Emilie Darlet

Dancing New Ecologies is a dance activist network investigating how embodied practices may restore a politicised public space

Dancing New Ecologies is a dance activist network that aims to investigate how embodied collective practices may contribute to the reactivation of a politicised public space by envisioning, experimenting with and constructing alternatives to capitalism, through dance.

Dance as a self-organised platform lying at the intersection of artistic stage and democratic arena, where transient communities of non-trained dancers gather to elaborate radical ideas about encountering and relating and shape utopian visions.

Emilie Darlet is a London-based cultural worker and dance activist.

Her practice is rooted in the belief that alongside public policies, personal endeavours may too repair and renew our relationship to the world: practices embedded with environmental and social care, that foster mutual support, value collaboration above competition and cultivate a sensibility for ethics. Although these everyday activisms may barely be visible in the public arena, they hold a powerful potential for political change.

Her work consists in disseminating such practices. Curating contexts for harnessing and channelling participants' creativity and craving for change, in order in order to support personal active responses to the social and political concerns of our times. Creating spaces where radical imagination and pragmatic utopias may emerge through enacting and performing the gestures of the world we want to live in. Promoting through these initiatives the development of those critical skills that may afford participants a sense of ownership of what our reality may become.

This series of workshops led by Emilie Darlet & Rick Nodine invites participants to explore new ways of encountering and relating, of supporting one another through deep listening in a playful co-creation, rehabilitating the body as a valid starting point for decision making and collaboration.

The DNE Lab is a space to learn to value and welcome unpredictability and to build creatively from it. A space shaping minds and bodies to interact in entirely new ways with the world around, leaving us more agile and better equipped to navigate unexplored territories and deftly respond to the Unexpected, characteristic of post-pandemic times. More agile and better equipped to design sustainable forms of being together.

Starting by lying together on the floor, we will work to disrupt our social and professional personas by relinquishing the upright stance of competent capitalist subjects. While close to the floor we will reclaim a harmonious relationship to earth by surrendering to the pull of gravity and accessing pleasure in non-goal oriented movement.

We will move on to radically reorient our relationship to physical proximity through experiments in non-gendered, non-manipulative, non-hierarchical touch. By reframing touch as communication based on receptivity and ‘listening’, we will have a chance to observe what selves we become when we stop practising the Capitalist physicality of dominance and submission.

Photo by Mauro Francesco Moledda

In Collaboration with:

Rick Nodine, dancer and choreographer

Medium:

Dance Activism

In 2020, four and half billion people were held physical and emotional hostages in an effort to curtail the spread of Coronavirus. The magnitude of this confinement had never been experienced. In this essay, I investigate how the mesh of such disorientating and intimate experiences of isolation may paradoxically offer an effective framework to collectively rethink our relationship to others and Nature.

I used personal experiences as a starting point to engage with resonating critical ideas, that I situated in relation to my own insights, in order to develop an argumentation in two stages: first, identify the origin and nature of the interconnections that underlie our social and natural ecosystems. Then, suggest new approaches that may form the ethical foundation of more sustainable ways to live together.

Yet, this essay is not a comprehensive and prescriptive catalogue of what our response to the pandemic ought to be. On the contrary, it will convey my belief that agility and openness are most efficient to navigate the radical unpredictability that characterises our post-pandemic world. The open-ended explorations exposed in this essay are subject by their very nature to being revisited, questioned and eventually invalidated, in the constant reshaping of a co-created future.

PDF: RESISTING BODIES: vulnerability as a site of emergence of post-pandemic ecologies

activism anthropocene body-politics new-materialism writing

Contact Improvisation is an explorative form, not a performative one.

It invites and trains dancers to focus on sensing movements, as opposed to reproducing choreographed sets of shapes for the gaze of an audience.

To celebrate this, I created a code that generates random shapes from the data of a dance performance recorded in a motion capture studio.

These do not replicate the patterns of movement we did that day, but rather emanate from them.