Tilting at Windmills in a changing climate: a performative walking practice and dance-documentary film as an embodied mode of engagement and persuasion

Abstract

In August 2010, dance artist Jess Allen undertook an eight-day journey on foot and public transport between the 10 wind farms of mid-Wales, talking to the people encountered about changing landscapes and changing values in a changing climate. The sound recordings of interviews and encounters conducted in this process were edited into a score that then formed the basis for a creative exchange with environmentalist and documentary film-maker Sara Penrhyn Jones. The resulting 15-minute film installation sits between the genres of dance and documentary. What we offer here is a reflexive account of the process of creating this work. We consider how walking, talking and being in landscape with greater attention to the senses can combine to foster a more deeply felt sense of embodiment in walker/researcher, respondents and film-maker alike. In pointing to the parallels between this and the application of somatic practices in dance training and performance, we ask if embodiment can be tangibly communicated from performer to audience to bring about greater ecological and social awareness. We also observe that, while coming from our seemingly disparate fields, the practices of somatics and of observational documentary are ultimately both about opening ‘space’. It is this we sought to amplify in the film: space for the subjects to speak in their own voices and, in limiting distracting visual images (unusually, the speakers themselves are not seen at all), greater space for the viewer to contemplate their message. We suggest that, in combining our fields of experience in this way, a practice is emerging which may represent an ‘activism by stealth’, stimulating debate and encouraging a more embodied and everyday engagement with the issues of climate change. We conclude with a discussion of the capacity of participative-collaborative arts projects to facilitate a move away from more traditional consumptive attitudes to the arts, counteracting passivity to re-frame our lives in the context of a changing climate.

Keywords:

• performance
• walking practice
• ethnography
• embodiment
• somatics
• documentary film
• environmentalism
• climate change
• wind turbines
• renewable energy landscape
• Wales

Notes

1. The nature of this co-authorship is such that, while much of the work has arisen from shared discussions, for the sake of consistency the text has been written by one author (JA), hence the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’ and possessive ‘my’ in passages which represent my individual reflection and opinion. Otherwise the conventional ‘we’ is used to indicate a shared perspective.

2. Whitehead's practice began as a process of walking and mapping in the Welsh landscape, initially as a means of resourcing subsequent (often durational) performances that were presented in a theatre/studio setting, but increasingly these pedestrian forays became the site of the performance itself. His work has also come to be characterised by sound and video recording and novel modes of interaction with people and place (Whitehead 2006). Having had the opportunity to participate in his Solos for Radio (Cardiff, 2005) and the ongoing LOCATOR (Ty Canol woods, Pembrokeshire, March 2010), I must acknowledge his significant influence on my own developing practice.

3. For example, Smithson's seminal work Spiral Jetty (1969–70) is a 1500 foot coil constructed from earth, black rock, salt crystals and red algae in the Great Salt Lake, Utah (on which he bought a 20-year lease) (Andrews 1999, 207). Hiezer's Double Negative (1969) is a 240,000 ton ‘displacement in rhyolite and sandstone in the Nevada desert’ (Andrews 1999, 209).

4. Europe's largest eco-centre, CAT has been exploring and promoting renewable energy and sustainable living since the 1970s, from its site on an old slate quarry.

5. The walk became eight days en route, when an injury necessitated a rest day on Thursday 12 August and some bus journeys and hitched lifts.

6. While the field of somatics is made up of a diverse range of practices, these may be loosely characterised by the use of (self-)observation and redirection (sensing, feeling, acting) combining, variously, verbal instruction, manipulation and movement to cultivate ease and efficiency in being and moving. The somatic practices reject the notion of dualism: they teach that the mind is not simply located in conscious thought and separate from or superior to the corporeal body (Hanna 1995).

7. For example, accompanying the artist who ‘loathed’ them for their noise and incursion on the ‘scenery’, we placed a near-silent turbine, turning innocuously in extreme out-of-focus close-up, so that centre portion of the blades moving across the screen became an abstract image of hypnotic fluidity and shifting colour, like a moving palette of viscous oil paint, curious and (to us) beautiful.