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Dancing into the Chthulucene: Sensuous Ecological Activism in the 21st Century

Klein, Kelly Perl
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4821-9269
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1545597606977576

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Dance Studies.
This dissertation centers sensuous movement-based performance and practice as particularly powerful modes of activism toward sustainability and multi-species justice in the early decades of the 21st century. Proposing a model of “sensuous ecological activism,” the author elucidates the sensual components of feminist philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of the Chthulucene, articulating how sensuous movement performance and practice interpellate Chthonic subjectivities. The dissertation explores the possibilities and limits of performances of vulnerability, experiences of interconnection, practices of sensitization, and embodied practices of radical inclusion as forms of activism in the context of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and competitive individualism. Two theatrical dance works and two communities of practice from India and the US are considered in relationship to neoliberal shifts in global economic policy that began in the late 1970s. The author analyzes the dance work The Dammed (2013) by the Darpana Academy for Performing Arts in Ahmedabad, India, in relationship to the Narmada Bachao Andolan—or, the Movement to Save the Narmada River—on which it was based, as well as to India’s history of modern dance, nationalism, and women’s movements. She discusses How to Lose a Mountain (2012) by the Dance Exchange in Washington, DC, alongside the anti-mountaintop removal movement in Appalachia to which the work speaks, and in relationship to the Dance Exchange’s “Moving Field Guides,” the choreographic and community-based education methods created and utilized in the piece’s creation, as modes of sensuous ecological activist performance and pedagogy. The primary somatic practices of the transnational contact improvisation community and the interconnected transnational Burning Man community, contact improvisation (CI) and ecstatic dance, are studied as practices of pilgrimage and nomadic subjectivization, which the author argues foster Chthonic subjectivities. This cross-cultural analysis highlights the transnational development and circulation of sensuous activism in India and the US, which further elucidates possibilities for sensuous bodily practices in and as activism in diverse local but globally imbricated contemporary contexts. The dissertation investigates how activists, artists, and movement practitioners create spectacles and/or facilitate sensuous experiences of ecological awareness that stand at oblique angles to neoliberal ideologies. The author shows how the examples resist the possessive individual’s sense of separation and isolation at the level of the body and its perceptions by bringing attention to one’s embeddedness within and responsibility for human and nonhuman ecologies, revealing the body as a political agent and bodily practice as an important mechanism for ecologically-conscious social transformation.
Harmony Bench, PhD (Committee Chair)
Hannah Kosstrin, PhD (Committee Member)
Mytheli Sreenivas, PhD (Committee Member)
Ann Cooper Albright, PhD (Committee Member)
397 p.
Dance; Gender Studies; Performing Arts
dance; performance studies; environmental humanities; Chthulucene; movement; practice; dance studies; ecocriticism; eco-criticism; queer ecology; embodiment; activism; sensuousness; vulnerability; interconnectedness; radical inclusion; sensitization

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Klein, K. P. (2019). Dancing into the Chthulucene: Sensuous Ecological Activism in the 21st Century [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1545597606977576

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Klein, Kelly. Dancing into the Chthulucene: Sensuous Ecological Activism in the 21st Century. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1545597606977576.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Klein, Kelly. "Dancing into the Chthulucene: Sensuous Ecological Activism in the 21st Century." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1545597606977576

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1545597606977576
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.