Critical Stages (Dec 2020)
Electric Dance, or How to Talk with Birds
Abstract
Reflecting on a series of ongoing outdoor performance experiments during the COVID-19 lockdown period, this dance essay is a composition that interweaves an outlook on the political and social fallout of the pandemic with more intimate, personal probings during the return to self-insulation in a generous countryside. The essay’s title evokes a series of climbs (up electrical power masts) or reverse bird-eye views on an eco-philosophical imaginary that seeks to combine body weather techniques (derived from Japanese butoh dance), enacted in various organic nature and industrial locations, with digital processing. The site-specific performances are creative responses as well as social choreographies in an era of climate crisis and virological pandemics. The author proposes that experiential time-based performance is an art form for the twenty-first century, capable of capturing the pulse of anxiety but re-connecting human and not-human lives or organisms: reflecting on what is important in our environments, nurturing mind-body connection and somatic experience in a commons.
