Rewilding the Soul
9 minutes, 4:5 aspect ratio, colour
Synopsis
Music, movement and poetry, inspired by nature, merged through video to encapsulate our embodied experience in nature. Climate futures rely on humans feeling a vested interest in our environment so our embodied experience of our surroundings is at the centre of this project, thereby placing our bodies and their senses as prisms through which the environment refracts. We believe the human-nature binary constructed by Western school of thought can be challenged through embodied movement. It makes us realize that we are not separate from nature but we are part of it. Everything is nature. Everything is connected. |
Artist Statement
Our work speaks to the theme of The Power of Two as it calls the human/nature binary into question. We aim to examine it, dissolve it and demonstrate how the two elements are one. We took inspiration from Nina Sun Eidsham’s concept of the ‘thick event’, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s ‘Spellsongs’, Rudolf van Laban’s ‘Movement choirs’, and ‘Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse’ by Agnès Varda, amongst others. The project stemmed from a nature walk led by Col and Yunlong which brought up the question: Are We Nature? To what extent have we, as humans, begun to consider ourselves as separate from other life forms? How can we reestablish connection with our natural environment through expressive and embodied practices of seeing, listening, touching, tasting and moving? The othering of nature is what makes us feel alienated to it, and this alienation leads to lack of empathy. This leads to people carelessly damaging the environment, and they might think that they are damaging the ""environment"" which is separate for them, but in fact they are part of it all, so by damaging nature they are actually damaging themselves. Instead of using sound to describe and represent our surroundings, we used it to respond and relate to the woodland environment and create a thick event. We responded with guitar, trumpet and violin, with our singing voices and spoken poetry, and with our bodies, movement and dance. All of these became interconnected components as we created a multisensory experience within the environment. Our movement, poetry and music can be seen as thick and woven paths of intersemiotic translation leading us into a song of being with the natural world.
The Team
We are a group of students at Lancaster University who came together as part of the module LICA480 Environmental Crises and Societal Change. Col, Fatima and Mary are studying MA Theatre for Social, Political and Environmental Change, and Grace, Gwendolyn and Yunlong are studying MA Sustainability and Global Environmental Futures. Through our collaboration, we were able to develop a project centred around our shared interest in nature connection. During the process we had the opportunity to share experiences and learn from each other in an incredibly generative way. It was a chance to challenge ourselves and work in different ways to the other parts of our courses. Most importantly it was a lot of fun!