"Human bodies are inseparable from the environment: they flow through one another."
—Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.
After this first performance in the series, the possibility of inviting dancers to perform became visible. Here are some videos from the session with the Iceland University of Arts Dance students engaging with the warm lava rocks in a black box, which followed the first performance.
Supervised and generously guided by Finnish theatre director Saana Lavaste, I led a series of movement experiments with my coursemates. We worked on various tempos, synchronous and asynchronous, within the group setting. The moving image of them spontaneously sliding on the floor with the lava rocks has been, for me, the most evocative of them all. I felt it was a synergy of what they already knew about my work and the generative process of experimentation, which brought forth novelty, and which has not been possible to “just” think. These improvisations generated new ideas and conceptualisation of the work.
This work complicates the clear-cut distinction between installation or sculptural and the performative, creating a performative space in which relations with the geological may be explored. The space holds more-than-human bodies of Iceland. Alongside warm lava rocks, the space is filled with stage smoke and a specially composed soundscape. Each piece is warmed and allowed to cool down slowly.
The installation is activated by the audience's engagement with the speculative scores. Next to each piece is a speculative prompt for engagement, allowing the audience to create performance within their own bodies, activating imagination and creating a visually compelling site of shared relationalities. Audience is encouraged to handle the warmed stones, to place them down and select others, to move through the environment, and to interpret the speculative instructions situated beside each rock. The experience of the warmed rocks changes as they eventually cool down, providing only a fleeting glimpse of this relational moment, playing on the notion of transience and impermanence of our own temporarily warm bodies.
When I was a child, my dad told me a story. He said, “Imagine that you are a microbe that lives for only one second. You are born at the tip of a wive on a stormy sea at night. In the last moments before dying, the microbe looks around and concludes, what a dark and static world, only huge unmoving mountains all around.”
This story by my physicist dad was stored somewhere at the back of my mind until I started to think of the geologic as moving and living entities, or, perhaps, I was thinking of the geologic as a dynamic being because this story was ingrained in me. Being introduced to process throught in my bacelour studies and reading new materialism such as Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning and Matter by Karen Barad further confirmed my suspicions that this perceptable static world is a dynamic acosystem that might seem static and monumental only because of our specific perspectives and very temporal nature and the differences in our timescales, similarly to the microb’s perception of the waves, which looked form our perspective are very perceptibly fluing and dynamic.
This text also features in the Field trip section.
Spoken word
The performance was accompanied by the spoken-word text written and read by me live at the start of the performance.
Tuning into the rhythm of rocks… it is hard. Geologic time is painfully slow to crash against. It takes time like it takes a body to dance. Your body. Your time.
Co-creating through this small crack in our time here. Allow your body to dance with the rock in a rhythm that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understand.
The body heat of a presence. Next time we’ll touch I will be a reabsorbed extinction, a movement that reorganises itself. A perennial truth of perpetual perishing.
The intimacy of deep time crackling in your bones. Tune into the metamorphic asana and allow for the erosion of your identity.