Embodying Gardens of Reciprocity

Here is an abstract of an essay that I recently published summarizing some of the research I have been doing as part of my PhD. Read the full essay now available online as open access download via this link:

„Embodying Gardens of Reciprocity“, in: Hardt, Yvonne / Berg, Marisa Joana / Chwialkowska, Anna / Nestler, Ulrike (ed.): Virtual Ecologies – Digitalitäten und Ökologien im Tanz, transcript: Bielefeld, 2024 p. 327-336.

The climate crisis has emerged from oppressive, inequitable, and exploitative relationships. My PhD research looks at the ways in which dance studies frameworks can address the ideological disconnection between humans and ‘nature’ lying at the root of the climate crisis. This separation has and continues to propel resource extraction, labor exploitation, and oppression of femme and BIPOC bodies as they are foundational to both colonialism and capitalism. What happens when we see this kind of toxicity and abuse reproduced without a way to imagine alternative pathways? As Yoruba philosopher, Bayo Akomolafe suggests, there is a need not only to “witness” but “with-ness” another. How can movement practices form a foundation based on recognition and attentiveness towards other actors by positioning themselves against anthropocentric, eurocentric, and heternormative thinking? What does reciprocal relationality with other humans and the more-than-human world look and feel like from an embodied and ecological perspective?

This separation from an ‘other’ can be traced back to the Cartesian body-mind split, which embodiment and somatic practices attempt to (re)connect. One such connective practice, is Shelley Etkin’s Garden as Studio workshop series. Etkin, a Jewish-American artist who studied Performance and Ecology in Finland, hosts workshops at Ponderosa Dance Center in Brandenburg outside of Berlin where participants learn to move in a ‘garden-ly’ way and garden in an embodied way. How can dance can be a place to learn about the process of being in relational ecologies? What can we learn from the Earth about receiving each other? Auto-ethnographic experiences of the Garden as Studio workshops and interviews with other participants are interwoven within critical analyses shaped by queer-feminist (i.e. bell hooks, Donna Haraway), decolonial (Edouard Glissant, Rolando Vazqez) and Indigenous perspectives (Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).

Shelley invites participants to not only massage and work the soil with our hands but to also “let the garden work on (us).” One participant remarked, “dance can open a space to be differently in relation with nature, through dancing, touching other human kind, you can encounter the garden differently. But also by encountering the garden through clay, soil, water, you can get in contact with nature… and that way in contact with your body again.” Expanding understandings of relationality makes it possible to sense when reciprocity is (and isn’t) taking place and what kind of response-ability (Haraway and others) we have to act on these alternative ways of knowing. The Garden as Studio workshop practice presents a window into the larger questions of how movement practices can influence the ways in which humans relate to the world around them, how it can function as a micropolitical form of climate justice activism, and what new frameworks this might open for dance and choreography.

You can learn more about Shelley Etkin's work here: https://shelleyetkin.com/

If you've read it and would like to share your feedback or have additional questions, please feel free to share them in the comments below. I look forward to being in dialogue with you!