Embodying an Ecological Condition: A Dance Practice Approach to Sensing Multiplicity

Abstract

The ecologies of the earth continue across the surface of my body and constitute the contents I sense as myself. From my practice as a contemporary dance artist of settler colonial descent living and working on the unceded Indigenous land of the Gadigal people of Eora (Sydney), I reflect on how engagement in dance practice can cultivate deepened awareness of a condition of trans-corporeal enmeshment with the more-than-human world. Drawing on discreet experiences from my professional practice contextualised within a lineage of Australian and international practitioners, including Rosalind Crisp, Chrysa Parkinson, and Lisa Nelson, I analyse how specific dance 'exercises' develop a deepened awareness of multiplicity and movement in the body’s internal-external environments. I draw attention to how such forms of awareness dissolve bounded perceptions of the self in thick experiences of immanence with more-than-human others and speculate that such embodied ways of knowing are urgently relevant local and global efforts committed to recuperating human-environment relations in the context of ecological crisis. Acknowledging that embodied practices are critical to Indigenous cultures' ecocentric knowledge systems, I draw on perspectives from Ecocultural Identity theory (Milstein and Castro-Sotomayor, 2020) to point to the importance of embodied knowledge practices in challenging dominant Western/ised anthropocentric knowledge systems and recentring connection with the-more-than-human world. Through a discussion of dance's capacity to make human entanglement in earthly ecosystems a more visceral, feel-able reality, I develop the concept of 'embodied ecological awareness' to describe this specific form of corporeal knowledge and point to potential ways dance knowledges might interact with the major crisis of our time.