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Abstract
Move into Life with Sandra Reeve, based in West Dorset, UK is a foundation programme in embodiment and teaches the art of being in movement. Addressing the relevance of performance training at the edge of extinction, this article points to how two Move into Life modules cultivate contextuality and complexity both in how they are structured and through the somatic skills they propose: adaptation, attunement, calibration, flexibility, sharing and dialogue. It shows how individual and collective approaches can co-exist and can support us to begin to shift perception in an age of climate and ecological emergency as well as to challenge personal and cultural furrows by working on the edge of the unknown. Four movement dynamics within ecological movement prioritise awareness of movement as one of the registers that we share with the animate world. Moving on from a preoccupation with elaborating our human experience of the world through five senses, these dynamics (active/passive, transition/position, proportion and point/line/angle) enable us to experience ourselves in movement reciprocity, as moving creatures in a moving world. Working with the ecological lenses of niche, pattern and emergence, these dynamics cultivate a sense of ‘being among’ rather than ‘at the centre of’ and enable an embodied empathy with the animate and inanimate world, disabling our tendency to treat the environment as other.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Joged Amerta is a practice that arises from the view of art. Creation is never-ending and has the quality of blossoming in the garden. I put myself in creation itself as evolution, rather than creativity being one part of evolution. How can I be an involved witness, how can I bring together the qualities of actor and audience within my breathing Being-in-Creation? (Suryodarmo Citation2019, 310).
2 David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College. He is also responsible for making possible the design and construction of a high profile ecologically designed centre to house his department, which indicates a coherent, embodied position in his teaching, his practice, his writings and his research.
3 The core score is to explore movement through the ecological lenses of niche, pattern and emergence.
4 An affordance is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behaviour. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer (Gibson, Citation1979, 129).
5 In Irish mythology the large hill in Sligo called Knocknarea is the burial place of the beautiful Warrior Queen Maeve of Connaught.
6 ‘Srawung is a Javanese term that means gathering or meeting conducted by more than one person or group, with togetherness and not concerned with different religious groups, then the relationship in building harmony and togetherness will be maintained in people’s lives.’ (Setiawan & Sibarani, Citation2021, 194).
7 Notions of ‘safety’ are often challenged by this approach, primarily if the participant comes from a therapeutic background. In my view, a certain degree of uncertainty is uncomfortable and it is useful to broaden our windows of tolerance.
8 Open Space is a technique for running gatherings where the participants create and manage the timetable themselves, often with multiple sessions running simultaneously.
9 ‘Gardener’ was a term used by Prapto to describe the process of ‘guiding’ another in their movement, through movement, words and sound. I like it because it suggests tending for the plants, attending, and it takes into account working with nature and/or with the environmental conditions, rather than focusing just on the human-to-human dynamics.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sandra Reeve
Sandra Reeve is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Move into Life is her cyclical programme of autobiographical and environmental movement workshops in West Dorset. Her movement research is influenced by Joged Amerta Movement, complexity thinking, Buddhist practice, symmathesy, walking, gardening and performance. She both facilitates and creates small-scale ecological events, as well as mentoring individual movement-based creative projects. www.moveintolife.com