Practices
• Collaborative/Improvisational movement improvisation based on generational memories
• Scripted monologues or incantations drawn from sound and text archives
• Creation of embodied poetic gestures tied to environmental ethics and ecological responses
Approach your body as both archive and antenna. In movement, listen for the gestures that arrive without being planned, the rhythms that feel older than you are. Let them carry you toward an environmental ethic that is not only intellectual but lived, felt, enacted. Allow your performance to create “affective geographies” where personal and ecological memory meet, and where kinship with the more-than-human becomes visible.
Exercise
Perform a ritual (solo or collaborative) that invokes ancestors, ecological grief, or healing. Use movement, gesture, and spatial relationships as your primary vocabulary—words may be present, but they need not lead.
Remember, a ritual is an act of repetition, not necessarily tied to divination or religious connotations. While you are welcome to connect it to your religious beliefs if you wish, the essence here is the rituals we create for ourselves. These rituals help us connect with our own stories, our planet, and our envisioned futures. They are personal practices that ground us, provide meaning, and foster a sense of continuity and purpose in our lives. Whether it’s a daily walk in nature, a moment of reflection, or a creative endeavor, these rituals are powerful tools for nurturing our connection to the world and our aspirations.You may draw from:
- Personal and ancestral memory
- Field recordings and archival sounds
- Found or made objects that carry ecological or symbolic resonance
Record the performance with whatever device is available to you—a phone, webcam, or simple camera. Work in a location that deepens your connection to the theme (outdoors, in a family space, near water, in a place marked by change).
Reflect on how the body remembers more-than-human relations. How does movement carry the weight of environmental grief? How might it also enact resilience and care?