Dancing the Face of Place: Environmental dance and eco-phenomenology

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Notes

¹ Others terms include ‘ecological dance’, ‘eco dance’, ‘dance and nature’, ‘landscape dance’ and of course ‘site-specific dance’. For now Iprefer ‘environmental dance’ because it includes, but extends beyond, site-specific performance and also invites useful comparison with established terms such as ‘environmental theatre’ (Schechner 1973) and ‘environmental art’ (Grande 2004).

² Historical examples of site-specific dance include sixteenth-century Elizabethan pastimes, including the prearranged dances and choreographed combats between mythical figures that surprised Elizabeth Ias she walked through the woods of Kenilworth and Woodstock in 1575 (Berry 1994: 98); the outdoor movement choirs developed by Rudolf Laban from 1913; and filmed works by Mary Wigman, such as ‘Wandering’, the second section from her 1924 piece Scenes from a Dance Drama, in which Wigman and her acolytes danced across a rural landscape (Manning 1993: 107-19). More recent examples include the work of a host of Butoh performers, including Atsushi Takenouchi, committed to dancing over places where large numbers of people have died, such as the killing fields of Cambodia, Poland, Japan (Fraleigh 2005: 336); Tanaka Min, whose Dream Island was performed over a rubbish tip in Tokyo Bay; and companies associated with Tanaka's Body Weather Work, such as Tess De Quincey's De Quincey Co, Stuart Lynch's Perfume Collective and Frank van de Ven's Body Weather Amsterdam. Other significant recent examples include the actions and events of Welsh-based movement artist Simon Whitehead; Sap Dance and Louise Ann Wilson Company's Jack Scout (2010); and Jennifer Monson's iLAND projects, most notably her multi-year Birdbrain Migrations in which Monson's company improvise at different locations, including bird sanctuaries, plotted by the migratory pathways of different species up and down the whole continent of North American (Monson 2009). A different if irreverent example is Lea Anderson's Out on the Windy Beach (1998) in which, at a number of seaside locations, dancers in luminous lime green body suits performed dances derived from mermaid poses, beauty contests and films of reptilian aliens (Briginshaw 2001: 59–62). An indicative list of dance works for the stage that seek to capture natural forms through movement include Loïe Fuller's evocation of flames, lilies, butterflies and other natural forms in her early-twentieth-century skirt dances (Thomas 1995: 55–60); Isadora Duncan's obsession with the wave form and concern for ‘biological dance’ (Innes 1983: 117); Doris Humphrey's Water Study (1928, see Siegel 1993: 85-9); Merce Cunningham's Beach Birds (1991) and Pond Way (1998); and, much more recently, several works concerned with water or the coast, including Rosemary Lee's Beached (2002), Celina Chaulvin's Phos (2004), Sap Dance's Lune (2005, see Stewart 2009), Jacky Lansley's View from the Shore (2007), and Motionhouse's Scattered (2009–10). Finally, examples of approaches to somatic education rooted in the experience and perception of the environment include courses run by Whitehead and Monson; the Body Weather Work training system; and Grotowski's paratheatre workshops of the 1970s (May 2005).

³ Re-enchantment and Reclamation: New Perceptions of Morecambe Bay through Dance, Film and Sound was hosted by the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University. It was funded by the Workshops and Networks scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Landscape and Environment Programme. Video clips, photographs, downloadable essays and reports are available at: www.re-enchantment.org. A video clip of the first exercise referred to in this article is available in the ‘Water Log’ section of this website.