I am nature
Somatic re-imagining and the other-than-human
The latest of our guest posts on Unpsychology Voices is by Kasia Witek, a Polish-born, UK-based dance artist. Her work spans installation, video, theatre and outdoor performance. Human kinship with the non-human environment is a central theme in much of her work. Her deep passion for music permeates all of her projects. Her essay, I Am Nature, is accompanied by a trailer for her film, Solastalgia (below) and this trailer can also be found HERE on YouTube.
I am nature
I’m a dancer and believe that conscious movement can save the world.
In my artistic work I look closer at how a somatic approach to movement affects our understanding of the body as nature and, in extension, its potential to reconfigure the relationship of self and other; moving from the sense of separation to experiencing the joy of coexistence.
Mapping the land
Somatics is a wide field of conscious bodywork, including therapeutic work with touch. To practice in a somatic way means to perceive the body from within, by first person perception. Somatic practice is designed to assist people in experiencing and transforming the self, through awareness relative to the living world, the environment, and others.1
It is characteristic for the somatic techniques to refer to the self as the whole being of the practitioner. It is in fact fundamental for somatic work to consider body-mind as a close unit, suggesting that one cannot operate without the other. Each action involves the practitioner as a whole. Therefore when using the term ‘self’ in this essay, I mean the practitioner as an integrated, intelligent, inseparable, moving, breathing and thinking being. Somatic approaches to movement assists in recognising this integrated intelligence of the body.
Sondra Fraleigh stresses another, often overlooked, potential in the field of somatics – developing greater awareness of self as forever entangled in a relationship with other.
Climate emergency and the experience of being a body
As a dance artist, somatic practitioner and yoga teacher, conscious bodywork affects my relationship with the environment. Dancer Gill Clarke said she is not “naïve enough to think that dancers can single-handedly get us [humans] out of our present troubles’ but that their ‘concerns, expertise and knowledge are ever more vital in connecting us back into our living, moving organisms, to a sense of relationship within ourselves”.2 I align with this thought. Until there is a systemic socio-political change that can reduce the negative impact of human activity on Earth’s environment it is never too early, and hopefully not too late, to look closer at our individual relationships with our environment.
For a change to happen it must take place on both global and individual levels. As Jane Bennett puts it:
“....bodily disciplines through which ethical sensibilities and social relations are formed and reformed are themselves political and constitute a whole (underexplored) field of “micropolitics”, without which any principle or policy risks being just a bunch of words. There will be no greening of the economy, no redistribution of wealth, no enforcement or extension of rights without human dispositions, moods, and cultural ensembles hospitable to these effects.”3
Within the physical practice and embodied experience lies the potentiality to re-imagine “what would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be....?".4 The power to dream such abstract and far-reaching concepts lies in the body's natural wisdom of coexistence. Instead of the conceptual, ‘rational’ mind these ideas are born from sensual experience and a taste of what oneness feels like –establishing the way for the new system of values to emerge.
I often find it difficult to explain the value of my somatic dance practice to those who have not yet engaged with it. It can be tricky to navigate the language in order to give justice to its transformative powers. Philosopher and father of deep ecology movement, Arne Naess writes: “if you hear a phrase ‘all life is fundamentally one!’ you must be open to tasting this, before asking immediately ‘what does this mean?” 5
In this sense our bodies get incredibly scant attention. The attention they do get is often in the context of aesthetics or curative mainstream medicine. We disregard the body in this way because we undervalue its intelligence 6. This is visible in our aspirations as individuals and as society, where physical or manual jobs are rarely as highly esteemed as the more cerebral jobs, where manual labour, sweat and physical effort aren’t required. Perceiving the cerebral as worthy, and the physical as unintelligent contributes to the creation of a whole set of values. This splitting of the world into dull material “stuff” and lively immaterial mind, suggests that life exists somehow outside of the matter and the physical body.
The thinking body
A dominant paradigm suggests intelligence as something to do with rationality. However, intelligence is incomplete without considering the body and its environment as the origin of thought. Thinking ought to be redefined to include a wider scope of bodily processes, as experienced through somatic work and suggested by neuroscience.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that no brain function can be considered as acting in isolation from the rest of the body and that the nervous system can only be viewed as acting in the context of the body and its environment.7 In fact this is exactly how our body-mind has evolved. The brain has not been “installed” into the evolved body as an external driving force. The intelligent body has evolved all its systems, including the brain and nervous system, over a long timeline.
We can consider ourselves intelligent precisely because we are bodies living as part of this environment called Earth.
Surrender and witness
During research and rehearsals of my works one wall of me and Solastalgia, I gave dancers a task to stay away from planning their movement and instead focus fully on the present sensations unfolding in their body. They were to observe the sensations of touch of another dancer, sense of weight of their own body and connection to their changes in breath. In this context, the dancers’ movements became more relaxed, ergonomic and efficient. They observed focusing deeply on the sensations offered to them at the present moment allowed them to surrender to these sensations without resistance. Without hoping it to be different, or forcing it to be something which was not, a wider range of possibilities became available to them.
Collective body
During the research and rehearsals of Solastalgia the dancers accessed what we called a collective body. During our group improvisation practice,, the dancers discovered they were thinking, feeling and breathing all as one. They were each part of a movement of the whole, and no one individual was the single driving force behind it: it happened truly collectively.
Elisa Vassena, a dancer in the work, reflected on this experience of a collective body:
“Physically experiencing the pressure, the pulling, this amalgamous organism made me feel not alone. I realised I am an element of a structure. A structure that moves, the organism that moves - because we [dancers] were relying on one another to locomote, to change” 8
‘Collective Body’ refers to both the processes of singular body organisms as well the entire Earth. In the context of a single body, one can view biological organisms as having collectivistic qualities: the body as a collection of cells, organs, nerves working as one. However, the term can also refer to any ecosystem or the entire Earth. Here, each entity is part of a wider collective body, working in a symbiotic exchange to sustain the life of individuals as much as that of the whole.
More experienced somatic practitioners can discover a multiplicity of connections and relationships happening all at once! To achieve the felt sense of this multiplicity of connections, Deborah Hay instructs: “do not look for a relationship, it is already there”.9 The practitioner can therefore rest in the knowledge that whatever they do, they remain in relationship to everything else.. For me, this realisation is soothing for my sense of belonging.
Centre is everywhere
What exactly happens for me during my somatic movement when I experience a sense of oneness with my body and the immediate environment? I sense the very edges of my body blur. What appeared before as mere surroundings, have now poured in, through the frames of my flesh. The canvas of my body soaks up the environment and I am at once outside and inside. Nature is everywhere at once. I am nature. In fact the very “I” reconfigures. It expands into the entire sensual field and loses its sense of centre. Centre is now everywhere.
This final sentence has acted as a leading score for my recent choreographic works. Dancers move and dance with this idea. Understanding this in the context of the body-mind as well as the space, the dancers allow the body to interpret this idea of decentralisation. This renders a specific non-hierarchical attitude towards the body as well as the space and wider environment.
Dancer Elisa Vassena reflects on this non-hierarchical approach to moving:
“I noticed this horizontallness [sic] of me as a being in relation to other beings - instead of hierarchical, horizontal ways of being and looking at things, which we are used to as humans. It was felt within my body and in relation to others.... it brought about joy, openness and a very high ability to listen.”10
Agency of matter
In an image from my performance installation You, Passing (2016), a sculpture is suspended from the ceiling, resembling a spiral-like tornado column, at the bottom of which I placed my own body lying face down on the studio floor. The sculpture was made out of a random collection of disused objects, each object dipped and set in wax. At the bottom, a single lighted candle, hung over my body, dripping wax onto my bare back and making my body a part of this collection of objects. The work aimed to remind us that everything belongs essentially to the same ecology, however distant this concept may seem at times. Everything is made from the same primal building blocks - all is irreducibly interconnected. This work was my meditation on the agency and power of all matter.
Contrary to the notion that human beings are too materialistic, Timothy Morton argues that we are not materialistic enough11. We do not hold matter in high enough esteem or respect. Matter is regarded as “lifeless” and often pushed to the margins, habitually, we underestimate its power and are blind and deaf to its aliveness. Every “thing” which we may consider trash or garbage is in fact alive: ad leaking streams of toxins, emitting gases into the air.12 In You, Passing the hot wax, transformed by the flames and dripping onto my skin caused it to become red and inflamed. The sense of burning I experienced was a profound signal to me that I am very much a part of this physical world.
To awaken into conscious participation in life we must reconnect with the bodily senses. With the aid of somatic approaches and through embodied experience I realise that I am not embedded in nature, but that I am nature. The power to sense this far reaching concept and to re-imagine our attitude to the environment lies in aligning with the body's natural wisdom of coexistence.
SOLASTALGIA
Where my previous piece one wall of me dealt with humanity’s relationship to nature in an abstract way, Solastalgia (a neologism referring to existential distress caused by environmental change) is a direct response to the climate emergency we face today. But instead of provoking anxiety, the piece aims to foster emotional resilience and a sense of togetherness, promoting hope rather than fear.
Drawing on Deborah Hay’s choreographic practice, the philosopher Timothy Morton’s writings on nature, and the work of Yorkshire-raised environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy, Solastalgia questions our perception of nature as "other", inviting both performers and audience to fully experience the range of emotions the climate crisis evokes. Ultimately, I aim to nurture a sense of togetherness through which to find solace as we deepen our understanding of how environmental changes affect our mental health.
The piece will be performed by Elisa Vassena and Anders Duckworth, with whom I has developed an intimate working relationship over several projects spanning nearly a decade.
Solastalgia’s original score is composed by long-time collaborator Alex Roth and features the contrabassist James Opstad.
Credits:
Choreography and Artistic Direction: Kasia Witek
Dancers: Elisa Vassena and Anders Duckworth
Original Score: Alex Roth
Double Bass: James Opstad
Workshop Leaders: Stella Papi and Tora Hed
Producer: Rosie Watt
Mentor: Joe Moran
Trailer film and edit: Ruta Puzaite
Footnotes
Fraleigh, S (ed.) (2015) Moving Consciously: Somatic transformations Through Dance,Yoga, and Touch Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press
Clarke, G. (2007). Mind is as in motion (accessed 10th July 2020) http://www.independentdance.co.uk/rsc/MindIsAsInMotion.pdf
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things, North Carolina: Duke University Press
Morton, T. (2010) The Ecological Thought, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press
Naess A. (1990) Ecology, community and lifestyle: outline of ecosophy [Online] Available at: https://archive.org/details/ecologycommunity00naes/page/n9/mode/2up (Accessed on: 1st June 2020)
Claxton, G. (2015) Intelligence in the Flesh: Why Your Mind Needs Your Body Much More Than It Thinks, New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Damasio, A. (2000) The feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the makingof consciousness. London: Harcourt. & Damasio, A. (2011) The Quest To Understand Consciousness Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_consciousness?language=en (Accessed: 17th May 2020)
Vassena, E. (2020) Conversation with Katarzyna Witek (19 August 2020)
Hay, D. (2018) a continuity of discontinuity or a way to practice dance [Winter Laboratory Workshop at Independent Dance, London]
Vassena, E. (2020) Conversation with Katarzyna Witek (19 August 2020)
Morton, T. (2007) Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Harvard University Press.
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things, North Carolina: Duke University Press
 | A guest post by
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There is something profoundly textured in the sensation of knowing that the relationships are already there… “do not look for a relationship, it is already there”