Finding Our Way Back Forward

Inspirations: Artist Examples

Many artists are currently doing just this: creating and doing to inspire connection and creativity.  Arden Thomas’ essay “Stillness in Nature: Eeo Stubblefield’s Still Dance with Anna Halprin” in Readings in Performance and Ecology discusses Anna Halprin’s Still Dance (1997 - 2000), a set of performances that exemplify using dance to connect with the self  and nature.  In these improvisational dances, a picture of which is shown in figure 1, Halprin collaborates with nature; nature is her dance partner.  Her movements are inspired by nature, and improvised based on her surroundings.  Additionally, she uses slowness as a disruption to capitalist notions of time, moving slowly in order to connect with nature and herself.  By allowing her natural surroundings to be her choreographer and sensually intertwining herself with nature, Halprin affirms our connection to nature, embodying Rifkin’s ideas of biophilia.  

Halprin is far from the only performer using embodiment to connect and discuss environmental issues.  For example, as Maja and Reuben Fowkes discuss in World of Art: Art and Climate Change (2022), Jonas Staal in Germany in 2019 enacted a participatory project called Training for the Future, which brought people together in a “utopian training camp” to learn skills and prepare for a better future through art, as seen in figure 2.  They practiced “choreographies of togetherness,” learning about modern issues like commodification, data mining, colonization and environmental issues, as well as ways to resist and overcome them (Fowkes 2022, 262).  In this case, active participation and connection are the artform, enabling people to understand current issues and imagine ways forward together.        

Similarly, Grace Ndiritu and Guadalupe Martinez led a weeklong workshop in 2019 on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people, called Healing Justice, as discussed in Grace Ndiritu’s Being together: a manual for living (2021).  In part of this workshop, participants met with First Nation community members to discuss current issues and challenges, an experience Martinez describes as “a time to reflect, learn, and cleanse, and … to remember that a practice of healing with and through social activism begins with each and every breath of the body, in the heart, in the lungs, and each leg, with my feet firmly on the ground, in community, whether standing together or alone” (Martinez 2021, 142).  By coming together and actively participating in discussions, as shown in figure 3, they were able to assert values of social justice and reconnect with each other and with themselves.  Once again, we see that groups connecting and creatively being with each other can affirm values of social justice.          

In addition to these participatory pieces, numerous dancers, including and beyond Anna Halprin, use their embodied artform to powerfully communicate about social justice issues.  For example, in An amplification through many minds (2019), Tanya Lukin Linklater developed a choreographic score with other dancers within the Pheobe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley to bring attention to the displacement of cultural objects fromher homelands in southern Alaska.  Through embodied connection to the objects trapped behind industrial metal cabinets as seen in figure 4, Linklater and the dancers highlight how the cultural objects have been extracted.  The dancers’ vivacity communicate the significance of the cultural objects, both commenting on the atrocity of colonial extraction and allowing the viewer to connect with inanimate objects.  

Nicholas Galanin’s two part dance piece Tsu Heidei Shugaztutann 1 & 2 (2006) further demonstrates how dance can communicate and disrupt oppressive notions.  As Renata Ryan Burchfield discusses in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change’s  chapter “Indigenous Media: Dialogic Resistance to Climate Disruption,” Galanin used two different dance choreographies and two different dancers in the dance pieces, combining both traditional Tlingit and modern dance and music elements.  In doing so, Galanin allowed the viewer to emotionally connect to the idea of Indigenous survivance through emphasizing “spiraling time”(Burchfield 2021, 183).  These pieces, shown in figures 5 & 6, emphasize the importance of embodiment and disrupting a Western colonial and capitalist notion of time.  The dancers, by combining traditional and modern elements, assert the presence and importance of indigenous culture, resisting any unjust and dangerous perceptions that place indigeneity as a thing of the past.  The dance then challenges societal norms, demonstrating dance’s importance as a tool in social justice.  

        Finally, art has the capacity to particularly comment on the harms of technology on the environment through focusing on embodiment, as demonstrated by Otobong Nkanga’s tapestries The Weight of Scars (2015), as discussed in Maja and Reuben Fowkes’ World of Art: Art and Climate Change (2022).  Though Nkanga uses tapestries and not a performance, her “work draws attention to the scars that such sites of extraction [of mining for minerals used in technology] have left, equally on landscapes and on people’s bodies, minds and emotions” (Fowkes 2022, 27).  Her tapestries, shown in figure 7, center the embodied pain of communities in Namibia from mining, intimately connecting understandings of lived experiences, technology production, and environmental damage, even without the use of performers.  This further demonstrates that artists of any medium can apply ideas of embodiment and lived experience to communicate about issues of technological and environmental injustice.  

Resources

Burchfield, Renata Ryan, Monani, Salma, Medak-Saltzman, Danika, Lempert, William.  “Indigenous Media: Dialogic Resistance to Climate Disruption.”  In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by T.J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee, 182-193.  New York, NY: Routledge, 2021.  

Fowkes, Maja, Fowkes, Reuben.  World of Art: Art and Climate Change.  United Kingdom: Thames & Hudson, 2022.  

Martinez, Guadalupe.  “Growing Together.”  In Being together: a manual for living, by Grace Ndiritu, 130-142.  Estonia: KRIEG, 2021.

“Tanya Lukin Linklater: My mind is with the weather.”  Contemporary Art Gallery.  2023.  Accessed December 11, 2023.  https://cagvancouver.org/exhibition/tanya-lukin-linklater-my-mind-is-with-the-weather 

Thomas, Arden.  “Stillness in Nature: Eeo Stubblefield’s Still Dance with Anna Halprin.”  In Readings in Performance and Ecology, edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, 113-124.  New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press LLC, 2012.