Creative lab “Ecosystem Practice” by Rósa Ómarsdóttir happened during dance.lt summer intensive in Vilnius, 2022.

It was a week- long workshop dedicated for exploring non anthropocentric ways of thinking and performing. Rosa provided us with many tools to challenge our perception of time, sense of self, relation to our environment and literally, everyTHING else. All of that in a framework of her method of ecosystem practice and ideas about vital materialism.  

It was a creative workshop, consisting of practices developed by the artist, so I will try to create an outline without going in too many details, just sharing some notes for an inspiration.

Very briefly, the workshop consisted of:

Reading and discussing few chapters from a book by Janne Bennet “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things".

Movement research: scores for experimenting with different time scales and body agency levels. Also, performance scores which begin from meditative or somatic experiences. For example:

Narrated meditation on being a “blob” - an abstract being which is moving in space in relation to light, temperature and sounds. 

Passive bodies- laying still and being moved by the other, then recreating the movements and imagining that somebody is moving you. In between of something that has a full agency and not. Uncanny feeling.

Glacier practice- imagining a movement in geologic time scale, becoming a melting glacier/ performing a glacier melting. 

Finally, all the scores, practices and exercises culminated with the Ecosystem practice: 

Collective writing as a way of indirect discussion: writing on the same sheet of paper keywords of what is ecosystem.

Experiencing self as: an ecosystem; as a part of an ecosystem; as an ecosystem in an ecosystem.

Performance sessions of an ecosystem, generating soundscape and movement simultaneously; using voices and a looper. 

The whole workshop was closed with an open- door session, where we shared our discoveries and experiences with the audience. 

During this workshop we generated a lot of ideas on ways how to move and to perform in non anthropocentric ways. If you would be interested to find out more about that, you can take a look into my blog post:

https://www.mig-le.com/post/imagination-body-and-mind