Finding Our Way Back Forward

Putting Ideas Into Practice: Creating an Embodied Practice

From this plurality of artists and performances, it is clear that art is needed to powerfully communicate about the need to address social injustice and to reconnect with ourselves, nature, and others.  To understand this and not consequently attempt to implement a creative embodied practice would be, I believe, a dishonor to the work of the incredible artists, performers, and thinkers described above.  Therefore, I implemented a group performance entitled Finding Our Way Back Forward to combine the insights of these inspirational works.          For the piece, as shown in figure 1, UW community members Iva Dhooria, Aliyah Cleveland, Noor Hasan, Ally Lam, and I came together in Grieg Garden on UW campus.  There, we enacted an altered version of the icebreaker game “the human knot,” where participants hold hands with others across the circle from each other and attempt to untangle themselves.  In this version, instead of starting with our hands connected, an electrical cord was taped to each hand, connecting them to another individual’s hand across the circle.  Thoroughly and haphazardly tied to each other, we struggled against these bonds while audio played during the first section of the piece.         This audio, played from my computer, serves as an important backdrop for the piece, centering the piece within a discussion of climate change, in that I created the audio using data about annual carbon dioxide emissions, one of the largest drivers of climate change.  With Eastern Washington University's tool musicalgorithms.ewu.edu, I used sonification to transform data from Our World in Data that represents the worldwide annual carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere from 1750 to 2021, where higher pitch and speed signaled a greater release of carbon dioxide for that year.  By doing so, we were able to hear, and concurrently embody and feel, the rapid increase in release of carbon dioxide.  The increase in speed and pitch is unsettling and anxiety-producing, similar to the changes we are seeing as a result of climate change.  I asked the other dancers to feel this with me as we struggled against the ways we were tied together and retreated into our own bodies.  Through this, we aimed to demonstrate the disconnected and damaging way we have been living: ungrounded and unconnected from natural processes, individualized and resistant to each other, and confined by oppressive uses of technology.  

        When the audio ends, however, it brings us to today, where we have a choice in how we will live.  We could continue to struggle against each other.  Yet, we also have the opportunity to decide to ground ourselves, to recognize our connection to the earth and each other, to slow down, to listen to the environment around us, and to breathe in life and peace.  Through connecting to and cooperating with each other, we can heal.  In this moment then, the cords as a symbol of technology become not an oppressive chain but rather a tool in being able to find the person on the other end of the cord.  To untangle and find each other, we need to iteratively give a bit of our connection to allow someone else to turn, trusting that they will do the same for us when we need to untangle ourselves.  We need to be attuned to each other, and work together to find a way through a messy, ungraceful process to a calm, united circle where all are connected.  

        Through this practice, we were able to collectively connect with each other and emotionally process harms from climate change and technology.  Though symbolic, grounding these learnings about the impacts of climate change, the importance of connection to nature and each other, and the possibilities of technology as both a tool for oppression and justice, was highly significant to me.  Allowing myself to feel and embody these ideas felt healing and hopeful.  I was not alone in this; Aliyah said that, “it was calming and cathartic to slow down and slowly detangle ourselves.”  Iva echoed this as well, commenting, “I did not expect to emotionally connect with the piece.  However, as we were doing the activity and visually seeing the chords all tangled up, I felt as if it was a visual image of my train of thought.”  Additionally, Noor commented on how the unstructured nature of the piece made it so she and others were facing outwards at the end of the piece, and said, “At first I was trying to ‘fix’ that and face inwards because that was how I’d started out and thought that it was the only correct way to be, but eventually just accepted that it hadn’t resolved itself exactly how I’d expected, but that that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.”  Through this, Noor comments on how the future may not be exactly what we expected, but can still be good.  Finally, Ally also described her experience, saying that “while participating in the dance, I felt the sense of being out of touch with my surroundings despite being connected to other people.  This transitioned to a feeling of connectedness with both by the end of the dance.”  Together, we were able to move from disconnection and isolation to connection and calm.  

Collectively, embodying this piece together allowed us each to develop our own insights from the piece, gaining more than simply the production of the piece itself.  The prior experience that I and others creating this type of art is largely irrelevant when the importance of participating and embodying is understood; as Bruce McConachie argues in “Ethics, Evolution, Ecology, and Performance,” “Even mediocre art could promote social interdependence” (McConachie 2012, 96).  Together in complexity, we were able to find our way back to each other, nature, and ourselves, visualizing a way forward into our futures.

Resources

“Annual CO2 emissions.”  Our World in Data.  Accessed December 11, 2023.  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=~OWID_WRL 

McConachie, Bruce.  “Ethics, Evolution, Ecology, and Performance.”  In Readings in Performance and Ecology, edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, 91-100.  New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press LLC, 2012.  

Middleton, Jonathan N.  “Algorithms and Interactive Tools for Exploring Music Composition, Analysis, and Interdisciplinary Learning.”  Music Algorithms.  Accessed December 11, 2023.  https://musicalgorithms.org/4.1/app/#