I Dance Land: An Apprenticeship with Wind and Water: Depatterning Somatic Amnesia, Repatterning Ecosomatic Senses

This doctoral research relates the somatic, sensory awareness, and eco-performative processes through which I seek to depattern my somatic amnesia and repattern my ecosomatic relationship to the land – a portal into what it means to move and think with the land and to ground knowledge by way of sensing and moving. EcoSomatics enlarges the notion of sensory motor amnesia by attending to ecosomatic disenchantment. This intuitive, site dance, performance as research bridges movement-based somatic art (somadance) with movement-based performance art (eco-performance). "I Dance Land" ecosomatic land-based epistemology is a hand-based philosophy founded on values of co-creation, reciprocity, mutuality, and continuity across differences, at the nexus of multiple somatic dimensions lived, apprenticing with wind and water, dancing and being danced by the land, and writing with mountain. The notion of somatic drives – senses of existing, awareness, attuning, and empathy –, delimiting a performance milieu, fleshing-out a notion of guesthood – arriving, waiting for an invitation, introducing myself and my art to the land, settling into, and not over-extending my stay –, sensing cold as texture, stepping into a place-of-not-cold, moving at the speed of ice, and finding ease in tension, are living and growing methods and techniques developed during this research journey. These lessons are methodologically rigorous, and generate a renewed intimacy with the land as they manifest in the somatic architecture my body dances. I include twelve autoethnographic case studies performed during the winter season's cold and summer's heat in Canada, the continental United States and Hawaii from 2013 to 2019. Not all make sense at the threshold between the real and the imagined, however, "I Dance Land" challenges the colonial legacy of Anglo-English culture of distrusting the body, sense, land, and meaning-making relationship. From the process of unwinding my aesthetic research journey emerges a praxis of relational eco-wellness that can be taught to dancers and non-dancers alike. Depatterning somatic amnesia, repatterning ecosomatic senses has rich implication for not only Somatics and EcoSomatics, but also for Phenomenology, Ecofeminism, Dance Studies, Performance Studies, and Settler-colonial scholarship, as well as laying the groundwork for research and community ecosomatic wellness projects involving somatic attentiveness.