1st Edition
Geographies of Us Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages
Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages is the first edited collection in the field of ecosomatics.
With a combination of essays and practice pages that provide a variety of scholarly, creative, and experience-based approaches for readers, the book brings together both established and emergent scholars and artists from many diverse backgrounds and covers work rooted in a dozen countries. The essays engage an array of crucial methodologies and critical/theoretical perspectives, including practice-based research in the arts, especially in performance and dance studies, critical theory, ecocriticism, Indigenous knowledges, material feminist critique, quantum field theory, and new phenomenologies. Practice pages are shorter chapters that provide readers a chance to engage creatively with the ideas presented across the collection. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective that brings together work in performance as research, phenomenology, and dance/movement; this is one of its significant contributions to the area of ecosomatics.
The book will be of interest to anyone curious about matters of embodiment, ecology, and the environment, especially artists and students of dance, performance, and somatic movement education who want to learn about ecosomatics and environmental activists who want to learn more about integrating creativity, the arts, and movement into their work.
Land Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
List of Figures
Ear and Heart to Earth with Gratitude
(Acknowledgements)
Introduction: Locating Geographies of Us
Sondra Fraleigh and Shannon Rose Riley
St. George, Utah, U.S.A: 37.0941° N, 113.5749° W
Fremont, California, U.S.A.: 37.5483° N, 121.9886° W
PART I
Enworlding, Rewilding, Decentering, Transing/Pluraling, Performing, Attending to, Dancing
1 A Critical Ecosomatics: Cultivating Awareness and Imagination
Shannon Rose Riley
Grau Pond, Fremont, California, U.S.A.: 37.5735° N,121.9847° W
Essay
2 What Native American Dance Does and the Stakes of Ecosomatics
Tria Blu Wakpa
University of California, Los Angeles, California,
U.S.A.: 34.0700° N, 118.4442° W
South Dakota State Penitentiary, Sioux Falls,
South Dakota, U.S.A.: 43.5668° N, 96.7250° W
Essay
3 Ecosomatic Performance Research for the Pluriverse
Daniel Ìgbín’bí Coleman
San Cristóbal de las Casas, México: 16.7370° N, 92.6376° W
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.: 33.7532° N, 84.3853° W
Practice Pages
4 Material/ Material: Thousandfold Somas and Poetry of Emergence
Sondra Fraleigh
St. George, Utah, U.S.A.: 37.0941° N, 113.5749° W
Essay
5 Decentering the Human through Butoh
Lani Weissbach
Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A.: 39.7684° N, 86.1581° W
Practice Pages
6 Shaky Islands and Rising Seas: Dancing Entanglements in the Global South
Karen Barbour
Kirikiriroa (Hamilton), Aotearoa (New Zealand): 37.7869° S, 175.3185° E
Essay
PART II
Horse, Lion, Queer Animal, Skin
7 Crittercal Somaticity: Rewilding Our Horse Senses
Stephen Smith
Pitt Meadows, British Colombia, Canada: 49.3058° N,122.6057° W
Essay
8 Moving with Cats
Shannon Rose Riley
The Berlin Zoological Garden, Berlin, Germany: 52.5079° N, 13.3378° E
Grimmuseum, Berlin, Germany: 52.4911° N, 13.4127° E
Private multispecies dwelling, Fremont, California,
U.S.A.: 37.5483° N, 121.9886° W
Practice Pages
9 Embodying Islands: Ecosomatics and the Transnational Queer
Fei Shi
Nex̱ wlélex̱ m (Bowen Island), Canada: 49.3768° N, 123.3702° W
Chongming Island, China: 31.6813° N, 121.4820° E
Essay
10 Skinbody and the Skin of the Earth
Alison (Ali) East
Otepoti (Dunedin), Aotearoa (New Zealand): 45.8795° S, 170.5006° E
Practice Pages
PART III
Tree, River, Carbon, Stone
11 Practicing with Trees 219
Annette Arlander
Galway Road, Johannesburg, South Africa:
26.1658° S, 28.0223° E
David Bagares Street, Stockholm, Sweden: 59.3373° N,18.0687° E
Kaivopuisto Park, Helsinki, Finland: 60.1557° N, 24.9557° E
Practice Pages
12 Fearless Belonging and River- Me
Adesola Akinleye
Thames River, London, U.K.: 51.4925° N, 0.0288° W
Mystic River, Boston, Massachusetts: U.S.A.: 42.3979° N, 71.0797° W
Denton, Texas, U.S.A.: 33.2302° N, 97.1213° W
Essay
13 How to Apprentice with Land in Enchanted Kinship Christine Bellerose
Rockcliffe Park, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: 45.4471° N, 75.6847° W
Practice Pages
14 Feel the Carbon under Your Footprint: Indigenous Approaches to Grounding
Nathalie Guillaume
Kūkaniloko Birthstones State Monument,
O’ahu, Hawaii: 21.5048° N, 158.0364° W
Port- au- Prince, Republic of Haiti: 18.5358° N, 72.3331° W
Practice Pages
PART IV
Place, Plasma, Pluriverse, Potato
15 My Place Is a Chiasmatic Dance
Glen A. Mazis
Marietta, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.: 40.0559° N, 76.5517° W
Essay
16 Cosmic Plasma Echoing in (Our) Place
Debra Lacey
Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.: 41.6033° N, 80.3058° W
Practice Pages
17 Languaging Body by Field: Ecoproprioception
George Quasha
Barrytown, New York, U.S.A.: 41.9998° N, 73.9248° W
Essay
18 Outdoor Dances: Meditations on Loss in the Finger Lakes and Beyond
Missy Pfohl Smith
Finger Lakes, New York, U.S.A.: 42.7238° N, 76.9297° W
Practice Pages
19 Awe and Empathy
Edward S. Casey
Stony Brook, New York, U.S.A.: 40.9027° N, 73.1338° W
Essay
20 Enworlding Place Dances and Potatoes
Sondra Fraleigh
Snow Canyon, Utah, U.S.A.: 37.2145° N, 113.6402° W
Yokohama, Japan: 35.4437° N, 139.6380° E
Circleville, Utah, U.S.A.: 38.1688° N, 112.2696° W
Practice Pages
Index
Biography
Sondra Fraleigh is Professor Emeritus, Department of Dance, State University of New York, Brockport, U.S.A.
Shannon Rose Riley is Professor of Humanities & Creative Arts, San José State University, U.S.A.
“This collection of essays gathers together important strands in the current studies of ecosomatics. It includes many ‘practice pages’ that open doors to the feelings that have generated the commitment of the writers to creating common grounds for deep conversation about the way people live in the ecologies of the world. The combination of affective strength, so difficult to articulate, with practical exercises—such as the many approaches to breathing as a form of ecoproprioception—will draw readers into places/ geographies where artmaking and philosophy join together and suggest new languages for thinking and talking about engaging with this Earth.”
Lynette Hunter, Professor of Theatre and Dance, University of California, Davis“This seminal collection of essays maps the contours of an emerging field: ecosomatics. At the intersection of dance studies, movement studies, philosophy, and ecology, ecosomatics encourages ways of thinking and doing that cultivate a human’s sensory awareness of their bodily enmeshment in enabling places and worlds—nexuses of material relationships which call for respect, reciprocity, and responsibility. In essays written by an international cast of contributors, ecosomatics demonstrates its fierce commitment to social and environmental justice; a ready embrace of Indigenous knowledges, histories, and rights; thoughtful engagement with established fields of phenomenology, eco-philosophy, and dance studies; a lived, dialectical production of theory and practice, and an overriding mission to participate as consciously as possible in generating worldviews and bodily practices that sensitize humans to the ongoing health and wellbeing of the Earth in us and around us.”
Kimerer L. LaMothe, PhD, author of Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming“Geographies of Us provides an exciting snapshot of a diversifying field: of the different methods, playful encounters, bodymind approaches, and land politics that make up the contemporary ecosomatic inquiry, with plenty of invitations to join in the dance. At its heart, this collection is about local and grounded connection, about reaching out—in intergenerational liveliness and critterly entanglement, in touch and in movement, in human and more-than-human worlds.”
Petra Kuppers, author of Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters; Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture, University of Michigan“I consider this the most important work to emerge in interdisciplinary dance/performance studies this century. The depth and quality of engagement available to the reader in these pages has the potential to widely transform thought, practice, institutions, environments, and the lived relations between.”
Karen Bond, Chair of Dance, Temple University
