Body Weathering

Paper in proceeding, 2017

Weather is not an object experienced from a distance, but rather a medium in which every living being is immersed. This weather reporting views clouds as ‘containers of possibility,’ as an infrastructure for thinking about the body as a vibrant, experiential and living matter to reinforce a direct relation to nature – merging land and sky. Because environmental commitments are complex, I enter the challenge through exploring embodied modes of inquiry into urban-making using a corporeal relation to clouds and atmosphere, exploring their common materiality through a day’s workshop culminating into a performance (modes expressed as intermissions). The artistic research is grounded in a Butoh choreography practice called Body Weather, performing fabulations with clouds supported by theoretical roots in corporeal studies, vibrant materialities, environmental imagining, atmospheres and assembled relations. I engage with the question of how to curate a corporeal poetics in urban-making with clouds in mind, and what if bodily movements created atmospheres to ecologically live by? My intent is to cultivate an artistic embodied approach to urban-making, thinking through clouds and embracing the body as a refined medium for generating a poethic –poetic, political and ethical – entangle with space.