or freezing day. I would go out on my bike early in the morning, after taking my kids to school, and I would continue the exploration in the afternoon until sunset. I wanted to challenge the comfort zone of my urban body as a clean, safe and detached body. I would lie and roll on the soil, the grass or in piles of leaves fallen from trees - be them dry or wet. I would move in deep contact with the bark of the trees - be it soft or rough. I would touch the gelid water of the river with my naked hands and feet.

 

Always begin by finding a more intimate contact with the earth. Hearing the sound of the feet crawling through the leaves as I am still standing. Meeting the resistance to lie on the earth with a naked body. Undressing the soil so that I can cover my body. Diving into this wet, mysterious pile of decomposing leaves. Closing the eyes. Finding stillness by finding the stillness of the earth: that profound presence of something very ancient, of a time much older that I can even start to imagine. Playing with touch and weight as secret codes of our companionship. The whole-body shivers at every little pressure. Following the pulse of the heart from chest, to belly, to hands. Noticing the impulse of fingers tickled by the leaves. The earth is breathing with me. 

A tiny creature just crawled across my neck, and then another tickled my ear. A bird just landed on the tree above, and suddenly took off again. Another leaf fell off a tree behind, to meet her destiny on the ground. I open my eyes all of the sudden. The light of the sun crossing the air between the branches catches me by surprise. To stay here is to become a witness: of my heart, of my breath, of this earth, of this tree. Breath goes in and breath goes out. The body is inflated, and the body is deflated. What moves around me is witnessing me too. The pulse of the heart is loud, the movement of the breath is clear.

I am speaking out the story of this deep encounter as it unfolds. Speaking to this embeddedness and to the illusion of being separate. Speaking to embodiment as a changing boundary, the edge from which I can imagine an inside and an outside. Earth and body: the body scans the earth; the earth scans the body. As I lie down between the tree and the earth, the flesh of reciprocity becomes a tangible terrain. This tree, this soil, these leaves and what lives under them: strata of embodiment. It is in this silence, when I listen and wait, that the world can speak through me.

I witness so much life above and below, so many other creatures thriving in this pile of leaves. This mysterious pile of life decomposing under the tree becomes the boundary of my felt body and calls me to stay. Don’t run away! What will be left of this reciprocity after I leave? A trace of the pressure of my body on the leaves. A trace of gravity. I was here. My body was here. My thoughts were here. We were here. Now I stand back and observe all this passing, all these traces. Am I still witnessed by the world? Are these written words part of this moment: of being touched by these leaves, by the insect crawling across my neck and by the bird landing on a branch of this imposing tree above me? Is this body still integral to who I am? Is this writing part of the earth?

 

Meeting the tree is a negotiation. I see this tree and I feel drawn into its personal space. I walk around the trunk but still at a distance, with caution. How close is too close, right now? The tree responds to my presence. There is a special place where its vibrations resonate with my body. I stand there listening, in stillness. I inhale: the thickness of its core, the colour of its skin, the extension of its limbs. I exhale. As breath comes in again, I let the tree into my body and pour my weight into the earth. Then I release my weight and breathe the tree out. You can hear the sound of this breathing conversation.

I am facing the tree, just standing there. And in the tree, I find a witness of my grounding. Is the tree feeling witnessed too? It can hear the sound of my breathing. Sometimes I feel like expanding my chest and looking up towards the edges of its beautiful body. Then I condense into the earth to meet its roots again. I dig my feet into the soil and give thanks to gravity for making this encounter possible. After a while, the tree invites me to come closer. The space between us has become thicker. Now we are nearly touching each other. My left hand reaches out. But it is too early. When trying for a second time, it feels right to stay. Vibrations are stronger now that my hands are on the trunk.

The more we stay in touch the more I feel intimacy and respect. The more touch becomes an intimate contact the more I feel I am being touched too. My pressure on the bark is met by the tree with its own pressure. In touching the trunk, I can feel the depth of the roots. The tree is pouring its weight into the ground as I am pouring mine. I start moving from this touch and from this shared ground with different parts of the body: the chest, the shoulders, the head, the feet. You can hear the sound of our breathing. Slowly, very slowly I allow my pelvis the freedom to turn without losing contact. I find my back leaning on the trunk. One movement falls into another in this play of pressure and release. My arms are now extended higher up. The contact is now with different parts at the same time. I am having a small dance with the tree. 

 

I can’t really yield to this moment. There is too much tension. This shaping cannot occur until my body is willing to be shaped by the tree. I am trying to find a sense of cuddling on this branch. The branch is my cradle. As soon as I say this, I start observing whether I can be the cradle for this branch. I become smaller to feel more comfortable. I try to engage the structure of this encounter so that it can suit both of us. 

With small sideway turns, I can feel the pelvis meeting the spine through the sacrum bone. This is the same meeting point between body and branch. Extending the limbs to follow the movement of the branch. Exploring this space of stillness as the only space I have, as the space of my body, of my becoming a body, of my bodily becoming. As I try different points of pressure, the feet, the vertebrae behind the chest, the back of the skull, I witness the inward cavity between head and neck folding with the branch. The tree is expanding, and my body is condensing into it. Caressing the bark, clinging on knots. A foot extends to touch the trunk. I am starting to feel comfortable. As the pelvis makes little turns on the surface of the branch, the head feels connected with the foot. The torso feels stable. Back, torso, pelvis, foot: points of contact on the right side of my body. On the left side, only the foot touches the branch at the edge of our shared line of extension. Leaning on one side, playing with instability, I can feel gravity pulling me down. I can feel muscles and tissues entering a relationship with the tree. It is a relation of weight, touch, rotation, pressure and release of pressure. Now it does feel more like a cuddle. I am letting go. 

Raffaele Rufo, I Am the Tree (Photo by Valentina Vitolo, 2020, from the ‘Sensing with Trees’ eco-somatic research project, Milan, Italy)

It’s not just the tree that is here for me. I am here for it too. My hands are grabbing the upper edge of the branch above my head. Grabbing and letting go. As the body turns to the right, I release some weight off the branch but I am still comfortable. Then the whole body returns on the branch. We are sharing the burden of this encounter with gravity, the tree and I. This is what we share. Holding on to each other. This is what we share. Shaping is breathing into this contact and then out of it. Shaping is yielding into this contact and then out of it. Shaping is being shaped. It is knowing that I am shaping and not knowing how I am being shaped. It is one thing and the other at the same time, without contradiction. It is letting go of my thoughts. It is a bodily becoming. 

The tree felt like a stranger when I arrived today. And now we are like friends. We are playing together. We are speaking with each other. You can hear our breathing conversation. I feel at home up here. You can hear silence for a while. Sensations are becoming sounds, uttered words that speak to this moment so that our connection can grow. The traces of our encounter are impressed in the shapes of this dance. The shapes of this dance are impressed in the shapes of these words. 

 

With-ness: Between Sensing and Being Sensed

The sensory and movement-based inquiry of my encounters with trees reveals the possibility of a perceptual shift from a narrow experience of embodiment - focused on the will to move and act upon the world, to the expanded experience of being moved by the world. This shift was manifested in the emergence of a felt sense of reciprocity between the human body and the tree. I began the explorations by focusing on scanning, grounding and shaping and ended up with the perception of being scanned, grounded and shaped by the natural environment. How does this shift happen? How do we become aware that the soil, the tree, the leaves and the air are touching us? In her philosophy of dance, Kimerer LaMothe (2016: 109, original emphasis) argues that: ‘Every movement “we” as individuals make expresses an impulse to connect with whatever other movements have enabled and will enable our ongoing participation in the rhythms of bodily becoming’. In this inquiry I ask and explore somatically how this connection is experienced and expressed as the weaving of threads between the sensing body and the sensible world. There are three key threads emerging from my inquiry: reciprocity unfolds in the spaces between the human body and the tree; it unfolds as the awareness of being witnessed by the tree; language can contribute creatively to this unfolding as a directly felt expression of movement.

How can we engage and become aware of the movement of the tree if, approached with our unaided senses, we perceive it as a static entity? We cannot physically move and be moved by the tree as we can move and be moved by another human being. Our human body can, however, meet the tree because we are both living forms of this same living earth, because we are both earthbound. We can bring attention to the agency of other natural forces moving the tree, like the wind moving its leaves, the sun feeding it with light, the soil providing it with minerals and nutrition and the air exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen with it. These movement processes are much more subtle and harder to perceive within human spatiotemporal patterns. Seeking cues on the tree’s movement leads to shifting the focus of inquiry to the livingness of the in-between spaces: between the tree and the land, between my body and the land, between the tree and my body. These meeting spaces are spaces of contamination: both body and tree, both body and land, both tree and land. It is in the earthiness of these in-betweens that the perception of our human spatiotemporality meets the spatiotemporality of the tree. For example, when I lie under the tree and observe how body and earth are scanning each other, I can meet the movement of the tree in the complex microcosmos unfolding between its fallen leaves, the soil and the vegetal and animal beings participating in the process of decomposition occurring above and around its roots. I can meet the movement of the tree also in the exploration of grounding when pouring weight with my feet into and out of the soil in which the roots of the tree are embedded while leaning with my body on its trunk. In this case, it is possible for me to sense how reciprocity is incarnated in the transmission of movement impulses occurring across the circuit created by the tactile connection between land, body and tree. The investigation of the reciprocity of perception in the spaces between human and natural elements resonates with Tim Ingold’s (2009) anthropological study of perception of the environment as a process occurring in a ‘fluid space’ in which organisms ‘leak’. Drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, Ingold (2009: 153) contends that sense perception is not an interior faculty of the individual, separate body but, rather, ‘one aspect of the unfolding of a total system of relations comprised by the creature’s embodied presence in a specific environment’. This system of relations unfolds in a fluid space in which ‘there are no objects of perception’ and ‘every living thing is itself an entanglement’ (Ingold 2009: 154). In my inquiry the fluidity of the spaces between my body and the tree was perceived and understood as an osmotic experience, that is, as an experience of sensory inter-penetration. The awareness of this carnal exchange was experienced and articulated as a process of witnessing and being witnessed. 

Weaving the threads between the sensing body and the sensible world involves engaging a more subtle and challenging form of bodily attention. By approaching perception as a process distributed throughout the entirety of the body and integrated with the sense of self, it is possible to decentre human agency so that the tree can be met as a demanding and responding being. Andrea Olsen (2002: 4) describes the dialogue between body and earth in terms of ‘the capacity to maintain inner awareness while attending to the outer world’ in a ‘process of inclusive attention’. In this inquiry the fleshy nature of reciprocity emerges particularly in and as the embodied awareness of witnessing the presence of the tree and being witnessed by its presence. How can I become a witness for this tree as I lie under it? How do the leaves fallen from the tree witness my presence as I lie on them? In the active experience of with-ness (witnessing), the tree is encountered as the sensible world and the human body is engaged as a being sensitive to it. In the passive experience of with-ness (being witnessed), the body is encountered as nature and the tree is engaged as a being sensitive to it. In both cases, the human body and the tree are there for each other. The active and passive perspectives exist as imbricated one into the other rather than as exclusive to each other. The tree and the body are witnessing something about each other’s living systems and bodily and affective states which belong to our shared earthly nature. With-ness is a mode of resonating with, of vibrating with the presence of the other through key somatic processes such as breathing and touching. With-ness involves being moved by each other’s presence by making our embodied connection accessible to the senses. If I want to know how the tree feels, I need to feel like the tree. As an osmotic process of becoming, with-ness requires the capacity to wait and to listen without judgment, both to one’s body and to the body of the tree.

To perceive reciprocity in the experience of sensing the tree and to evolve an awareness of this reciprocity through movement, we need to slow down human temporal patterns. We need to embrace a meditative form of stillness which puts us in a condition to intercept intuitively non-human temporal patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. First of all, we need to give ourselves enough time for wandering freely and curiously in nature and the chance to allow natural elements to speak to us through what is happening - rather than through what we make happen. Take the blossoming of a flower. This natural process occurs over a long time, but it becomes perceivable to human consciousness as a single, integrated phenomenon only by watching its time lapse. To sense the agentic forces of nature we need to frame them in human times. Otherwise, what we see is immobility, which is confused with inertness. The much more extended temporal patterns that characterize the experience of being a tree is linked with the fact that the tree is moving in relation with everything else in a web of interdependencies that is extremely hard to notice and understand for us humans. In my inquiry the importance of slowing down time for experiencing with-ness has led to the emergence of a stage-based exploratory framework. With-ness was not sought but met in a gradual process of letting moments and sensations emerge spontaneously. Movement explorations were engaged as an improvisational process of going through stages of spatial and temporal perception of the presence of the tree. These stages emerged through speaking out and articulating the lived experience of noticing perceptual shifts in the experience of movement. My exploration of grounding with the tree, for example, was based on three macro stages: seeing the tree, meeting the tree and touching the tree. These stages work as broad intentions rather than prescriptive categories. The perceptual shift from one state to the other cannot be expected or anticipated.

As a practice of waiting for subtle sensory inputs to reach us and take us into the next movement, the experience of being ‘danced by the tree’ is deeply reliant on the tactile experience of one’s body weight in relation with the natural environment. Both humans and trees are bound to the force of gravity. Touch and the sensation of weight felt in different body parts and in different bodily positions emerge from the inquiry as secret codes of the human companionship with trees. For example, when combined with the fine-tuned sensation of pouring weight into and out of the soil, the trunk or a branch, waiting comes alive as a very fleshy and bony experience of with-ness. Even just by attending to standing we can notice how our perception of weight reveals the sensation of being witnessed by the earth. Weight is also a code through which the tree and the earth witness each other. The tree exists in a constant dynamic of pouring weight and pressure into the earth and of moving away from it. 

The third key thread emerging from the inquiry is the creative and facilitating role of language (written and spoken) in the experience and understanding of the reciprocity between the human body and the tree. As a channel to connect with and bring awareness to sensory experience, language participates in the experience of being ‘danced by the tree’ by enriching the embodied experience of relating with the natural environment. There is a tendency to mistrust words in dance and somatic practices that is often linked with asserting the central role of the senses. Why do we name experiences if they can be sensed somatically without the intervention of words? In her phenomenological analysis of movement Sheets-Johnstone (2011a: 127) argues that ‘it is one thing to attend to movement kinesthetically and to discover experientially the distinctive play of qualities that are there in our movement, and quite another to try to put that kinesthetic experience into words’. According to Sheets-Johnstone (2011a: 127), when we pay bodily attention, our direct, non-verbal experience of movement is ‘kinetically unmistakable’ because the spatiotemporal perception of how we move coincides with the actual manner in which we are moving. In trying to find words, on the other hand, we run the risk of adding ‘unwanted association’ to our descriptions (Sheets-Johnstone 2011a: 127). In this inquiry I have explored how words can be met, rather than found, in the kinaesthetic process of listening to and with the body.

Drawing on David Abram’s (2010, 2017) philosophical anthropology of depth perception, I have approached naming as a practice of attention which helps connect the sensing body with the sensuous world. The type of language that I have engaged during and after movement explorations tries to speak of and to the body and the tree as intelligent beings. This involves naming specific parts of the body (e.g., pelvis, feet, eyes and spine) and of the tree (e.g., trunk, roots, branches and leaves) as agentic forces rather than things controlled by the brain. The working of these bodily agents of consciousness is foregrounded to attention in the process of following the moment as it arrives. Words are engaged in their capacity to reveal and evoke very specific sensations in the unfolding of an integrated sense of perception. Uttering and writing words can also contribute to perceive what is happening at a more subtle level of embeddedness by bringing to life sensory aspects of the encounter with nature that extend beyond the kinaesthetic sense of one’s self-movement (e.g., the light of the sun, the songs of the birds, a leaf falling off the tree). Like the imprint left by the body on a pile of leaves, words are traces of the ephemeral reciprocity felt between the body and the earth. This inquiry shows how, in speaking, naming acts as the echo of bodily becoming by coming into the world when the felt sense of the movement is about to land. In writing, the traces left by movement explorations emerge as the lingering qualities of a mode of embodiment that is re-engaged in the act of moving the fingers on the screen of a digital device or on a piece of paper. 

 

Towards an Eco-Somatic Understanding of Embodiment

By weaving somatically, verbally and visually the relationality between the sensing body and the sensible world in which it is embedded, my inquiry leads to articulating the experience of being ‘danced by the tree’ as a mode of eco-somatic embodiment. This is a mode of being embodied with and in a relation of reciprocity with the earth which emerges by attending to a larger perceptual field and, in particular, to the spaces between the mover’s insides and outsides and between human and more-than-human expressions of life. Starting from a definition of embodiment as the experience of becoming conscious of what the body is and does, the perspective of eco-somatic embodiment places the unfolding of this experience in the perceptual interplay between the human body and its ecosystem. Engaging eco-somatic embodiment involves decentring human agency by asking: how do I co-exist with and make room for the will and intelligence of the other natural elements living in my ecosystem? It involves bringing attention to how the presence of a tree is catching me by surprise and calling me to challenge default perceptual habits so that I can experience my body as the result of the movement of everything else above, beneath and around me. It involves approaching my bodily sense of self from the perspective of a tree that, in the Autumn season, for example, is offering its dying leaves to be decomposed into organic matter that will feed other living beings. These are practices of humbling one’s self to recognise that we are here because the tree, the land and the river are here too.

Eco-somatic embodiment is approached here as the experience of the body having a felt sense of itself from the inside-out. However, the emphasis is placed on how somatic perception is also a perception of how the body is also being perceived by the sensuous world. My eco-somatic research leads to argue that the more we dig inside to reveal the intelligence of bodily living systems, the more it becomes possible to perceive the outside as part of the larger perceptual field in which embodiment is occurring. This perspective opens up the potential for reclaiming the connecting and transformative power embodiment in pursuit of societal and ecological sensitivities that promote enduring values towards a more just and compassionate way of being human.

As a sensory, responsive and participatory experience, improvisational movement enables the shift towards eco-somatic embodiment by producing a form of knowledge that, as argued by LaMothe, cannot be secured in any other way. Being ‘danced by the tree’ can be described as an evolutionary process towards a heightened level of somatic listening and kinaesthetic awareness which allows the emergence of what LaMothe refers to as ‘ecokinetic’ knowledge. In this deep state of presence, what is touching my body is also moving and potentially changing me as an impulse traversing the boundaries of material identity. Being ‘danced by the tree’ involves feeling the tree as part my experience of movement. In this process, the dance between body and tree grows an incarnation of our sensory encounter and embodiment can be understood as a carnal meeting between sensing and being sensed. In this subtle experience of waiting to be moved before moving, of waiting to be touched before touching, of waiting to be witnessed before witnessing, sensing and responding to sensations are integrated in the bodily becoming of movement as a felt experience of reciprocity which crosses the boundaries between the mover’s inside and outside worlds and between the imagined and actualised sense of movement and touch. This expanded and heightened field of awareness in which the body is participating unfolds as a timeless terrain where the next move does not manifest as a consequence of the previous one but as a falling into what is already happening which unsettles the expectations and the preparations which preceded the act of movement.

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For references and quotes from the text of this page, cite Raffaele Rufo, 2024, ‘Eco-Somatics’, www.raffaelerufo.com/ecosomatics

 

References

Abram, David (2010), Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, New York: Vintage Books.

Abram, David (2017[1997]), The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York: Vintage Books.

Hanna, Thomas (1986), ‘What is somatics? (Part I)’, Somatics: Magazine-Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences, 5:4, pp. 4–8.

Ingold, Tim (2009), ‘Point, line and counterpoint: From environment to fluid space’, in Neurobiology of “Umwelt”: How Living Beings Perceive the World (eds Alain Berthoz and Yves Christen), Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp 141-55.

LaMothe, Kimerer. (2015) Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming. New York: Columbia University Press.

Olsen, Andrea. (2002). Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Rufo, Raffaele (2020a), ‘Re-engaging touch in tango: An experiential framework for kinesthetic listening’, Ph.D. thesis, Melbourne, Australia: Deakin University, School of Communication and Creative Arts. http://dro.deakin.edu.au/view/DU:30135544

Rufo, Raffaele (2020b), ‘Touch in tango as a form of contagion’, in Thinking Touch in Partnering and Contact Improvisation: Pedagogy, Philosophy, Practice (ed. Malaika Sarco-Thomas), Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 129–48.

Rufo, Raffaele (2020c), ‘(Re-)engaging touch as a tango dancer: An experimental framework for kinaesthetic listening’, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 12:2, pp. 207–228. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp_00024_1

Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (2011a), The Primacy of Movement, 2nd ed., Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (2011b), ‘The corporeal turn: Reflections on awareness and gnostic tactility and kinaesthesia’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18:7&8, pp. 145–68.

 

Other EcoSomatic Writings and Lectures by Raffaele Rufo