About
STREET-TREE STEWARDANCE:
Urban Forest Stewardship as Movement Practice
2010 iLAB Collaborative Residency
Jackie Dodd, choreographer; Philip Silva, urban forester
The ways Jackie practices dance, and Phil practices street-tree stewardship, share a commitment to sensory aptitude, awareness, and presence. However, these two applications of our senses have previously sought different ends: in stewardship, Phil used the senses to amass information as fact, and in dance, Jackie used them to connect to information as subjective experience. STEWARDANCE feels that science-based disciplines like stewardship sometimes devalue inner awareness- and emotional, personal experience- which dance acknowledges, and dance sometimes goes so far into individual subjectivity that onlookers, and other fields, don’t have a common context through which to relate. The STEWARDANCE collaborators will engage the heightened inner awareness and emotional vigor of dance with the material groundedness of ecological stewardship as an embodied sustainability strategy, which will be their mode of operation as they undertake each stewardship task: learning the ecological systems of the urban forest, gathering scientific data, physically laboring at stewardship, dialoguing with passerby, and coordinating team members. These experiments will occur wherever the task does- on the street, in the classroom, and in each of our own sensate bodies.
Contact: jcaradodd@gmail.com
