Dance as a Form of Deep Ecological Thought

After four years of working on a dance film, 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.

Perhaps we need to stop speaking in order to think.

To think with the skin.

To think with the breath.

To think with what gives way.

Dance, in its barest forms — those found on the margins, in rituals, in solitary or collective bodies — 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. Not in the head.

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. Not with intellect — with sensation, with adaptation, with permeability. 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. Through loss. Through recurrence without identity.

They do not cling to form. They dwell in becoming. And perhaps that is what allows them to handle something greater, something more complex than language: the excess of the world.

Its silence.

Its weight.

Its aliveness.