Sustainability, Ecology and the Moving Body
Thursday 22 January 2009 in the Lipman Theatre at Northumbria University.
The symposium responds to and addresses some of the following questions:
How do we understand the environment through movement practices?
What does our engagement in movement practice reveal about our relationships to broader ecologies?
How do we differentiate and make meaning in interaction with different bodies and environments?
How do we perceive relationships between the environment and the moving body?
What are sustainable dance practices?
What constitutes a healthy and sustainable dance ecology?
What are ecological approaches to making dance?
How might performance work extend ecological consciousness?
Programme:
0930-1030 Body Mind Centering inspired warm up workshop with Angela Kennedy (limited to 30 participants)
1045-1115 paper/performance: Privileging Process: Ecologies of Place and Performance by Tamara Ashley
This paper considers processes of creating relationships between performance and place, in terms of practical processes, research, learning and performance. Holistic processual approaches to making and performing offer models by which ethical relationships between place and performance might be explored. Drawing on philosophers and practitioners of process, I will offer a performed dialogue of a movement process in place.
1115-1145 paper: Dancing Ages by Virginia Kennedy, Northumbria University/Independent Artist
By ignoring the past we impoverish the present! Yet we constantly look to the future with exaggerated expectation. This is a good time to be aware of the living continuum of our dance heritage. I plan to relate from experiences of intergenerational projects in rural settings and my most recent project ‘Thrift & Thread’.
1200-1230 paper: Misplaced Metaphor: Interrogating “Survival of the Fittest” in Dance Ecology by Candice Salyers, Smith College, USA
This paper questions “survival of the fittest” as a metaphor used to justify existing power arrangements and to assert competitive survival as “natural.” While dance as a landscape of the moving body is natural, the relegation of dance participation to those most “fit” signals a problematic complacency in conceiving what is possible in the field and form of dance. By interrogating hierarchical separations, competition for space, ways of exercising power, and potentials for reimagining resistance through embodied knowing, dance practices can reveal and shift such dynamics in the field, the larger world, and even between humans and other ecosystems.
1230-1300 paper/performance: Sue Hawksley, Telford College/Edinburgh College of Art
Mature dance-artists are no longer rare or declining species at the edge of the field. A growing number of older dancers are still practicing, reaping the rewards of sustainable, somatic approaches to dance which nurture active, ‘thinking bodies’.
These practitioners are now often to be found, continuing their practice-as-research, within academic institutions, where they also lead developments in dance pedagogy,
This proposal will consider how the presence of active mature artists in the academy benefits and shapes the creative ecology. Through questioning ‘old-school’ conventions of training and assumptions that dance is principally a language of youth and athleticism, they facilitate the cultivation of bio-diverse, broad (moving) minded dance-artists.
1415-1545 Life Art Process Workshop with Audicia Morley (limited to 30 participants)
Audicia will introduce participants to some of the art life process work developed by Anna Halprin.
1600-1730 Artful Ecologies Panel Discussion
What are the ecologies of our practices? How do the ways in which we practice cultivate forms of ecological awareness, sustainability and healthy relationships with our lived in environments? What makes an ecology artful? Do artists have an ecological responsibility? How do our art practices relate to the earth, the environment and each other?
This panel features contributions from artistic, scientific, curatorial and pedagogical perspectives. Each of the speakers will speak to ideas of sustaining artful ecologies through their various practices and research projects.
Panelists: Dr Mike Jefferies – Northumbria Geography Division
Audicia Morley – creative movement artist
Tim Rubidge – Visiting Fellow in Performing Arts at Northumbria University
Margit Galanter – Co-Artistic Director of Earthdance, USA
Dr Paul Kleiman – Deputy Director of PALATINE
1900 Performance
Join us for an evening of work that is inspired by the symposium themes. Contributions from Hannah Seignor, Liz Pavey, Tim Rubidge, Year 1 and Year 2 students at Northumbria University and Newcastle Contact Improvisation group.
Dissolving Borders: Performance, Pedagogy, Practice, Research 
I’d just like to say a big thank you to everyone who was there, especially the organisers and presenters! It’s been an absolutely fantastic day – thoroughy inspirational and thought-provoking!
I am digesting yesterday with thanks and appreciation to all who were there. It seems that some our conversations were only just beginning and I am left with thoughts and questions for the future.
From the beginning of the day, with Angela’s warm up, my attention came to the process of the body and the support of our body systems in interaction with the environment. Angela brought our attention to the bones and to the function of marrow in generating blood cells. Throughout the day, this relationship of support between inner and outer was referred to. How do we negotiate relationships with our environments in terms of creative practice, dance making, sustainable living and for our health?
Questions resonating in my mind today:
How can we create contexts where people feel safe and willing to learn and change, so that age, and other barriers, do not inhibit participation? (Virginia Kennedy)
How do our institutional structures both nurture and limit us in terms of evolving as full human beings? (Sue Hawksley)
How can dance come to be more integrated into culture? (Candice Salyers)
How is an inclusive dance curriculum assessed? Who gets accepted into university dance programmes and what is the kind of knowledge that is priveleged? (discussion)
How do the architectures of our spaces inform the ways in which we establish conventions of performance and interaction? (discussion)
Is the analogy of theatre as a house appropriate, given that its organisation is nothing like a house or home at all? (Paul Kleiman)
Can we develop a first person science? (Margit Galanter)
How can art illustrate the richness of the ecological processes going on in our daily lives – in the pub, the street, on a night out in Newcastle? (Mike Jeffries)
What arises when you let your body speak to you? (Audicia Morley)
How do place and memory inform dance making? (Tim Rubidge)
What are relationships between art and science? (discussion)
There were several discussions on assumptions about objectivity, validity and rationality. Although many people were comfortable with knowledge as contingent and changing as well as moving across contexts and borders as an idea when practical examples were offered, inherited assumptions from old beliefs seemed to inform descisions that we made. How do our habits and histories perhaps bring us into making decisions that move away from inclusive dance ecologies? How can we notice our decisions in terms of the ecologies that we are making? What are relationships between diversity and ecology?
It was a great symposium, very stimulating and useful thoughts on process and practice.
I am also left thinking… how do we find, as mature practioners a way forward which enables our bodies and minds to continue to be engaged with movement and dance?
What is this inclusive but challenging practice which I seek to develop and use as my guiding principles and philosophy when working with others?
How do we navigate with the many different environments and ecologies of dance making while questioning what Candice says is the hierarchical nature of the dance world, while still respecting our bodies? Can we work respectfully with others and with a humanity which also questions our own practices which enables shared ownership of learning about the body?
Can we shift the metaphor that surviving is about fitness? What is fitness? Fitness for what?
How can we create ecological holistic dance structures which enable students/people/children/dancers/artists/tutors to become fully embodied owners of their own practice?
Angela Kennedy Dance and Visual Artist