How to Dance with the Forest: Sensing, Responding and Participating in a More-than-Human World
Combining practice-based artistic research with ecosomatic inquiry, this chapter interweaves movement, phenomenological reflection and poetic language as a methodology for embodied participation. A pathway is offered through which the environmental turn can become a lived, perceptual and shareable experience rather than a theoretical concept.
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Chapter submitted for the Routledge Companion to Dance and Somatic Practices, (2026, forthcoming, ed. by Emma Redding, Lily, Marie-Louise Crawley and Sarah Whatley). Routledge: London.
Abstract: How to dance with the forest is not a metaphor. It is the methodological question that guides this inquiry into ecosomatic practice as a form of practice-based research. Rather than proposing another definition of ecosomatics, this chapter explores how an ecosomatic approach may become a methodology through which the environmental turn becomes experientially available. The inquiry asks not simply how one can encounter the forest through dance, but how movement itself can become a mode of embodied participation through which another organisation of ecological perception gradually emerges. The chapter reveals that the contribution of ecosomatic practice lies not simply in recognising that humans are ecologically entangled with more-than-human worlds, but in cultivating embodied practices through which this ontological condition can be lived, explored and shared.
