TIDAL MEDITATIONS (for species evolution)
Preparations and research for project at Oerol Festival
June 2023
Together with fellow dancer/performer Mikka Mallow and video photographer Mikkel Ulriksen I conducted mbodied research into co-creational encounters with the mudflats, the beings and dynamics inhabiting them and the tidal rhythms defining them. The research yielded the idea of an evolutionary training of the human species for a not-so-distant future world of rising waters in order to develop new abilities as hybrid bodies living within cycles of immersion, flooding and re-emergence.
Working to examine these narratives with our own bodies and in encounters with the more-than-human bodies and phenomena of the mudflats, we asked:
Who can we become together?
What does mutual survival and interspecies dialogical existence look like here?
What is the future of a (human) body in a shifting world of water?
The research was documented in video and sound as well as unfolded further in a GOING VISITING workshop inviting other human bodies into examining these questions and dialogues with the landscape and surrendering to the submersion of the tide.
The method Going Visiting has been developed through my work in and with many different geographical places and types of land, drawing inspiration from new materialist and eco-feminist writers and thinkers including Donna J. Haraway, Karen Barad and Astrida Neimanis. The method is a framework for exploring and co-creating with a given area through physical encounters between the human body and the more-than-human bodies, phenomena and dynamics of this particular place. Through this work, new understandings emerge, immersive and performative situations and potentials arise, text is produced and shared aesthetic sensory mappings begin.
“Visiting is not an easy practice; it demands the ability to find others actively interesting, even, or especially others most people already claim to know all too completely, to ask questions that one's interlocutors truly find interesting, to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to attune one's ability to sense and respond - and to do all this politely! .... [This] sort of politeness does the energetic work of holding open the possibility that surprises are in store, that something interesting is about to happen, but only if one cultivates the virtue of letting those, one visits intra-actively shape what occurs. They are not who/what we expected to visit, and we are not who/what we anticipated either. Visiting is a subject- and object-making dance, and the choreographer is a trickster.”
(Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene)