Sensing with Trees (2020-23)
Eco-Somatic Group Dance Practice
Not long after I moved to Rome with my family in June 2021, I began to develop an eco-somatic dance practice and a series of group pedagogical and performative interventions. This work was mainly based in the Forest of Castel Fusano, positioned inside the Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast (Rome, Central Italy). See also https://www.raffaelerufo.com/ecosomatic-dance-rome-2022.
My main role in these group practices was to curate and facilitate emplaced encounters among groups of participants (typically non professional movers and dancers) with each other and with trees while foregrounding the work of the lived body and of the lived land as our key teachers and mentors. This involved guiding participants along somatic improvisational and compositional processes by focusing on the relationship between each other and the ecosystem in which we gathered and worked together. This also involved facilitating the emergence of the group as a platform for sharing and mixing experiences and competences.
Audiovisual impressions were captured by myself while witnessing the emergence of the improvisational dances among participants or by external observers joining us to document the practice for a variety of purposes.
“We sense the possibility of being together in a different way by recognising that the sand is our partner, that the grains of the sand are our partners, that the barks of the trees are our partners, that the leaves of the forest are our partners. And the outcome is a sense of healing, a sense of pleasure. I don’t refer to the conventional meaning pleasure but to ecstatic pleasure as a deep sense of sensorial or sensuous connection.”
To know about other areas of the ‘Sensing with Trees’ project:
NATURECULTURE PEDAGOGICAL INTERVENTIONS
Videographic embodied research
COLLECTIVE WORK: ECO-SOMATIC GROUP DANCE PRACTICE
DANCE OF THE BROKEN BRANCHES
Winter 2022, Forest of Castel Fusano (Rome)
Audiovisual impressions of ecosomatic dance practice
Broken branches are engaged as an extended boundary of the human body to meet the other in a space in-between: between humans and between the human and the nonhuman.
VEGETALIZING THE SENSES
Spring 2022, Forest of Castel Fusano (Rome)
Audiovisual impressions of ecosomatic dance practice
An experiment with breath, touch and the imagination to meet trees halfway. Ho do we learn to breath with trees? How do we expand temporal patterns and deepen tactile perception to engage with them sensorially?
GROUNDING WITH THE FOREST
Spring 2022, Forest of Castel Fusano (Rome)
Audiovisual impressions of ecosomatic dance practice
A small dance with trees. Dance emerges from sensing the presence of trees through touch and weight and becoming aware of the reciprocity of human-arboreal listening.
COMPOSING AND DECOMPOSING STRUCTURE
Spring 2022
Audiovisual impressions of ecosomatic dance practice
An imaginal-tensional work in which we become an pluri-somatic-organism. To find the center that we share, to move from that center between resisting pressure and releasing movement.