Environmental Labour & A New Dance
What is uncomfortable and confronting about life is not the solitary experience of one person but frequently the suffering of many. Through the arc of dancing, thinking, writing and conversation I interrogate how I/we need to live differently to survive the time we live in. I want to leave a legacy, which is not separate from how we care for each other, our local environment and the planet. They are intertwined and entangled realities of thought, feeling and lived experience. Is it a new dance? I am asking this through the lens of my practice. This is where my skill lies and my accumulated ‘body of knowledge’. It is not an imperious lofty gesture from the canon of western dance; it is the everyday gesture of my hands reaching to touch you. The potential of which is transformed in the moment of your touch reaching my extended hands. I feel your desire for life in this meeting. Our story is in our hands and our reach from ourselves towards another. There is always demand there in the desire for connection, and perhaps even understanding. Without this we are a blank and no one wants to be met by nothingness. Is this absence then?
Are we absent from our own lives? Is this the clarion call of this historical crisis we are in? In the routine of busy lives filled with what we think is important we rarely make time to feel. My work is an invitation for people to feel their lives. In all their dimensions and complexity. It is courageous work – archaeological, anthropological, philosophical and creative. Beauty is critical to this process. Eros too. Reclaiming the territory of our souls is tilling the ground of our existence and this involves recognition of earth itself. It is an ecological process inseparable from the life of the planet. This is where I begin my environmental labour.