{"id":128,"date":"2024-06-04T19:47:33","date_gmt":"2024-06-04T19:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/29\/?p=128"},"modified":"2024-06-20T19:01:46","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T19:01:46","slug":"towards-a-poetics-of-affectability-dance-in-more-than-human-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/29\/towards-a-poetics-of-affectability-dance-in-more-than-human-worlds\/","title":{"rendered":"Towards a Poetics of Affectability: Dance in More-Than-Human Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jonas Schnor<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

How are dancers and choreographers\u2014in response to the ecological crises of our historical present\u2014experimenting with how human and nonhuman bodies can move and be moved by each other, relating in new and perhaps more mutually respectful ways? Which pathways for transferring embodied knowledge between species are explored in contemporary choreographic experiments, and which limitations and obstacles are uncovered in the process? And what kind of futures are such experiments potentially disclosing? In this article, I am going to explore what dance can do in the present to open up new potentials for multi-species co-existence in the future. To do so, I will think with a particularly potent example; namely, the solo Sammal\/Moss<\/font> (2022) by choreographer Angela Schubot, performed by dancer Suvi Kemppainen\u2014a work that arose out of Schubot\u2019s extensive artistic research into human-moss relations. By thinking with Sammal\/Moss<\/font>, I will reflect upon a current tendency in dance and choreography which I propose to call a \u201cpoetics of affectability.\u201d A poetics of affectability, put simply, is enacted whenever artistic work involves different bodies being transformed through their encounters by allowing themselves to become affected by their differences\u2014and thereby becoming something else. To analyse how Schubot and Kemppainen worked with moss during their creative process, I will draw inspiration from the posthuman affect theory of Bruno Latour, specifically his notion of \u201carticulation.\u201d Based on this, I will show how the movement research of Schubot and the performance of Kemppainen can be said to articulate the affects of an encounter between human and moss bodies, thereby enacting a poetics of affectability that pushes forward an ecocentric orientation in dance and choreography of relevance in our times of environmental urgency.

Keywords:<\/strong> more-than-human, affectability, ecological crisis, Angela Schubot, moss, ecocentric movement research<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alongside the cries for political climate action during the past decades, critical thought and experimental art have sought to question and counter human exceptionalism in numerous ways. In the Western humanities, posthumanist philosophy and new materialist theories have abounded to generate new narratives of planetary being. Earthly existence in its many forms is theorised as made up of more-than-human networks\u2014as webs of interconnected ecologies where multiple species depend on each other to sustain their shared existence (for a variation of posthuman and new materialist perspectives and arguments, see Alaimo; Barad; Barca; Bellacasa; Bennett; Braidotti and Bignall; Connolly; Haraway; Latour; Tsing). Theoretical physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad even speculates that on the level of subatomic matter, agency is enacted by particles always-already constituting (and constituted by) relational fields in which they can neither be reduced to pre-existing individualities nor to a mindless undifferentiated whole\u2014but instead make up a shared field of intra-action<\/em>.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critics of such theoretical standpoints argue that it is a trend borne out of a desire for immediate contact with reality, a contact which, it is argued, was lost during the modern age with its suspicion of the epistemological limits of (human) perception and knowledge (Boysen and Rasmussen 2\u20139). However, the ecological turn in the arts and humanities advanced by new materialist thought is not necessarily rooted in the experience of an ontological lack (of immediate contact) but is, I would argue, more accurately explained by an ethical unease (or even dread), a sense that it is the false sense of human superiority in relation to other species that is underlying the current destruction of the earth\u2019s biospheres, the climate collapse and the rapid extinction of multiple species. In other words, it is our human, all too human orientation which makes us perceive non-human species as less worthy and less agentic and, thereby, justifies their exclusion from the ethical realm. Perhaps we need to think with Sara Ahmed and queer this orientation, allowing ourselves to become disoriented in order to be able to perceive other species differently and to imagine other ways of co-existence. Not in an attempt to come into more immediate contact with reality but to abandon the idea of one Reality altogether and exercise our abilities to perceive, acknowledge and include multiple realities<\/em>\u2014beyond the human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the fields of dance and choreography in Europe, many artists and collectives have recently engaged themselves in bio-art<\/em>: artistic works that explore the co-existence of human and non-human beings. In Sheep Pig Goat <\/em>(2017\u201320), the collective Fevered Sleep staged a performance by human musicians and dancers together with sheep, pigs and goats and pondered its ethical dilemmas (see Cull). The two very different works Entangled <\/em>(2022\u201323) by Beyond Darkness and The Hut <\/em>(2022) by Angela Schubot, Jared Gradinger, Alm Gnista, Shelley Etkin and Stefan Rusconi both explored having fungi and mycelial cultures as integrated \u201cpartners\u201d in the artistic work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the durational piece Mass-Bloom-Explorations <\/em>(2018, 2023) by Recoil Performance Group, dancer Hilde I. Sandvold performed together with a living scenography of mealworms. To this by no means exhaustive list should also be added Secret Hotel\u2019s Banquet for Bees <\/em>(2020\u201323), Annette Arlander\u2019s Pondering with Pines <\/em>(2022), as well as the work of Nana Fransisca Schottl\u00e4nder (for example, Sympoiesis, <\/em>2021\u2013, and Body-scaping<\/em>,2021) which explores the relationship between the performing body and more-than-human landscapes (see Gade).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is it that motivates many performing artists today to question anthropocentrism and create works that attempt to reshape the relation with more-than-human worlds? According to theatre and performance scholar Lisa Woyrnarski, ecological dramaturgies harbour an intersectional impulse (35\u201338). Intersectionality, a term coined by legal scholar Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw, names the efforts to become ever more aware of systemic inequalities of power between different individuals or groups and within institutions (Collins and Bilge 2). Intersectional analysis makes aware, for example, when racialisation and gendering is both at play causing societal exclusions of women of colour which white feminist politics cannot account for. In terms of what she calls \u201cintersectional ecologies,\u201d Woyrnarski writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Who is being represented and who is being erased in the narrative? What ideology, knowledge or subject position is represented as the \u2018norm\u2019 or dominant? What places and people are bearing the brunt of ecological consequences? How is the slow violence of climate change, and other ecological violence, producing inequality and fatal, asymmetrical effects? . . . Intersectional ecologies attend to how identities and power relations construct and regulate ecological responsibility and response-ability, foregrounding the way ecological issues are multi-sited and also always social, political, gendered, racialised, class-based, disability and access issues. Ecodramaturgies expose the way in which ecologies are intersectional. (37)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Whilst ecodramaturgies in the performing arts can, as Woyrnarski argues, powerfully expose and critique such political agendas, narratives and structures which, in my view, belong to the realm of macropolitics, I would add that intersectional ecological thought also bears consequences on a micropolitical<\/em> level\u2014that is, in terms of how we approach the co-existence with others in our daily ongoings, in the sensorial and affective intra-actions of bodies relating to other bodies. Micropolitics is the always situational and never finished \u201cwork\u201d of maintaining and reconfiguring social relations.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whereas macropolitical actions, albeit important, can only reactively correct pre-existing structures, micropolitics refers to acts of generating or sustaining certain potentialities of life within the very way we relate to each other as sensuous entities. From a micropolitical perspective, the ecological crisis is a crisis of relation. In this light, the question becomes: how to nurture other ways of relating between different beings, groups or species in order to\u2014from the bottom-up\u2014give way for more just, caring and life-potentialising worlds? In terms of dance and choreography, we can ask how intersectional ecological thinking is emerging in and as movement research, as experiments of co-existence between different species and between living beings and the environments they are a part of.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, I am going to explore what dance can do in the present to open up new potentials for multi-species co-existence in the future. In order to do so, I will think-with a particularly potent example; namely, the solo Sammal\/Moss <\/em>(2022) by choreographer Angela Schubot, performed by dancer Suvi Kemppainen. This work was first presented at Moving in November in Helsinki 2022 as part of Jared Gradinger\u2019s and Angela Schubot\u2019s larger contribution to the festival under the title Herbarium<\/em>. Sammal\/Moss<\/em> has since then evolved into a group piece titled Moss Belly <\/em>which premiered at Impulstanz in 2023. The work is a result of Schubot\u2019s extensive research into mosses in which she experimented with methods of becoming affected by the plant and letting those affects give way for movement research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on interviews with Schubot about the practices and creation process of Sammal\/Moss<\/em> as well as my own experience of the finalised performance, my aim in this article is to reflect upon a current tendency in dance and choreography which I propose to call a \u201cpoetics of affectability.\u201d A poetics of affectability, put simply, is enacted whenever artistic work involves different bodies being transformed through their encounters by allowing themselves to become affected by their differences\u2014and thereby, becoming something else. Exercising affect ability, in this specific case, entails an intra-action between human bodies and plant bodies and, therefore, relies on modes of affecting and becoming affected that extends beyond verbal and (visibly) kinaesthetic communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to analyse how Schubot and Kemppainen facilitated this intra-action with moss during their creative process, I will draw inspiration from the posthuman affect theory of Bruno Latour, specifically his notion of \u201carticulation.\u201d Based on this, I will show how the movement research of Schubot and the performance of Kemppainen can be said to \u201carticulate\u201d the affects of an encounter between human and moss bodies, thereby enacting a poetics of affectability that pushes forward an ecocentric orientation in dance and choreography pertinent to our times of environmental urgency.  <\/p>\n\n\n

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Photo: Jared Gradinger<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Moss Movements<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Stoa Music Hall, Helsinki, 10 November 2022. As I enter a large studio with wooden floors with the rest of the audience crowd, I notice dancer Suvi Kemppainen on their knees halfway across the room, next to a couple of lamps. I immediately realise that I had already, without being fully aware of it, noticed something else: the clacking sound of their fingernails tapping against the floor. As the spectators pick up pillows by the entrance and scattering across the dimly lit room, Kemppainen keep tapping their nails, incessantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I quickly note the obvious: there is no actual moss in the room. The set is incredibly simple, just the lamps, Kemppainen in training clothes and the spectators spread out from one wall to the other. The simplicity sharpens my attention to details. Kemppainen\u2019s nails are long and covered with a dark-blue polish. Their gaze has a depersonalised but curious glow, and their face moves slightly from side to side while their nails keep tapping away. Until, suddenly, they stop, sit upright, still, on their knees. Quiet for a moment, then Kemppainen starts tapping again, this time on their own knees. Shortly after, they get up, walk to another spot and gets down on their knees and forearms. Now, they start banging their feet rhythmically against the floor and, after a while, the nails again, then both simultaneously but at different rhythms. From here, the score keep mutating as Kemppainen moves through many variations of polyrhythmic tapping, clacking and banging against the floor with their fingers, hands, nails, feet and knees. The rhythmic ongoingness gradually develops into a consistent atmosphere, a sense that this is everything, that this will keep on going, tirelessly.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
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Sammal\/Moss <\/em>by Angela Schubot. Performed by Suvi Kemppainen. Stoa Music Hall, Moving in November 2022, Helsinki. Photo: Mariangela Pluchino<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Sitting on the same surface as Kemppainen, the atmosphere produced by their rhythmic tapping is not only a visual and auditory experience; it is haptic, too. I feel the vibrations through the floor, and I lie down in order to feel this across the whole surface of my body. As my body becomes a tactile receiver of the apparently inexhaustible rhythms, I think about moss. What does this performance have to do with that green surface growth I have walked on and touched and lay upon my whole life? This constant haptic rhythm\u2014is this (a symbolic representation of) how moss feels? How moss senses? I begin to feel like I am inside <\/em>a clump of moss, within its moist mass of leaves and stems. I have a sense that moss is \u201cblind,\u201d that it cannot sense beyond its interior body. This body, however, I imagine as haptically and auditory tuned in every cell as it intercommunicates and resonates with every movement of its environment. The constant, polyrhythmic tapping is the \u201ctouchlistening\u201d of moss\u2014its plant tissue as one, heterogeneous sensory organ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the audience, two older female bodies are lying with their eyes closed, as if sleeping. Midway through the performance, Kemppainen approaches one of them and starts tapping on her head. Gradually, they lay their body across the sleeper\u2014the living surface\u2014while tapping their feet and hands against the floor, before eventually spooning the sleeper, relentlessly tapping her shoulder and arm. A while later, the same thing happens with a younger woman who lays down in the middle of the room with a water bottle next to her. Towards the end of the performance, the last of the three women acting as \u201csurfaces\u201d stands by the wall, and Kemppainen goes and stands behind her, tapping her gently. Eventually, Kemppainen lies down, holding the woman\u2019s hand, tapping the floor with their heels. As their hands let go, the woman starts walking around the audience, telling them that the performance is over. In the middle of the room, the water bottle has been knocked over, a clear stream of water running across the floor. As we leave, Kemppainen\u2019s tapping is still ongoing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eternal Rain Feeling<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In the attempt at approximating a living entity so radically different from the human as moss (or any other plant, for that matter), what are the techniques for becoming affected by its mode of existence? What is the work of the senses and the imagination in the human performer that allows for movements, images, ideas and feelings to emerge in resonance with the radically other?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Angela Schubot tells me about her long engagement with plant consciousness, from its onset in Ayahuasca ceremonies to the more subtle and simple maneuvers that has informed Sammal\/Moss<\/em>. According to Schubot, it is rather easy to \u201copen up\u201d to a plant and \u201ctune into\u201d its mode of being. As she says: \u201cYou can just sit with a plant and see how it makes your body feel\u201d (Schubot, Personal Interview). For Sammal\/Moss<\/em>, Schubot experimented with a technique called \u201ctrituration,\u201d brought to her by collaborator and friend Shelley Etkin who learned it from artist Aune Kallinen. Trituration is the hour-long grinding of a plant into a fine, homogenous powder which, in the homeopathic tradition, is used to produced medicines. In Schubots practice, however, trituration became a method for tuning into different plants. Traditionally, trituration is done over three sessions on the same day, but Schubot would spread these out over days or weeks in the studio, alternating between sessions of grinding and sessions of movement research in which she let her body sense and feel in resonance with the plant processing. During such a session with moss, the tapping emerged. As Schubot recalls:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

It was this feeling of soft rain on earth. You know, how the rain seeps in a little bit in but also pearls off. It had this soft vibrance. It fitted to the moss, because it didn\u2019t go all the way deep, it didn\u2019t have this depth into the ground, like heavy bone drumming . . . it had this eternal rain feeling. I felt like a jazz pianist. I realised: oh, I\u2019m doing something that opens up the connection to the moss. When I do this, I feel in communication with it. The more I learned about moss I found that mosses were the first plants to move from water to land. They are so spongy, they love the water, yet they can be without water for so long. This eternal rain is a real gift to them, they just want to be wet all the time. (Personal Interview)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The tapping became a key to tune into the vital materiality of the moss. Eventually, Schubot would share this research with Kemppainen and the tapping\u2014\u201cthe eternal rain feeling\u201d\u2014became the choreographic base-structure guiding the process of creation. The physical challenge they took upon themselves was to activate the centerless, polyrhythmic quality of the moss\u2014the \u201cjazz pianist\u201d\u2014in a single body not accustomed to such deterritorialised movements. Here, the sensation of water landing and moving through the moss-body became their guiding physical imaginary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Native American botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describe in her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses<\/em> the deep affinity mosses have for water:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Mosses must be awash in moisture in order for the alchemy of photosynthesis to occur. A thin film of water over the moss leaf is the gateway for carbon dioxide to dissolve and enter the leaf, beginning the transformation of light and air into sugar. . . . Lacking roots, mosses can\u2019t replenish their supply of water from the soil, and survive only at the mercy of rainfall.<\/p>\n36<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Mosses have elaborate systems for retaining and circulating rainwater. Their many overlapping leaves pleat \u201cinto minute accordion folds that trap water in the crevices,\u201d and undulations in each leaf create \u201ca microtopography of rolling hills and water-filled valleys\u201d (40). Like a complex herbaceous \u201cchampagne fountain,\u201d mosses let their leaf bases \u201cfill and overflow, with the excess drawn to the leaf below, creating an interconnected string of pools beneath each overlapping leaf\u201d (41). As they cannot store water, mosses make the most of the rain, cascading it through their dense interiors. Lacking the storage units of roots, mosses are also experts at surviving without water for long periods of time. They simply stop growing and exist in a suspended state until the next downpour. In Kimmerer\u2019s empathetic reading of moss-life, she imagines that, even in the total absence of water, mosses are still entangled with the liquid their desire running across and throughout their bodies: \u201cWhat art of waiting is practiced by the mosses, crisped and baking on the summer oak? They curl inward upon themselves, as if suspended in daydreams. And if mosses dream, I suspect they dream of rain\u201d (36).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tapping choreography that arose out of Schubot\u2019s kinaesthetic and imaginative immersion into the living materiality of moss is, as we can see, strongly corresponding to the botanical knowledge about mosses, even though this physical imaginary or haptic image<\/em> (the physical sensation and movement of body parts tapping against the floor) of Schubot\u2019s eternal rain feeling did not emerge from an academic study of botany. Nevertheless, the embodied dramaturgy of Sammal\/Moss<\/em> can be read as a symbolic representation of moss-life, either as the image of mosses drenched in rain or as the dream that mosses dream as they lie curled up and dry, practicing their \u201cart of waiting.\u201d The representation is particularly evident when Kemppainen taps the bodies of the older women, as if being moss covering ancient rocks, processing water on their still surfaces.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Sammal\/Moss <\/em>by Angela Schubot. Performed by Suvi Kemppainen. Stoa Music Hall, Moving in November 2022, Helsinki. Photo: Mariangela Pluchino<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

At the same time, however, the performance operates on other levels, too. As the audience is consistently exposed to the tapping sensation, visually and auditory sensing its many variations and, even more importantly, feeling its haptic reverberations through the wooden floor, Kemppainen carefully builds and sustains a sensorial atmosphere of the life of moss, a sort of phenomenological<\/em> representation or, perhaps more accurately, a phenomenological approximation to how moss \u201cfeels.\u201d As the choreography gradually un<\/em>folds this atmosphere in its many textures, it en<\/em>folds the audience in what I have elsewhere called a \u201ctropography\u201d (from ancient Greek: tr\u00f3pos<\/em>, meaning mood, mode or atmosphere, and graphe<\/em>: to write), the kinaesthetic transference from performer to audience of a chrono-spatial state that does not convey an idea or meaning but exposes to a felt dimension, to the perhaps imagined but nevertheless embodied and affective immanence of a mode of existence (see Schnor)\u2014in this case, the life of moss transmuted into human experience.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question remains, however, which processes Schubot and Kemppainen produced in their own bodies <\/em>in order to make this tropographic state emerge? Approaching this question will help to unearth some answers to another question crucial to my investigation; namely, how we are to understand the connection between human and plant in this artistic experiment: is the life of moss, as it emanates from Kemppainen\u2019s body, nothing but a product of the imagination with no anchor point in the \u201creal world\u201d? Or is it a clear and uncompromised insight into the actual<\/em> life of moss? Or, finally, is it somewhere between the two, vibrating between sensation and phantasy, the production of a new body<\/em> through the friction of an encounter that will never fully escape an element of opacity or unknowing? In order to approximate these questions, it is important to direct focus away from the dramaturgy of the performance and towards its dramaturgy of experimental becoming\u2014that is, the embodied work of the artists during the creation process, or what I have elsewhere called \u201cmicrodramaturgy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Sammal\/Moss <\/em>by Angela Schubot. Performed by Suvi Kemppainen. Stoa Music Hall, Moving in November 2022, Helsinki. Photo: Mariangela Pluchino<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
New \u0392odies<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with artistic director of Moving in November Kerstin Schroth, Schubot explains that, with Sammal\/Moss<\/em>, her interest was in \u201ca deep encounter with a certain plant and creating a movement language that evokes and invites the presence of the plant back into the space through the dance\u201d  (Schroth and Schubot). Regarding this encounter, Schubot states that, in her experience, such encounters open up new spaces in the human body, or even \u201cnew bodies,\u201d new body-spaces, that we can share with the plants. \u201cPlants for me blow the imagination of what the physical is and on what levels the physical can take place. And it is so exciting to experience how each plant invites a unique space for the physical as its very singular terrain and domain\u201d (Schroth and Schubot).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I, a year later, asked Schubot about her experience of this expanded physicality, she explained how her encounters with different plant species produced for her completely disparate bodily sensations. For example, in her encounter with birch, she felt her body transforming into a night sky, a star map with no volume, a wide expanse. Whilst this alteration of her body-state felt quite aggressive, the moss provided a much lighter, gentle hapticality, the soft rain on earth: the subtle, polyrhythmic and centerless vibrations of a multitude body (Schubot, Personal Interview).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this encounter, Schubot experienced moss as \u201cnon-aggressive expansion and sustainable life in-between spaces.\u201d Moss \u201cteaches us to give space for others and to be the ground for others.\u201d They embody a fierceness, according to Schubot, which she links to their move from water to land millions of years ago and describes as \u201ca vital energy of departure,\u201d of \u201cwe are going off even if we don\u2019t know where to go\u201d (Schroth and Schubot). The moss also provided Schubot with another way of becoming a body\u2014as split into \u201cfinely polyrythmic multiplicities\u201d that neither pierces into the sky nor into earth but \u201cinvites us to stay on the surface and not underestimate it.\u201d  Here, Schubot traces a correspondence between moss as the surface of the forest and human skin. The depth of the skin, of touch and relation, at the surface of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ensuing choreographic work was a combination of staying connected and in tune with this sensation of moss-existence and of trying to give it another life in the single, human body. Working with the tapping choreography had to do with staying connected to a \u201cdrumming physicality\u201d that, according to Schubot, she could not locate in the human body and which was not an easy task to embody. As Schubot says: \u201cif you are not a professional drummer, it is difficult to drum differently with a foot and a hand\u201d (Schubot, Personal Interview). This simple point reflects a crucial aspect of Schubot\u2019s work; namely, that although each plant and what it communicates is unique, it always has to pass through the filter of your own body<\/em> (Personal Interview).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of how the haptic image is received, the artistic work resides in finding out how to give it form through the human body. In the case of Sammal\/Moss<\/em>, Schubot and Kemppainen had to find concrete ways of tapping and drumming differently with different body parts. Obviously, a single human body tapping and drumming with body parts will never equate the cascading of water over and within a patch of moss. But in the kinaesthetic and imaginative work of making something come out of one body that is transmitted from another, becoming affected by the other does not have to result in imitation. Instead of an attempt at similarity, the work can give way for an embodied articulation that is sensitive to the differences between the beings in question. Such a sensitivity towards differences can act as a force that allows other<\/em> differences or deviations through which a \u201cnew body\u201d can emerge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Bruno Latour, \u201cto have a body is to learn to be affected<\/em>, meaning \u2018effectuated,\u2019 moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans\u201d ( 205). Moreover, learning to be affected entails a sensitivity to differences (206). In terms of how bodies process the events and entities they are moved by, Latour distinguishes between statements striving for accuracy of reference<\/em> and articulations that seek to include and layer contrasting differences<\/em>. \u201cArticulations . . . may easily proliferate without ceasing to register differences\u201d (211). If we follow this line of thought in regard to Sammal\/Moss<\/em>, we can say that the work of Schubot or Kemppainen is not to provide an accurate referent of moss. The human dance is not a truth-claim concerning the existence of a plant-being. It is, rather, an embodied articulation of how these human beings have become affected by the encounter with another living entity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, it becomes important to pay attention to the elements that do not add up to a representation, to highlight the components of the haptic image that act transversally upon it, disrupting its internal unity. The first and most noticeable element is Kemppainen\u2019s long nails with their shiny blue polish. Although the blue may reference water, the polish is a distinctive human trait, and as the tapping nails are such a constitutive aspect of the choreography, the blue nails gain a life of their own, departing from their belonging in a human-centered world, becoming a strange sensory organ somewhere between moss, water and human. The same goes for the ways in which Kemppainen clap their hands together, let their eyes and mouth open and close, bang their feet on top of the female bodies as well as their uncanny turns of the head. All these movements signal a non-human entity and supports the sensation of being inside the moss. Simultaneously, however, they also break with this haptic image, producing another kind of body, a dancing human body that both is and is not itself. I would argue, then, that it is this choreographic complexity, not only the eternal rain feeling of moss but the transversal and deviant configuration of another kind of body\u2014connected to the encounter with moss but expanding beyond it\u2014that allows us as spectators to \u201csense\u201d moss through dance. Not by providing an accurate reference but by exposing us to the frictions and differences of an encounter between radically different beings: a choreographic articulation that makes us think and sense towards what we perhaps have not sensed before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schubot and Kemppainen\u2019s work have staged, I would argue, not a direct encounter with moss in the immediacy of the one and only Reality, but generated a kinaesthetic and imaginative field between themselves and mosses, and it this field which the audience is invited into; a field of physical imagination forged by enacted affect ability\u2014the practice of becoming affected and staying sensitive to differences\u2014that proliferates movement-articulations which, however fleetingly, conjure new embodiments in the in-between space of two species.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Sammal\/Moss <\/em>by Angela Schubot. Performed by Suvi Kemppainen. Stoa Music Hall, Moving in November 2022, Helsinki. Photo: Mariangela Pluchino<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Towards a Poetics of Affectability<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

If we (humans) desire to counter the destructive consequences of anthropocentric hegemony on the planet, it is paramount that we extend our senses and our affective states towards the more-than-human. Although we must acknowledge that other beings sense, survive and thrive in ways different from our own and live through bodies and in conditions we cannot necessarily access, it is possible to activate our abilities for becoming affected by lives not our own. In terms of plants, non-human animals and larger ecosystems, this requires other means than language. Here, dance and movement research open potentialities for combining the felt (phenomenological) body with the power of imagination to come closer to other modes of existing. Such potentialities are neither about presupposing that other beings can be fully known nor about conjuring phantasmal illusions about them. Sammal\/Moss <\/em>is an example of how movement research can establish a field between a human and a non-human entity, a field which can perhaps be described as phanta-physical or physio-phantasmal: an embodied imagination, a space for generating a new body-space based on a practice of becoming affected by others. A proprioceptive and chrono-spatial dream, a slice of reality, an attentive encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this, a micropolitical potential is disclosed, adding an important dimension to the intersectional ecological thinking so desperately needed in our times of climate catastrophe. In the sensitive space of embodied imagination, human artists can strive to preserve non-human others in their opacity, that is, to not attempt to translate the others fully and colonise their mode of existence. At the same time, an attentive listening to the being of others can be sustained in order to become as affected as possible by the aliveness of others. A poetics of affectability is enacted when this ambiguity is not resolved; when the other is felt but remains unknown. In this way, dance artists are doing important research into what it means on kinaesthetic and affective levels to strive for just and empathetic multispecies co-existence. We must learn, again and again and in ever new ways, to become affected. We must learn to dance in more-than-human worlds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Endnote<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> This definition of micropolitics is inspired by Bojana Kunst, who engages in-depth with the notion of micropolitics in the relationship between life and art, see Kunst (25, 41\u201353), as well as Suely Rolnik, who specifically includes non-human agents in her notion of micropolitical insurgency, see Rolnik (77\u201394).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others<\/em>. Duke UP, 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times<\/em>. U of Minnesota P, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning<\/em>. Duke UP, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barca, Stefania. Forces of Reproduction<\/em>. Cambridge UP, 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bellacasa, Mar\u00eda Puig de la. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds<\/em>. U of Minnesota P, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things<\/em>. Duke UP, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boysen, Benjamin, and Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen, eds. Against New Materialisms<\/em>. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Braidotti, Rosi, and Simone Bignall, eds. Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze<\/em>. Rowman and Littlefield International Ltd, 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality<\/em>. 1st ed., Polity, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connolly, William E. A World of Becoming<\/em>. Duke UP, 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crenshaw, Kimberl\u00e9. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum<\/em>, no. 140, 1989, pp. 139\u201367.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cull \u00d3 Maoilearca, Laura. “Opening the Circle.”  Performance Research<\/em>, vol. 23, no 4\u20135, 2018, pp. 419\u201321.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gade, Solveig. “Connected Matters: Collaboration and Care in Nana Francisca Schottl\u00e4nder\u2019s Bodyscaping.” Peripeti<\/em>, vol. 19, no 37, 2022, pp. 16\u201329.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene<\/em>. Duke UP, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses<\/em>. Oregon State UP, 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kunst, Bojana. Das Leben der Kunst: Transversale Linien der Sorge<\/em>. Translated by Alfred Leskovec, 1st ed., Transversal texts, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Latour, Bruno. “How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies.” Body & Society<\/em>, vol. 10, no 2\u20133, 2004, pp. 205\u201329.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rolnik, Suely. Spheres of Insurrection: Notes on Decolonizing the Unconscious<\/em>. Translated by Sergio Delgado Moya, Polity, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schnor, Jonas. Microdramaturgy. Between Practice and Event: A Performance Philosophy<\/em>. 2022. University of Surrey, PhD dissertation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schubot, Angela. “Conversation Between Angela Schubot and Kerstin Schroth About Sammal\/Moss<\/em><\/a>.” Moving in November, 2022. Accessed 19 Oct. 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—. Personal Interview. 25 Sept. 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins<\/em>. Princeton UP, 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Woynarski, Lisa. Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change<\/em>. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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*<\/a>Jonas Schnor<\/strong> is a dramaturg and philosopher working in theatre, dance and performance studies. They hold a PhD from the Centre for Performance Philosophy, University of Surrey, and are currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Centre for Visual Poetics, University of Antwerp. They have collaborated with choreographers, performance collectives and festivals across Europe and Brazil, amongst others Marcelo Evelin, Sisters Hope and Moving in November. They publish in a variety of journals and are since 2023 co-editor of Peripeti\u2014Journal for Dramaturgical Studies<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2024 Jonas Schnor
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN:2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n

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