Softening as a strategy

I remember the way the skin of this one tree in Latvia felt, both the parts covered with moss and the parts without. The color of the moss was somewhere between grey, green and silver. It hosted big red ants. The way it towered over me, calmed my insides. I remember lots of fallen pine needles and other plantation at its foot. And, hiding in the crack of its skin, a mini snail house. Meeting it, made me feel alive and connected.  

My encounter with this tree was the result of a task given by eco artist Krista Burāne on the first day of the ACT summerlab in the magical peatlands of Riga. Krista was one of the many people feeding the project week with their knowledge and practice. When speaking about her work she stated that through her art she aims to change the position of the human body towards the environment. Her statement stayed with me. Change-to-what, I wondered.

This summerlab was designed by the New Theatre Institute Latvia. Their invitation was a noteworthy one. Director Bek Berger wanted to create an opportunity for us to immerse ourselves in the powerful beauty of the Latvian land and the importance it holds in Latvian culture. She consciously left enough space in the schedule in order for us participants to rest and recharge. We were invited to spend time in nature and take in the information offered to us, without the expectation or obligation to produce an outcome together.

Changing position

We start out the lab by walking through the peatlands over a type of wooden scaffolding. The path is rather narrow so we walk in a line. At the front of the line is Jānis Šlūke, our nature guide. His factual knowledge about the area is expansive. Besides explaining us the carbon storage potential of the peatlands and its importance in the fight against climate change, Jānis shares many other insights. How dead trees are important for a forest, as they can hold more species than a living one, for example. Initially, I feel like a child on a school trip, thoroughly enjoying learning to observe and identify bird species and pine trees. 

However, as our walks continue, I start to wonder about this particular way of connecting to the land, by trying to learn all kinds of facts about it. I start to notice the loudness of our voices in the forest, the volume of our bodies in the captivating peatlands. I witness the proactive way we’re trying to get a handle on the area within just a few days by walking, driving, rowing, talking and recording every step of the way.  

As the days pass, I can’t help but wonder if what we are doing is another form of extraction, of colonization. A form of gaining knowledge aimed at controlling the land and the species it holds in order to subdue and use them for our own good.  

I notice that to me studying the environment does not feel the same as actually relating to it. Of course, our bodies are changing position in relation to our environment, like Krista suggested. But from my experience as a dance dramaturge I know it is relatively easy for human bodies to change their physical positions in relation to their environment(s), without truly changing their inner positions towards it. Changing our bodies’ positions and postures is technique, really. It’s mechanics. Changing our bodies’ positions is not automatically intertwined with a growing consciousness, relationality and accountability towards our environment. This only happens when this is practiced, when it is consciously chosen, nourished and crafted. 

I catch myself longing to practice exactly this: deepening my inner relationship to this environment. I start to let myself be quiet and drop towards the back of the line to feel the tensions and the presence of the landscape and observe my colleagues. I feel my desire acknowledged indirectly when, after we come out of one of our tours with him through the raised bog in Ķemeri National Park, Jānis Šlūke says: “I do not know in what way trees and boulders are speaking to us, but their energy is tangible, present.” It is a key moment for me, to hear our nature guide speak about the surroundings, not in educational terms, but in terms of energy. 

Feeling deeply

Feeling deeply and observing groups, while being a part of them, are characteristic for the way I walk through life, as well as for the way I practice dramaturgy, facilitation and alignment coaching. In that sense, having been assigned the role of observant in this lab comes natural to me. In my work, I often use feelings and bodily sensations as information. I believe in the power and importance of doing so. I consider feeling deeply a specific form of concentration, a way of listening with the entire body. It helps me to pick up on what is happening in a group or a situation, particularly the things that are not being said or addressed out loud. 

Having been called too emotional and too sensitive often, I decided to claim my feeling as knowledge. I did not want to censor myself into not feeling or feeling less, especially in professional contexts. Therefore I started practicing feeling my feelings and physical sensations in their most profound and diverse forms, wherever I went. I see this as an act of resistance in the average working cultures of today, in which feelings are often unwelcome and being pushed aside. This presumably happens to benefit the efficiency and productivity of the workers. I question that attitude and the formality it comes with. I question the presumed critical distance we can take from our experiential selves. I wonder how this emphasis on formality in fact truly keeps in place a lack of accountability, of relationality, of ethics and sometimes plainly of decent human behavior in our work environments.

Fast forward to the end of the week. I am ill and I have to skip the last walk through the wetlands. When my fellow group members return from their trip I hear a celebratory tone in their voices. They tell me that this time they went into the peatlands with two other guides, Iluta Dauškane and Anna Ķirse. Where they started the day worrying whether their shoes would get wet, many of them ended up soaking in the moist lands completely naked. They tell me folk stories have been shared, raising a different imagination about the land. As I look at them and listen, I get the feeling something was released in them that day. I wonder whether it was the allowance they gave themselves to experience the environment in this visceral way that had raised their spirits so much.

I consciously use the word ‘allow’ and the sense of permission here. I wonder to what extend eco artists and nature guides generally allow themselves to experience the grounds they focus their work around in a multitude of ways, using the different ways of knowing that their bodies hold. It is interesting to witness my colleagues and the resonance of this experience in their bodies, while not having been in it myself. It perhaps makes the power of sensorial, physical and emotional experiencing even more tangible and visible to me – the glow it gives them. I believe that is what a moment to break away from formality, from politeness, from an expected or accepted way of being present with each other and with nature can do for us. I believe that is what the (eco) arts have to offer people. Creating encounters and occasions for more people to practice their inner relationships to the environments we live in.  

Their experience also makes me realize that throughout this week I have been yearning for acknowledgement of the more magical, more ungraspable character of nature, in the midst of all I have learned about the peatlands. You see, I consider nature as my refuge. It is overwhelming to know that the places and moments in which I feel the most belonging are under great attack. When I go into the facts and my rational thoughts about climate crisis, I loose hope. When I tune into nature’s presence I gain hope. 

I am not suggesting that bathing naked in the peatlands can solve all of our problems. However, I do suggest that perhaps by letting nature move our bodies and touch our senses, by letting it inform our tempo and our decision-making, nature itself is showing us how to stay with the trouble. Perhaps it is even showing us the way out of this climate crisis – through our bodies and our feelings, step by step. Cause in the end I believe it is the practice of hope and belief that drive us forward and that can change our inner stance towards our environments. It is therefore hope and belief that can change our behavior, our behavior that is causing this crisis to unfold so rapidly.  

Eco artists have the ability to create the space to listen to nature, in a shared moment that is crafted to this end. When their work goes beyond changing our physical positions and tap into our inner selves as well, their works can be considered occasions for us to exercise a new ecological consciousness. To try out our inner allowance to experience ourselves as being part of nature. To broaden expected or accepted ways of being present with each other, nature and ourselves. The practices of fellow participants Zoe Laureen Palmer and Noor Stenfert Kroese are beautiful examples of this.

No split 
“What would have happened if we had started the week like that? If bathing in the wetlands and listening to folk stories would have been our first encounter with the peatlands, instead of the other way around?” Zoe asks. In her work Zoe practices from and invites in sensual, sensorial and ancestral knowledge. In line with the work of Adrienne Maree Brown, Zoe wants to facilitate inner work leading to outer transformation, making work for the world and of the world. She facilitates retreats in nature, lasting two or three days, holding space for women and femmes of color, but also anyone who wants to experience collective care and access to nature. 

In these retreats Zoe invites people to slow down enough to feel the changes in the environment throughout one day. “My work is to invite, rather than to teach people. I aim to ignite people’s capacity to be with themselves”, Zoe says. Her work is not focussed on practicing resilience but on softening. “That is what acknowledging that we are nature, that there is no split, can do for us”, Zoe says, “it softens us in our relationships, to ourselves, amongst one another and between us and our environments. It is like an affirmation in public, saying: this matters. By resting and being in nature, we are contributing to well being. You are invited.”, Zoe states. Working from the conviction that we have the language of nature within us, that we are nature, to Zoe means that our capacity to sit with ourselves directly defines our capacity to sit with nature. To improve one’s relationship with one’s self is to improve one’s relationship to all else. 

New media artist Noor works from a critical post-humanistic perspective, in which we humans no longer take center stage. Her aim is to use installations to create and facilitate an embodied encounter between people and other species’ existences and perspectives, a situation in which all species have agency. Through her work Noor creates more insight and knowledge about other species and the way we are interconnected with them. She feels hopeful that through choosing relating over disassociating, more people will feel inclined to fight for climate justice. 

Her key strategy: creating empathy towards other species. “I want to solve challenges from the stance/idea that we are connected, instead of fighting and competing with each other. There might always be a degree of competition between species, but ultimately we need each other to survive.” These other societies of non-human species can mirror and inspire us, Noor believes, as examples and expansions of our imagination on what it means to co-exist. From there, Noor hopes, we will be able to find a way to be flexible, to bend, to transform the human-nature relationship. 

A step towards liberation 

I feel aligned with the softening as a strategy, which both Zoe and Noor speak of, be it in different ways. It requires us to let ourselves be moved by what surrounds us: other people, other environments, other species. And as their practices show, softening is not necessarily soft. It is also a route to being more hardcore in acknowledging what is needed to be alive in the world today. It points to finding out deeper values and hard boundaries we need to put in place with and through our arts practices, in order to change the course of a crisis as big as the one we are living through right now. 

Softening is a first step to liberation – it is brave, it is stepping out of line, stepping away from known hierarchies and behaviors. What I recognize in the practice of Zoe and Noor is that what we allow ourselves to feel, can either keep systems in place or change them. To me, their practices underline that allowing ourselves to feel and to sense in any type of environment – work environments or elsewhere – is a first and crucial step on the way to not only change our bodies’ positions but our inner dispositions in facing the big challenges of today, being social and environmental justice, in the arts and in the world. 

In order for us to truly engage in this process, we need time. Deep realizations happen in the timing of the body, not of the mind. It often means we have to slow things down. The act of resistance in Bek Berger’s proposition to focus on wellbeing and not be outcome driven therefore resonates in me. In order to create work for other people in which they are invited to revive their relationship to nature; we have to revive our own relationship to ourselves and to nature. We need to create the conditions for that to happen. That is what it means to align vision and actions. Bek Berger’s choices for this summerlab point to that. And perhaps this is exactly what Krista meant all along as well, when she spoke about changing the position of the human body towards the environment, back then, at the beginning of the week.

Summerlab Observants
Merel Heering wrote this text on the occasion of the 2022 ACT Summerlab in Riga. As independent observant she was invited to participate in the Summerlab, and asked to create a critical reflection, based on the Summerlab’s programme, participating artists and its social and ecological context. The Summerlab programme was organized by ACT-partner NTIL and can be found here. 

Merel Heering is an independent dance dramaturge, facilitator & alignment coach based in Rotterdam, NL. She aims to contribute to creating ethically just working cultures in the arts. More one Merel can be found here

Credits and suggestions for further reading:

Zoe Laureen Palmer, who wrote this reflection on the 2022 ACT Summerlab: 

Noor Stenfert Kroese

The work of Connor Schumacher, on the dance floor as a place to practice being human.

The work of Brenda Dixon Gottschild, reflected in her book ‘The Black Dancing Body’.

The work of Susan Cook on ‘encultured somatophobia’.

The work of Holiday Philips on (climate) grief.

The work of Adrienne Maree Brown, reflected in her book Pleasure Activism.

The work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, reflected in her book The Democracy of Species.

The work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, reflected in her book Decolonizing Methodologies.