Embodying an Ecological Condition: Dance Practices and the Development of Embodied Ecological Awareness

• Main Author: Newton, Rhiannon
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: UNSW, Sydney 2022
• Subjects: Contemporary Dance; Embodiment; Ecocultural; Ecological; anzsrc-for: 360402 Dance and dance studies; anzsrc-for: 4406 Human geography; anzsrc-for: 440503 Feminist theory; First Nations
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/100670; https://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/bitstreams/f08fdb42-59ff-4db2-a03c-f77a0af9f05f/download; https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/24377

Addressing the climate crisis requires practices for recognising the ecological condition of the body and its enmeshment with the more-than-human world. Significant humanities and social sciences scholarship argues that embodiment is key to dismantling dominant anthropocentric structures that understand humans as separate from or superior to the environment. From my position as a contemporary dance artist, I unpack how the methodical processes of contemporary dance exemplify a practice-based approach to embodied knowledge that engenders greater understanding of the ecological condition of the body’s interconnection with the more-than- human world. Highlighting transdisciplinary correspondences between dance practice methods and theoretical insights from feminist, ecocultural, First Nations, and environmental philosophy scholars, I identify four key frameworks through which dance practices affect embodied awareness of an ecological condition. These are: Knowing Multiplicity, Attending to an In-Motion Condition, Indivisibility at the Body-World Threshold, and Multisensory Ways of Knowing. With these correspondences, I formulate the new theoretical framework of embodied ecological awareness to describe the particular knowledge dance practices cultivate and can contribute to broader ecological discourses. To demonstrate how dance practices develop this knowledge, I engage a body-centred autoethnographic methodology to analyse key experiences of dance practice exercises and the embodied understandings they promote. In finding that these exercises develop corporeal understandings of the interconnected, in-motion multiplicities constituting and interweaving the body’s internal and external environments — understandings identified as explicitly ecological — I propose that dance practices develop a form of knowledge that is imminently relevant to recuperating human-environment relations in the face of climate crisis: that is, embodied ecological awareness.