ECOKINETICS

Embodying Reciprocity with Plants

Workshop presented at ‘(Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures - Ecosomatics’

Floating University Berlin

23-25 June 2022

curated by Dr Berit FisCher

part of the project "Natureculture Pedagogies", funded by: Spartenoffene Förderung für Festivals und Reihen (zweijährig) der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:

How can a movement-based somatic engagement with plants help us restore our relationship with bodily movement as radically embedded in the larger body of the earth? In this 3-hour outdoor workshop, we will explore a series of improvisational ways to engage with somatic sensations, listen, and empathetically witness the sensory presence of trees, shrubs, reeds, and other plant creatures that inhabit the rainwater pool. Ways that challenge the comfort zone of our urban bodies—as clean, safe, and detached bodies—and humbly acknowledge that we are here because other life forms are here too. The participants are encouraged to be moved by the impulses they receive from what they perceive. The embodiment of this expanded and intensified field of perception enables a knowledge of how to cultivate mutually nurturing relationships with the more-than-human that is difficult to attain in any other way. Ecokinetic knowledge feeds ecological awareness and re-activates our response-ability as agents for ethical and sustainable living. All bodies are welcome. Please come in comfortable clothing appropriate to the weather and bring a bottle of drinking water with you.

For registration, write to: raffaele.rufo@gmail.com.

Raffaele Rufo (PhD) is a dance and movement artist and educator and a scientist of sensory perception. After touring Europe, Africa and Australia for more than two decades, Raffaele now resides in a nature reserve on the coast of Rome, where he explores the ecosomatic limits of embodiment. www.raffaelerufo.com  

Part I - Wandering in Movement : A Walk Around the Basin

We walk together around the basin, following the dirt track - like a pilgrimage.

Mapping the territory with our senses: walking, breathing, seeing, listening, pausing.

As we walk together around the basin, from above we can sense how the micro and the macro cellular levels meet.

As we walk together around the basin, we can put the site in context from above.

We finish the walk noticing what has changed in our perception when we return down to the ground of the basin.

We encounter a change of perspective: with breath, with kinesthetic listening, with attunement to the others. 

Part II - Grounding with trees (Vegetalising the senses)

Exploring a series of improvisational ways to engage with somatic sensations, listen, and empathetically witness the sensory presence of trees, shrubs, reeds, and other plant creatures that inhabit the rainwater basin.

Grounding is growing creatively out of the constraints that define our sensibility and our sentience. Grounding is dancing with gravity to become the meeting point between freedom and necessity. Grounding is bringing awareness to the empowering effects of being bound to this earth. Trees are masters of grounding. To learn this art, we need to awaken our senses and our imagination to the possibility of a more-than-human perceptual interchange.

Raffaele Rufo, ‘Sensing with Trees’ (published in Venti Journal, 2022)

Part III - Dance of the Broken Branches

From the vegetalised state of grounding with trees, gather one piece of dead nature, a broken branch. The broken branch as a connective tissue. Negotiate that branch with another person.

Walk with the piece of nature in your hands: a duo: a branch between the bodies: the in-between manifests the space of our reciprocity

Give our bodies back to the forests: human bodies become extensions of the branches and the branches become extension of the bodies

Play with the space between I pull / you pull, I release my pressure / you release your pressure. Reciprocity is embodied through this giving and receiving of pressure, this constant presence: I never let go completely / I never resist completely to the presence of the other.

Part IV - Awakening the memory of the body through human touch

Embodying reciprocity with plants by awakening the memory of the body through human touch. A caring touch that wants nothing: touch to be with, to explore the joy and the pain of the (other) body. When the felt sense of the body becomes tangible it begins to manifest the immemorial process of coevolution between humans and other organisms. Reciprocity: to stay with awareness in this space of heightened perceptiveness between touching/being touched, moving/being moved in which the embodied present reveals the ancient.

Reciprocity is ancient like this body that has co-evolved with plants for millions of years. Reciprocity dwells in a space between presence and absence. It works as a process of rediscovering the hereditary legacy of our belonging to the human species and our co-evolution with nonhuman species. 

Reciprocity is in your hands and in the other parts of the body touching and being touched by another. It unfolds as resisting intentional movement and allows touch to reawaken a sense of self in connection with/as a response to our deep interconnectedness with the world (past and present). 

Reciprocity does not want to surpass the boundaries of essence (as giver and as receiver of touch) and suspends the compulsion of having a form (as receiver and as a giver).

Awakening the memory of the body: experimenting with how do we can become aware of our automatic reaction to the unbearable complexity and pain of human made ecological disasters: having a conscious feeling of what is happening: response is not a reaction because it connects/gives time to the inputs we receive from the external world to connect with our internal impulses. (we work towards being danced by the memory of the body)

In this deep state of presence, I am not only touching but also being touched, not only moving but also being moved; what is touching my body is also moving and potentially changing me as an impulse traversing the boundaries of material identity. 

Part V - Words of Reciprocity

Naming the sensing. Write from the body, from this deep state of presence: sensing and naming, sensing and sharing. Words of reciprocity with this place, with plants (and with other humans). Which words speak to the experience of touching and being touched in the trios? The words of movement and the movement of words.

We write from the body, from this deep state of presence, sensing and naming, sensing and sharing. Words of reciprocity with this place, with plants (and with other humans). What words speak to the experience of touching and being touched in the trios? The words of movement and the movement of words. Sensing and naming.

On Ecokinetic Knowledge

ECOKINETICS asks us to consider how we can enter an intimate relationship with the sensuous world and integrate it in our dance practice and in our vision of reality.

ECOKINETIC KNOWLEDGE: How do we cultivate mutually nurturing relationships with the earth in us and around us? A deep state of presence, an evolutionary process towards a heightened level of somatic listening and kinaesthetic awareness (heightened perceptiveness).

For references and quotes from the text of this page, cite Raffaele Rufo, 2022, ‘Ecokinetics: Embodying Reciprocity with Plants’, https://www.raffaelerufo.com/ecosomatics/ecokinetics-workshop-berlin-2022