In May of 2019 I met a dancer and mover named Stephanie Gottlob. We were on a course together that is still in progress—Depth Ecology and Wild Ethics, hosted by David Abram (author of The Spell of the Sensuous) in Santa Fe.
Stephanie had just set out on a pilgrimage to dance different biomes. By November, she made her way to my bioregion—the temperate transitional rain forest of New England. During her time here, she was a creator-in-residence at Earthdance. I attended her culminating performance, and the following are some reflections from what I witnessed there.
Leaves
The performance was given in a studio, and part of the exploration for Stephanie was to see what of the wild world she would be able to cultivate within herself in an indoor space. Luckily she employed one natural prop — one quarter of the floor was covered in recently-fallen crunchy leaves.
At one point in the performance she immersed herself in these leaves.
This is one of the things that is so magical about fall leaves. Along with water, snow, and maybe sand/mud—they’re one of the few things that I can fully immerse my body in.
Stephanie rolled in the leaves, scattered the leaves, crunched the leaves. It is wonderful to become intimate with leaves in this way.
Interbeing Communication
The ability to have a conversation with a place, with a landscape, is of fundamental importance to being human and to the earth.
I read Jensen’s A Language Older than Words over the summer, and in it, he references a deeply disturbing set of experiments with monkeys performed by Harry Harlow, dubbed the “monster mother” experiments. In creating abusive machine mothers for his monkeys he noticed that, when these monkeys became mothers themselves, they were profoundly negligent and outright abusive of their offspring (for a more graphic description, see Jensen’s writing on the subject).
I bring up this jarring imagery because I’d like to be exploring the concept of empathy with a landscape and with the more than human world. When I say empathy, I don’t mean it in a superficial or pleasant way. I mean that, in our society’s inability to have real conversation with anything but each other and our machines, we’ve become catastrophically or even apocalyptically cruel to all that is not human/machine. Take the tar sands as epitome.
In Stephanie’s dances — how does the place around her receive them? What is possible through these conversations? Just as we see the birds and the trees and the river as part of the landscape, what happens when humans too become a fundamental aspect of this larger realm? I don’t think I can overstate the potential here.
I feel like Stephanie’s exploration of dancing different bioregions is a profoundly significant and expansive endeavor.
Stephanie has shared three principles with me from which she works that I will speak to from my own perspective.
Improvisation
A conversation consists of a back and forth; one being speaks while the other listens, and then the exchange reciprocates in the other direction. Often when people improvise, we say they’re “making it up.” The kind of improvisation we’re exploring here does have an inner aspect, a connecting with our own essence. Yet it also has an outer aspect—a listening to the landscape, and responding accordingly.
Creativity
In discussions of creativity, we tend to focus on the creativity of people. What is the creativity of a place? In her book Big Magic, author Elizabeth Gilbert speaks of the autonomy of ideas; they aren’t ours. David Abrams speaks of mind as a property of a place—which is why we might enter one line of thought as we walk through the yellow aspens out in the Rockies on a crisp fall day, but might abruptly transition to a different subject once we’ve driven back down the canyon and arrive in the suburbs of the Front Range. In Stephanie’s work of dancing a place, she must first allow the creativity, the spirit of the place to enter her and co-create with her.
Body-based (internal and external) connection to landscape
Soma: Greek, meaning body. Somatic experience speaks to the experience of the body. In a way, it is bizarre that there is even a need for us to call out this mode of perception. Isn’t all experience mediated through the body? Phenomenologists would say yes. Others might find the question confusing.
I recently read a book about plant perception—Thus Spoke the Plant, by Monica Gagliano. In it, she explores some of the ways in which plants have awareness of their environment. In one experiment, she notices that one plant is able to detect the presence of another plant, even though it is on the other side of a wall. I found myself dearly hoping that she was about to describe the ways in which on being can sense the presence of another somatically. Dispirited, I read on to learn that it was simply an auditory thing (or, at least, that was the mechanism she was able to identify in her experiment).
Scientists are constantly discovering new human senses. We’re well beyond five at this point. I frequent a community sauna and, I’ve notice, while sitting in the quite dark of the sauna, I experience different qualities of the presence of others who join me there, even when my normal senses can’t detect them. Another place this perception is palpable is when sitting under a tree, feeling the presence of the tree.
All of this is to say—Stephanie is experimenting with what it is like to utilize all it is to be human to further her conversations with place.
Photos in this post courtesy of Stephanie Gottlob.
