For this period of physical distancing, we are now offering online dance and climate change workshops, lectures, and residencies. The core of these offerings is a new pedagogy and performance practice called eco-kinetics developed by Jody Sperling. Eco-kinetics was conceived as corollary to eco-acoustics, an environmentally-based mode of music composition. Eco-kinetics focuses on cultivating a dynamic relationship between the moving body and the environment, whether human-made or natural. The human mover practices attuning to and embodying environmental and atmospheric motion patterns. In the process, the practitioner becomes sensitized to the body’s energetic impacts on the surrounding micro-climate. This method may be taught remotely to students in any physical setting.
Eco-kinetics is a part of a toolkit for dancing and dancemaking that engages with the larger issue of climate change. This dance-climate toolkit provides a series of strategies beginning with cultivating empathy for the non-human and geophysical, and progressing through modeling interconnectedness, creating ritual experiences, building community, and facilitating action.
Students are experiencing increasing levels of anxiety and despair both about the covid-19 global pandemic and about the climate emergency. Artists and educators must find ways to help students to confront these issues, process their grief, and feel empowered to act. We are offering these learning experiences as a positive vehicle toward engagement and activism.
Please email us us for further information.
