“Ecosomatic practice is a sensory and poetic exploration in movement: it is a dance with the inner and outer landscapes, a return to perception that is at the same time a dive into the places of our territory.”
— Raffaele Rufo
Online training
Online training
The online training on Ecosomatic Awareness is under construction. Contact us to receive updates.
What is Ecosomatics?
The term somatic (as a quality of bodily experience) and the cognate expression somatics (as a field of study) derive from the Greek word soma, meaning ‘the living body in its wholeness’. These terms were introduced and discussed systematically in the 1970’s by existential philosopher and Feldenkrais practitioner Thomas Hanna. Hanna’s aim was to bring together a broad range of first-person approaches to movement based on the human body as an internally sensed and immediately perceived living process of physical, mental and emotional awareness. The term ecology derives from the Greek word oikos, meaning household, habitat or dwelling place. Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with one another and with their environments. By focusing on relationality and interdependence, ecological thinking displaces the human from the center of the world and foregrounds the key role of natural elements like water, plants, minerals and gases for our survival. In doing so, it also aims to encourage our responsibility towards the planet. The emerging field of ecosomatics attends to and investigates the relation between the direct experience and knowledge of the body’s sensations and systems, which is central to somatics, dance and other embodiment practices, with the ecological understanding of and dynamic connection with the larger field of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.
As a response to the ecological crises of our time, ecosomatics is growing as a pluriverse of practices of listening with earth, seeding human-nature reciprocity and learning the art of commoning. Breath and touch are the most vivid and accessible example of how life works through immersion and compenetration of the human within the earth and the cosmos, and of the earth and the cosmos within the human. Ecosomatic practices arise from the embodied connection with the land: when the relationship with body movement as a source of somatic awareness meets the relationship with the territory as a source of ecosocial awareness. They work as ‘gateways’ to a place, embodied in the imagination, and in concrete experience where movement-based artistic, educational and therapeutic practices oriented toward self-ezpressiom and personal transformation meet ecological, social and cultural knowledges oriented toward community and territorial regeneration. My work draws particular attention to how listening and seeding reciprocity start from confronting the tragedy of our destructive cultural heritage and regaining the ability to grieve for ecological losses. In this sense, ecosomatic practices work as ‘gateway’ to recognise the perceptual roots of ecological crises and seed the (re-)generation of humanity as a form of ecological regeneration.
What do we experience in ecosomatic practices?
We work mainly outdoor in rural, naturalistic, archeological and urban settings and experiment with the sensations and perceptions of movements and matter in an embodied relationship with the presence, influence and responsiveness of other human beings as well as of non-human beings and living systems. We explore pathways to reconnect with our indigenous and wild roots and reactivate our sensory somatic systems with the goal of enriching proprioception and reshaping embodied self-image through an individual and collective journey. We explore the awareness that emerges through movement when the senses and the sensible are ‘decolonised’ from the anthropic distortion of confining perception only to those phenomena that exist within the limits and interest of human cognition, agency and activism. We work on suspending the codes of human supremacy and judgement on what matters and of what should be valued. This expands the field of the possible reality you can come in contact with in meaningful and constructive ways. You open up to the new possibilities of being touched and shaped by the encounter with other forms of living, sentient, and vibrant matter in transformative and (re-)generative ways.
How do we experience ecosomatic connections?
We start with exercises and rituals of listening to and with the body and observing the becoming of movement inside and outside through conscious breath, touch and movement. We work on the roots of sensing to feed the imagination with memories of place and matter that dwell in our tissues and cells to rediscover new movements and improvisational gestures and transform our habits and our self-image. Working with a collaborative approach and in a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere, and starting with impulses and intuitions, participants are guided to practice listening and attention to consciously connect with the elements (earth, water, fire and air) and with the forms, textures, smells and textures of the plant, animal and mineral world (barks, leaves, roots, branches, insects, birds, stones, rocks, trees ...). We work both with ordinary movements and with personal and collective improvisational dance and choreographic embodiments, as well as with voice and sound. Explorations are integrated with improvisational scores to weave ritualistic practices of collective dance responsive to others as well as to place and landscape. Through a process of improvisation we are in search of kinesthetic synchronicities and choreographic formations that develop the ability to notice where and how the attention of the group is moving and to respond to the offering of others in ways that support the ritualistic experience.
Read more about Ecosomatics
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Raffaele Rufo (2024), ‘Somatic Arts and Liveable Futures. Engaging Ecological Connections’, Lagoonscapes. Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities vol. 4(1), pp. 199-218
Abstract: The article reflects on the possibility to re-activate our eco-consciousness through embodied practices of interconnectedness with nonhuman living beings and systems. Then it discusses the cultural conditions shaping the growing field of ecosomatic practices and evaluate their political implications as acts of caring, collaboration, and cultural resistance. The importance of awakening the memory of the body and grieving for anthropogenic ecological losses is foregrounded as a key passage towards regeneration.
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Raffaele Rufo (2023), ‘Humans, Trees, and the Intimacy of Movement: An Encounter with Eco-Somatic Practice’, European Journal of Ecological Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 88-113.
Abstract: This essay takes the reader into a synesthetic landscape to explore the possibility of relating with trees as intimate companions of movement and becoming. David Abram's ecophenomenology of perception is brought into dialogue with Kimerer LaMothe's philosophy of dance and with other voices in the growing interdisciplinary field of ecosomatics. Based on the author's inquiries as dancer-researcher, encounters with trees are staged as slow improvisational rituals of listening and attunement. In opening the senses and the imagination to the presence of trees, ecosomatic practice exposes the porosity and permeability of bodily boundaries and reveals the possibility of a perceptual shift into a heightened experience of embodiment. We are not only touching, witnessing, and dancing with trees, we are also being touched, witnessed, and danced by them. In these in-between spaces the soma is reached sensorially by ecological wounds and dance is reclaimed as a healing force.
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Raffaele Rufo (2022), ‘Sensing with Trees: Explorations in the Reciprocity of Perception’, VENTI Journal: Air, Experience, Aesthetics, vol. 2(2)
Abstract: This essay weaves together reflexive discourse and conceptual discussion on the reciprocity of perception with textual, photographic, and audiovisual materials from the author’s somatic explorations in nature. Drawing on Natasha Myers’s studies of plant sensing and David Abram’s eco-phenomenology of perception, “sensing with trees” is engaged as a slow improvisational dance of listening and attunement through which the human sensorium is imbued with arboreal attention and trees are recognized and honored as intimate companions of becoming. In opening the senses and the imagination to the bodily earthly ground, reciprocity emerges through the awareness of a deep perceptual shift: we are not only sensing and witnessing trees, we are also being sensed and witnessed by them
Public Lectures on Ecosomatics
For a critical introduction to the field of ecosomatics, you can listen to Raffaele Rufo’s public lecture on ‘Somatic Arts and Liveable Futures: (Re-)Embodying Ecological Connections’, part of the programme (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures - Ecosomatics, curated at Floating University Berlin by Berit Fisher and funded by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, 23-25 June 2022. (The lecture was broadcasted live by THF radio Berlin).
For a discussion of the role of ecosomatic art practices as a vehicle for embodying personal and cultural processes of grieving and regeneration, you can listen to Raffaele Rufo’s public lecture on ‘Ecosomatic Seeds of Reciprocity: Uncovering the Perceptual Roots of Ecological Crises’, presented at the Italian Cultural Institute of Bucharest on 26 March 2024 and part of the ROOTS Dance Residency Project by AREAL Space for Choreographic Development.
Ecosomatic Workshops
Ecokinetics: (Re-)embodying reciprocity with plants
Challenge the comfort zone of our urban bodies to witness and respond to the sensory presence of trees, shrubs, reeds, and other plant creatures.
Shifting landscapes / Rituali di Pa(e)ssaggio
Reclaiming the ritualistic dimension of human experience and reconnecting with our indigenous and wild roots.
Reclaiming the metamorphic imagination
Explore the relation between place and passage and the creation of ‘gateways’ between matter and the imagination.
Human, Nonhuman and the More-than: The Ecosomatic Dance of Perception
The practice of ecosomatics is interconnected with the notion of the ‘more-than-human’. We could say that the ‘more-than-human’ is a particular embodied ecological encounter between the human and the nonhuman and it’s ‘more-than’ because of the way this encounter takes places, because of its qualities: they are embodied, they are eco-embodied. This ‘more-than-human’ is not a transcendental entity, it is not something other than the human and the nonhuman. But the qualities of this encounter cannot be categorised as human or nonhuman, that’s what makes it ‘more-than’. It stretches the boundaries of each of the two categories to a point where you have to think anew, sense anew to recognise that which is neither one or the other, both one and the other. So it’s the meeting between the giant snail and the human skin that can be a more-than-human encounter. The ‘more-than’ requires an engagement with the skin, with the body, a vulnerability. And the (tiny) giant snail looks vulnerable on this huge human hand or skin or piece of skin as much as we might feel displaced or defamiliarised from the human in the encounter with the skin, with the body of the snail.
Raffaele Rufo, ‘Decolonising Perception’
“To let death become life is one thing that trees and plants can do, that other species can do, and we humans cannot do that well. It takes time, and it takes space, and it takes courage, and it takes letting go. It’s not death and life as two separate worlds. It’s death and life as continuous worlds, one interweaving into the other.”
For references and quotes from the text of this page, cite Raffaele Rufo, 2024, ‘Ecosomatics: Introduction’, www.raffaelerufo.com/ecosomatics/introduction