Through creative embodied inquiry and somatic practice, we will disorient and deconstruct human-centric ways of being, doing and performing. We will engage the more-than-human as teacher, as agent, and collaborator, by attuning ourselves toward more-than-human timescales, spatialities, relationships, and modes of perception and embodiment. Physical investigations will be supported and inspired by studying, reading, and viewing resources by scholars and artists thinking/moving at the intersections of Indigenous cosmologies, Black Quantum Futurism, Posthumanism, Queer and Speculative Ecology, and Disability Studies. Together, we might grow slime mold bodies, become monstrous, dance “weather-map” choreographies, develop “plastic” kinships, become “zombies,” vibrate as water bag bodies, immerse in interspecies publics, and conspire with mycelial economies and symbiotic collaborators!
This course welcomes students from all disciplines with an interest and curiosity in exploring the porosity of binaries such as human/non-human, animate/inanimate, living/dead, lively/inert, nature/culture, self/other, objecthood/personhood, and unsettling the value systems and beliefs that uphold them. Our time together will be shaped by movement practice, discussion, journaling, photo-archiving and drawing in the studio and outdoors. Students will be asked to create and share body-based arts and movement practices throughout the course which will culminate in a collective showing at the end of term.
Learning Outcomes:
-Development of movement practices outside traditional performance paradigms
-Cultivate somatic awareness in dialogue with land, nature and non-human species
-Exposure to a survey of artists and scholars from a variety of fields whose work reimagines how we think about ecology
-Acknowledgement of emerging studies and critical discourse
-Increase one’s level of curiosity
Delivery Method: Fully in-person
Course Level: 2000-level
Credits: 4
Th 1:40PM - 5:20PM (Full-term)
Maximum Enrollment: 18
Course Frequency: One time only
Categories: 2000 , Advancement of Public Action , All courses , Dance , Four Credit , Fully In-Person
Tags: black futurism , dance , disability studies , ecology , indigenous rights , land acknowledgement , movement practice , nature , performance , plants , posthumanism , queer theory , somatic practice