This issue offers Four articles with authors from diverse backgrounds.
The article, Moving Words, Thinking Movement: Three Peruvian Approaches to Dance and Diversity, authored by Pamela Santana-Oliveros discusses the work of Peruvian artists exploring the intersection of traditional and contemporary dance practices. Santana-Oliveros frames the practices and processes of the artists within an evolving Peruvian identity as an innovative push that contends with questions of fusion, decolonization, diversity, and the history of Peru which often separates the traditional from the contemporary in dance practice.Elise Butterfield contributes Searching for the Symbiocene in Alice Gosti’s “Bodies of Water,” which utilizes Glenn Albrecht’s concept of the Symbiocene to explore Alice Gosti’s durational public dance work, Bodies of Water (2016). The article argues for a harmonious relationship between human beings and the environment as understood through movement. Gosti’s site-specific work provides insight into relationships, presence and care, as well as offering a level of complexity necessary to address the often-paradoxical relationship between humans and their environment inherent in the Symbiocene.
In Meg Kirchhoff’s Lakes and Bodies: A Somatic Posthuman Praxis, the author explores the entanglement of humans with the environment by analyzing her somatic movement practice as an “ecological-self.” She outlines her practices with breath, touch, and witnessing in relationship with a forest, a lake, and a field. The interconnectedness reveals a sharing of undercurrent exchanges with the world around us, offering a perspective of an emerging ecological self.
In Shanny Rann's Blurring of boundaries in Homeostatic: a dance film review, is a review of the practice and the dance technique. the author explores the performance practice of a specific dance production the homeostatic.
Articles
Lakes and Bodies: A Somatic Posthuman Praxis
Author: Meg Kirchhoff Singh,MFA State University of New York at Buffalo
Abstract
Abstract This paper delineates an embodied praxis for exploring the ongoing interactivity that entangles humans with environments. Somatic-based movement encounters activated by post human concepts are positioned as generative sites for perceptual shifts of human-ecological connections. I consider this project my “doing the post human,” or a means of enacting theories via practice. I focus on breath as an experience of mutual exchange, touch and the possibilities afforded by haptic knowledge, and the practice of witnessing as active material engagement. From these encounters, I experienced an emerging sense of ecological-self that is irrevocably interconnected within a matrix of materiality.
Moving Words, Thinking Movement: Three Peruvian Approaches to Dance and Diversity
Author: Pamela Santana Oliveros, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Abstract
Abstract Based on the Redefining the Contemporary Symposium held online in 2020, this article explores “traditional” and “contemporary” concepts derived from the Peruvian round table and the effects these categorical perspectives can have on dancers’ practices and experiences. Further explored in this article are how “essentialist” discourses of identity and negative recognition of diversity can be intertwined in how dance is conceptualized, practiced, and taught. Focusing on three Peruvian artists’ ideas and artistic proposals: Antonio Vílchez, Luz Gutiérrez, and Carmen Román, this paper further interprets their dance practices as de-colonial actions that postulate an alternative mestizaje as a means to advance the positive recognition of diversity in a Peruvian dance context.
Searching for the Symbiocene in Alice Gosti’s Bodies of Water
Author: Elise Butterfield, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Abstract
Abstract: This paper utilizes Glenn Albrecht’s concept of the Symbiocene to explore Alice Gosti’s durational public dance work, Bodies of Water (2016). The author argues that there can be no complete understanding of the Symbiocene without incorporation and consideration of movement – a lexicon connected to both epistemology and emotion. Gosti’s attention to relationships of presence and care, to and among performers, with the audience, and to the specific environment of the site, offers a level of complexity necessary to address the often-paradoxical relationship of humans and their environment inherent in the Symbiocene.
Blurring of boundaries in Homeostatic: a dance film review
Author: Shanny Rann, Simon Fraser University
Abstract
Abstract With the closures of theatres and performance venues around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has inadvertently led to the reinvention of dance and how it is presented to the audience. Dance film is the new dance. This is a review of the dance film Homeostatic (2021), which brings home a tale that is conceived during the prime of human confinement in recent history. Inspired by the quarantine and surveillance of bodies brought upon by states of emergency, the film tells a story of a man and a woman dancing together and apart, and together again, inside and outside, blurring the boundaries between what has now become private and what is no longer public until a new equilibrium is reached.