BYE-CERTAINTY: (Rehearsing) Choreographies for Shifting Bodies in Transitional Ecologies

This artistic research project expands dance and choreographic practice as a speculative method for imagining and rehearsing alternative forms of embodiment attuned to post-anthropocentric possibilities. Embodiments that take more-than-human ethics, human spectrality, and the biospheric scales within which the human body is entangled and traced in account.

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The framework of Uncertainty points at the ecological instability of our present moment, particularly by examining the conditions and implications of the ongoing climate emergency. From an ecological perspective of planetary co-existence it is not possible to separate our body from the rest of the world; the body and the atmosphere are inside one another. Recognizing the body as an entangled part of the world places it in an uncertain position: how do biospheric changes, transformations of biotopes, and relations with more-than-human beings reshape the very notion of the body itself? What does it mean to be, have and meet through a ’human’ body while questioning its solid identity? Can the testing (rehearsing) of alternative (future) embodiments become a ground to think of the relationship of bodies, ecology and more-than-humans as more entangled, relational and continuously in transformation?

 

By approaching Uncertainty as ontological, the artistic inquiry of the project opens towards what potential future forms of embodiments that arises in the speculative ’what if’ brought about by post-anthropocentric perspectives. Perspectives meant to decenter the human centered existence and instead recognize our bodies as part of the flux of shaping, and being shaped by, the world(s) we inhabit.

A key part of the work will unfold through the creation of choreographic scores based on the idea of 'ends'. This divides the research

 

in three parts; end of body, end of (one)self and end of human, that commonly will assume a ”Möbius Trilogy” of performative works. Here, ’end’ is not understood as a destination, but as a process of transition and transformation through which our ways of being fold into new and shifting meanings.

Choreographic practice is approached as a laboratory for testing, sensing, and rehearsing such new social and ecological relations, where each part of the trilogy rehearse different alternatives to the anthropocentric body. Accordingly, the project search to disrupt stable notions of embodied identity and encouraging critical reflection and deepen sensory awareness of our interdependence with human and non-human ecologies.