This collection of essays gathers together important strands in the current studies of ecosomatics. It includes many ‘practice pages’ that open doors to the feelings that have generated the commitment of the writers to creating common grounds for deep conversation about the way people live in the ecologies of the world. The combination of affective strength, so difficult to articulate, with practical exercises—such as the many approaches to breathing as a form of ecoproprioception—will draw readers into places/ geographies where artmaking and philosophy join together and suggest new languages for thinking and talking about engaging with this Earth.
Lynette Hunter, Professor of Theatre and Dance, University of California, Davis
This seminal collection of essays maps the contours of an emerging field: ecosomatics. At the intersection of dance studies, movement studies, philosophy, and ecology, ecosomatics encourages ways of thinking and doing that cultivate a human’s sensory awareness of their bodily enmeshment in enabling places and worlds—nexuses of material relationships which call for respect, reciprocity, and responsibility. In essays written by an international cast of contributors, ecosomatics demonstrates its fierce commitment to social and environmental justice; a ready embrace of Indigenous knowledges, histories, and rights; thoughtful engagement with established fields of phenomenology, eco-philosophy, and dance studies; a lived, dialectical production of theory and practice, and an overriding mission to participate as consciously as possible in generating worldviews and bodily practices that sensitize humans to the ongoing health and wellbeing of the Earth in us and around us.
Kimerer L. LaMothe, PhD, author of Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming
Geographies of Us provides an exciting snapshot of a diversifying field: of the different methods, playful encounters, bodymind approaches, and land politics that make up the contemporary ecosomatic inquiry, with plenty of invitations to join in the dance. At its heart, this collection is about local and grounded connection, about reaching out—in intergenerational liveliness and critterly entanglement, in touch and in movement, in human and more-than-human worlds.
Petra Kuppers, author of Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters; Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture, University of Michigan
I consider this the most important work to emerge in interdisciplinary dance/performance studies this century. The depth and quality of engagement available to the reader in these pages has the potential to widely transform thought, practice, institutions, environments, and the lived relations between.
Karen Bond, Chair of Dance, Temple University
