Dance as a Form of Deep Ecological Thought : the R&SONANCES project

After four years of working on a dance film series, we are still circling that question:

Why are dancers such body-philosophers?

Is it because they dwell in the ephemeral,

because they consent to disappear,

because they know how to touch the intangible?

We don’t know. But in every rehearsal, in every trembling instant, the question remains.

And it moves.

Conceived not by choreographers, the R&SONANCES series stands at the crossroads of philosophy, anthropology, and movement. We work within the field of ecopoetics, a terrain where science and art continually hybridise and sustain one another. By examining the unstable, often problematic notion of “nature,” this approach aligns with the pressing urgencies of life’s survival on our planet.

Perhaps we need to stop speaking in order to think. To think with the skin.

Dance, in its barest forms is not an expression. It expresses nothing.

It brings into relation. And that is where

 i n t e l l i g e n c e  begins.

Each film is both a question and an encounter: How does a human body relate to the architecture of the universe when words fall away? R&SONANCES started by inviting five internationally acclaimed dancers into site-specific experiments to explore through the body five fundamental dimensions through which humans define the cosmos for more than 2,500 years : 

space, 

time,

light, 

matter, 

void. 

Our axes of investigation sit at the intersection of physics, cosmology, metaphysics, phenomenology, aesthetics, and even spiritual traditions. They are among the oldest lenses through which humans have tried to explain the universe. Physicists pursue them through mathematics, philosophers through concepts, mystics through inner experience. We pursue them through dance : a language older than words. Our practice explores how movement, perception and landscape shape human experience. Drawing from eco-phenomenology, ritual studies and post-human humanities, we create films in which bodies serve as instruments of inquiry rather than simple subjects of representation.

Disclaimer 1 : spectacle

This exploration unfolds through a dual medium—choreography and video—each carrying a degree of spectacle that we consciously engage with and reflect upon. Aware of being the products of our specular capitalist era, we are trying to join a long tradition: the attempt, present since the earliest cultures, to understand the cosmos through embodied experience. We hope to provide an authentic testimony, offered by early 21st-century Western artists, to the ways in which humans still seek to relate to the architecture of the universe.

Disclaimer 2 : anthropocentrism

Each of our five solos carries an important bias : they are centered on a human body to express concepts that are, by nature, non-human. Space, time, light, matter, the void — these are forces that exceed us, precede us, and will outlive us. By placing a single dancer at the heart of each film, we acknowledge the paradox rather than trying to resolve it. Why? Because these films are meant to be seen by singular human spectators. We want these hybrids of dance (art of feeling, almost interior) and video (art of mediated seeing) to be received with a similar blend of identification and distance. The human body becomes both limit and lens, a fragile portal through which the inhuman can be felt, approached, or momentarily embodied. In this way, we hope to create a form of distanced vision, an « eco-phenomenological » focus. And thus join a long, immemorial tradition of trying to make existential sense not through complicated words, but through the body itself.

d a n c e   a s   a   f o r m   o f   d e e p   e c o l o g I c a l   t h o u g h t   ?

Deep ecology is not the ecology of causes. It is the ecology of relations. Of becomings. Of shared milieus. It does not ask us to be right. It asks us to listen. And dancing — that is exactly what it is: listening with one’s whole body. It does not illustrate an idea, nor embody an argument. It lets a world pass through a body. A patch of ground rise into the heels. A gust of wind ripple through the spine. An unknown body become necessary. To dance is to become vulnerable to forces. To accept not understanding everything. To follow a rhythm older than oneself.

There is an immediate humility in dance: that of the living being who does not control but responds. An availability to the world. A way of saying “i-am-here-with”.  Without subject, without object. A dance cannot be repeated. Not exactly. It happens once, disappears, leaves nothing but breath, sweat, and memory. It insists on the present moment, and then it vanishes. Dancers live in that vanishing. They learn to create without trace. They practice presence, not permanence. And in this sense, they resemble the forest, the storm, the animal. They live and think through motion. They dwell in becoming. And perhaps that is what allows them to handle something greater, something more complex than language: the world.

Its silence.

Its weight.

Its aliveness.