Introducing Eco Soma

What is “eco soma”? I approach this phrase as a mash-up, an encounter zone all by itself: there is “ecosomatics,” a term somewhere between exclusion and inclusion, with undertones of neoliberal self-care, of White settler appropriation of Indigenous practices, a bit New Agey, a bit old ritual. And there is “eco soma:” a two step, a longer phrase, a stumble, the hesitation marks left in. The break holds hope and promise. I propose “eco soma” as a method for working with somatics in performance: both in the production and the reception of somatic-flavored work.

This book collects my experiences of embodied performance witnessing. It attempts to figure out those special moments when time shifts, or new sensations emerge, in the middle of involved witnessing, in the encounter zones between self and environment and on specific lands.

Eco soma sensing connects with materials, objects, and sites that one’s moving body meets. I find that sometimes my moving self, in dancerly openness, can sense more or differently than when I am immobile, even though (or maybe because) my disabled movement is painful. Eco soma sensing is interested in the kind of gaps and opportunities that open up when phenomenological awareness of being in the world encounters uncomfortable spaces. That discomfort opens up, for instance, when your cuddly blanket is made of water-threatening plastics whose tiny fibers might clog a fish’s digestive system. Your own stomach contracts at the thought, even while you hold on to differences between your own gut and a fish’s sensing. My play here with I/you/we pronouns is a deliberate invitation—not to overidentify but to wonder. This being-with and alongside elements and nonhuman others is central to my query (particularly in chapter 3, where disabled people go swimming together and hang out as/with salamanders).

In an eco soma inquiry, my own self is never “unmarked” or the quiet center of the phenomenological self: I am part of both a human and a nonhuman ecology, and I am part of a set of historically and culturally grown relations. All of this brings embeddedness and entanglement. In my case, my self is marked as White, a citizen of the perpetrator nation Germany, a disabled wheelchair/scooter user, a settler on Anishinaabe territory, a consumer in a Global North economy, a cis woman, queer, an artist and an academic, in pain, and in joy. All of these markers complicatedly arise to my being in the world: they shape my sensations and my fantasies.

My personal lineage for this work emerges from disability culture, queer phenomenology, ecopoetics, experimental anthropology, psychogeography, affect theory, and from long immersion in somatic movement modalities and performance practices. As you will see, each practitioner whose work I engage with in these chapters calls on their ancestors in different ways and creates their own lineage: academic, artistic, spiritual, or other. I honor multiple ways of coming into one’s self, and hence I use the term bodymindspirit at multiple points. See how it resonates with you.

The first one of these lineages I cited above is probably the one least written about: disability culture. I am encultured as disabled—left out, not thought about, discarded—and, on a regular basis in my case, sitting at the bottom of the steps. And I also co-create disability culture: reaching toward resilience from an unstable position, trying to not be lonely in my singular and painful form of embodiment, okay with being the odd one out and being jubilant when I am not. My particular somatic way of being in the world encompasses these things: in pain, unstable when on my feet, out of the “talk sphere” when sitting in my wheelchair at belt level and with the party happening above me, unable to get into most dance studios, experimental performance venues, private homes, etc., and being mistaken for other wheelchair users on a regular basis. All these sensations and experiences shape and characterize my perspective in this book.

Other disabled people have different markers of their exclusion and their sites of joy, as have others with different cultural lineages whose forms of embodiment and enmindment have been denigrated, often with deadly results, by the dominant forces that shape the way people encounter each other, live, and interact.

My citable (i.e., archive-explorable) lineage for my cultural form includes disabled people who speak about disability culture (or adjacent concepts), such as psychologist Carol Gill, the British dance group Candoco, performance artist Neil Marcus, theater artist Mat Fraser, playwright Kaite O’Reilly, theater and disability theorist Carrie Sandahl, choregraphers Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Gerda König, and Manri Kim, choreographer and dramaturg Raimund Hoghe, disability studies scholars Steven Brown, Tobin Siebers, and Eliza Chandler, Sins Invalid co-founders Patricia Berne and Leroy Moore, AXIS dance company’s Judith Smith, performance artist Frank Moore, artist Syrus Marcus Ware, dance artist Perel, Two-Spirit poet Qwo-Li Driskill, disability justice organizer Mia Mingus, and activist Anne McDonald. My archive also includes writers and visionaries I never met who were disabled but wrote or created in relation to the “cultural” part of disability in complex terms, such as Antonin Artaud, Martín Ramírez, Audre Lorde, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (who did not embrace the label “disability” but wrote eloquently about theorizing in pain and from a bed). It gives me such pleasure to write even this short list of names, to cite a lineage and a peer world when so few disabled people have come to voice, expression, public performance, or print. Most of us have to construct our lineage in a shallow time slice, as we can’t easily find each other. The nondisabled world does not often offer me “disability culture(s)” as something to learn and know about. And, as part of this, disability culture(s) are diminished by insufficient contact between different cultural formations.1

An important connection point in my repertoire-based, embodied, private lineage is my Tante (great-aunt) Lisa, who had cerebral palsy and was a farmworker for most of her life, with no access to a love life, to sexual expression with others, or to education. She was the one who first taught me about living well in pain, about ways of thinking creatively about the erotic, and who strongly supported my path away from my small German village toward the education denied to her. I was so lucky to sit side-by-side with her under trees, both of us chucking peas or peeling the potatoes she grew. I still can feel the sensations: dappled sunshine through the trees, a bowl on my knees, and the nutritious plants heavy and moist in my hands.

My task in this book is to unsettle myself, embrace my unstable way of being in the world and in academia, and prepare and offer nourishment, a place to be, breathe, and sense into connections. I offer my pain and joy to others who experience their cultural location with ambivalence and with stumbling. Fantasies of otherworlds are part of this, trying to find different gravities, different atmospheres. I can think about disability culture being a “pie in the sky”: an American formulation that emerges from a workers’ song written in 1911 by Swedish-American labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill, which he wrote as a parody of the Salvation Army hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By.” Pointing to an “elsewhere” for one’s reward is a powerful hegemonic mechanism of control. In 2007 I wrote about disability and crip culture being “a moon on the horizon, an accessible castle in the air” (2007b)—a European fantasy image, the fairytale castle out of reach, with its own heritage of feudalism and Disney dreams, mashed up with ramps, soft pillows, and talking elevators. Speculative dreams of happiness and communality are never easy, pure, or unadulterated, as performance studies writers like Jill Dolan and José Esteban Muñoz have shown.

Whether “disability culture(s)” are a thing or not is hard to decide, but my painful bones long for it, just as so many others look for cultural identification as a home, a place of certainty, of belonging. In this book, I show what it can be like to witness performances from the embodied and fantasized position of a disability culture observer. Disability culture becomes a felt and enacted process, not a thing.

Above I wrote of stumbling as a way to think about being uncertainly identified and identifying. Somatic experiences are central to my theorizing. I am usually the only visibly disabled person in most academic settings that are not specifically about disability (studies) (and certainly in most dance studios), and I often think I can feel eyes on my skin. When I get up and move on my feet, anything can unbalance me. I fear being pushed over, afraid that I am too heavy to fall gracefully and without injury. Years of Contact Improvisation have taught me skills for falling, but a lifetime of pain reasserts its emotional and somatic marks. But I also love my instability, to be in ocean waves, on uneven forest ground, or among moving people, for short periods. So I aim to get myself into encounter zones where I feel difference close up, skin to skin, where a lack of balance is an aesthetic strategy. In the pauses, when I rest after a few minutes of dancing, I have enough time to contemplate the implications and to witness the world, as even more years of Authentic Movement and Contemplative Dance Practices have taught me. I listen inside, honed by my experiences with Continuum Movement and BodyMindCentering, and I watch around me, using my performance anthropology training and Laban Movement Analysis skills to look for what is communicated in nonverbal ways by the wider field I am in: human worlds, more-than-human/nonhuman worlds and their movements, geology and elements with different temporal markers.

Identifications and lineages come with baggage, and this book explores multiple zones where what I/you/we bring to an encounter extends beyond our individual skin sack—and yet remains available to our senses. Colonial histories have proven that it is much too easy to shut one’s self off from these eco soma encounter zones, to either other the other completely into property, or to subsume the other in one’s identificatory fantasies (i.e., “They are just like me.”)—something I write about in the fourth chapter as I follow Saidiya Hartman’s critique of empathy into engagements with video dances and speculative time signatures.

But the point of this book is to stay open in the physical encounter zone, in the physical meeting of human/nonhuman/world: to enter as an artful cultural practitioner/theorist into un/comfortable contact and to seek out somatic sensations in environmental art practices. Where do you feel yourself become unstable? How do you consciously call upon, think, or fantasize about your roots? What are the limits of security and clarity in your lineage? How do you respond to the moments when your own identification is unclear, doubtful, or painful?

When thinking about lineages and the disruptions of colonial, racist, and eugenic violences becomes too hard, how do you find a momentary balance, a resting place for yourself and for others (a central question of chapter 1, with its focus on somatics and participatory performances)?

How can you consciously unsettle and resettle yourself and think about the implications of the land you are on and the histories that brought you here (the core of chapter 2, which looks at Indigenous/settler collaborations and mediations)? I invite you to take these questions into your reading of this book.

Isolation Somatics: Zoom Worlds

In the middle of writing this book, the somatic performance scene shifted, aligning itself with a new environmental world and a new attitude toward fellow humans. The year 2020 marked the start of the global coronavirus pandemic. Performance and embodiment practitioners found themselves shifting ground in viral times. In this book, I think about somatics, embodiment, environment, and contact zones; these are my lenses on this pandemic time. Thus, in this preface, I write about Zoom worlds, with the openness of an explorer in new territory.

In April 2020, novelist Arundhati Roy wrote in the Financial Times about the coronavirus in India:

It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. (2020)

Much of 2020 feels like a portal, indeed: the pandemic and its global effects bringing supply chains into focus; an ongoing economic collapse and the breaching of environmental protections; and the global uprisings against police violence and the turn toward Black Lives Matter even by White people who a few short years ago bristled at the words—hopefully making a revolution and reparations possible. The international environmental movement keeps reminding newspaper audiences of the “portal” moment of these times: the last moments to reverse or mitigate climate collapse and the rearrangement of the human world.

In a much less cited moment in the same article, Roy speaks about online somatics. She critiques as narcissistic Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s decision to “share his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation” (Roy 2020). As the high point of her irony, she asks for a different dream-asana:

Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. (Roy 2020)

This, then, is the public perspective on somatics in a nutshell: a highly complicated place between narcissism, indulgence, fantasy, and nourishment; between effectiveness and doing too little; and between wealthy self-delusion and public suffering. Somatic practice, even yoga in India (though particularly in an India under the sway of a Hindu nationalist agenda), seems inadequate, meaningless, and ungrounded.

In moments of such tension and overwhelm, caught between a rock and a hard place, I move. This book charts moments when others do the same: move fast or slow, shift gears, shift worlds, shift sensations, to get to portals of “otherwise,” to “walk [or roll] lightly, to imagine another world” (Roy 2020).

Part of my regular practice is drifting, dérive, spending more time than “normal” exploring space, checking in with my body and my environment.2 As mobility is physically painful for me, I naturally pay extra attention to where I am and how gravity works on me.

Let’s enter. In today’s drifting, I amble around my study, a common disability performance practice even in nonviral times: pain and mobility difficulties often constrict my range. I, like many disabled people, have learned to think of mundane and enclosed spaces as environments, not just the lofty wild sites of much environmental writing. Most of my wilderness explorations with fellow disabled people are on the edge of car parks, on streets within reach of my car door, or in my yard. So today I caress the edges of my home space with fingers and eyes: a midwestern U.S. family home in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with its pine cladding and quarry tiles, while outside the windows can be found the freshly greening white pine trees in the yard. I drift over to a painting on a table easel next to my writing space, and I look at a little diver, a tiny detail in a much larger painting (Plate 1). It’s the first painting I have completed since the isolation started, and it holds many traces of dreams and desires—not least my urgent and frustrated physical need to be weightless in the warm water therapy pool, a refuge for my aching body. But the little diver is also my somanaut,3 an emblem of the social isolation practice my wife Stephanie Heit and I have been in since I fell ill on March 3, 2020, before Covid-19 testing became widely available in the United States.

I have been using the isolation of these last months, when I wasn’t coughing and/or very worried, to participate in somatic sessions brought to me via Zoom. I have managed to reconnect with many old comrades from my personal dance history this way, and I have leaned into practices that have been part of my embodied world for two decades or more. I cite these practices as they also chart some of my movement lineages: I enjoyed Continuum Movement with Teri Carter; BodyMindCentering with Olive Bieringa, Martha Eddy, and in lectures with founder Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen; Somatic Experiencing with Daniel Bear Davis; Speaking in Tongues sessions with mayfield brooks; Feldenkrais with Mary Armentrout; Skinner Releasing with Julie Mayo and Yvonne Meier; Qi Gong with Laurel Atwell; Salsa Somatica with Amelia Uzategui Bonilla and Juan Urbina; moving/drawing/writing sessions at the American Dance Festival with Jesse Zaritt; languaging dance with Ishmael Houston-Jones; Resilience Motions with Zavé Martohardjono; and more.

In my drifting, I am drawn to a particular embodiment/Zoom moment that happened on my purple plastic-derived carpet in front of the acrylic diver painting. On May Day 2020, Beltane, or Worker’s Day, I lay down on this carpet to participate in a Queer Embodiment session, organized by the LGBT Health and Wellbeing of Scotland network and facilitated by Tracy Veck, a disabled, queer, White, Scotland-based artist who has led similar sessions out of the Center for Contemporary Art in Glasgow. Let’s dive in here.

Tracy (she/her), our facilitator, is hosted by Benn (he/him), from the Scottish LGBT Health and Wellbeing network. I arrive to the Zoom meeting, and Benn welcomes me. Then he helps me figure out how to change my name on my iPhone (which is different from the protocols of the laptop). I offer my usual handle: full name, (she/her), which has become the queer/trans-aware convention for many of us in the (at that point only two) months of daily Zooms. There are about ten people in this session: half use this convention, while the other half do not. Maybe this gives some clues to the fact that I am no longer in an academic or artistic environment but in a more diverse and differently queer scene. Visually to me, participants come from mixed racialized backgrounds, and some are visibly disabled.

I greet the few people I know in private chat messages. There is both personal intimacy from these earlier connections and also impersonal intimacies: we are all present because we align around the theme of “queer,” so being here is the equivalent of the little queer nod we’d usually give each other in public.

I can see people’s bedrooms and living rooms. They can see my study. Dogs and cats walk past the camera, both in my own space and in the spaces in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and England.

Tracy leads us with kindness and spaciousness. First, we breathe. We arrive. Meditate where you are, move or do not move, feel what’s right for you: kind words to hear in isolation time, no shoulds, no judgment. Leave your camera on, turn it off—whatever works best. She breathes acceptance and support through the screen, and I can see many of us fall into our back-bodies, fall (at least in my case) into delicious trust and openness.

For the next hour, I relax my face and my jaw. I let my hand touch my other hand gently, exploratorily, with all senses engaged, on the edges of skin-sense of self and other. I hug myself and acknowledge that this might be a weighty and emotional gesture for some of us. I rub and give care to my belly in this trauma-informed care session.

Every few minutes the group extends this exploration by going disco. I get to groove to glam-rock music, like the Scissor Sisters tune “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing When the Old Joanna Plays” (with “Joanna” signifying a cockney rhyme to “piano”). The band Scissor Sisters emerged from queer NYC nightlife, and the name references a lesbian sexual practice. The song lyrics we dance to signify something of the push-pull of queer desire, the awkward caught-ness that also speaks to isolated lives in the pandemic crisis: “Don’t feel like dancin’, dancin’/Rather be home with no one if I can’t get down with you.” The music twitches into danceability. This upbeat tempo contrasts deliciously with Tracy’s calming delivery and her focus on small muscle releases. We can dance it out. I can see people dance in their living room, their seat, their bed. They can see my study and my nest, a purple sheepskin laid out on my purple carpet. As the movement grows, I take my phone into Turtle Disco, the empty front living room that Stephanie and I use as a community movement studio. I boogie down. There is no judgment; disquiet and disconnect shake out of my bones, at least for a second. Something releases in me: both the intense self-scrutiny of Zoom and intense self-consciousness. Heart rate up, breath out.

As part of the Queer Embodiments session, Tracy asks us to explore our space, using the music as a way to see our home environment with new rhythms. The music is 1940s jazz nightclub music. Later on, in the discussion, one of the participants talks about how the dust bunnies around her room took on a different charge with her changed perspective of her space: now, as she misses dancing in a queer club, the dust accumulations feel appropriate, reminding her of a shabby, comfy home away from home. In these little moments, fantasy and spatial exploration combine to animate new opportunities, merging memory and what-is-available into speculative realms of how to live in a pandemic. The moment feels communal to me: we can do this.

Tracy’s invitations to find new rhythms and intimacies with our household and its objects echo Sara Ahmed’s queer objects. Ahmed writes about how a space makes “certain things, not others, available” to us (2006, 14). In this quiet practice of Tracy Veck’s, the living room transforms into the club, with little transitional animacies guiding the way. The space makes things available; dance makes things available. Our orientations can offer us new perspectives.4 Turning ourselves away from the everyday directional lines of our rooms, some of us go upside down, or lie on the floor—and there might be a dust bunny. What we each do with it—what kind of orientation we might activate, stress, or derail from—is here artfully up for grabs, or for cruising. This is a dance, not the everyday aliveness that might orient some of us toward a dustpan. By turning away from this dustpan’s call, some of us might even experience a turn away from the line of the family Ahmed discusses: the call, hail, or order of patriarchal arrangements. By doing something different, feeling differently, I get a glimpse of moments that offer little queer openings into the nonmundane: vibrations.

My language repertoire feels/sees/senses space between words: eco soma. Eco soma enters when world, environment, and embodiment/self find some open space in reflection: new openings for pain, toward joy.

Eco Soma Writing

I’ve just read a section of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet during a collaborative art practice in viral times. The excerpt is part of a writing prompt by the NYC-based feminist poetry collective Belladonna. In this passage, queer elder Pessoa is a writer at his desk adding mundane business figures into his ledger. Something happens at that writing desk: for a moment, Pessoa sees the lines he filled out as a palimpsest, as something built on older erasures. Pessoa, the Portuguese colonial cis male figure, sees it as a lineage of all kinds of explorers:

Smiling to myself I remember that life, which contains these pages with fabric types, prices and sales, blank spaces, letters and ruled lines, also includes the great navigators, the great saints, and the poets of every age, not one of whom enters the books—a vast progeny banished from those who determine the world’s worth. ([1982] 2017:5)

When I read this passage with an eye alert to how the world parses, and who has “worth” in multiple ways, the passage reverberates well beyond what Pessoa might have foreseen. Our words and worlds have histories, and the “great navigators” echo with colonial violence, even as Pessoa tries to point to men of exploration, saints, and poetry as the shimmering call beyond the mundane into the space of fantasy. One man’s freedom of movement is another man’s domination.

I am interested here in moments of seeing more than one thing and touching in non-touch. There’s the not-quite-coinciding of writing practice and longing: what enters the book is not just what is in the book. Power relations shape (ecological) fantasy, as any auto-ethnographer knows. My painterly/swimmerly imagination of the gravity-free diver, my somanaut, has other layers, too: ocean degradation, tourism and its costs, and plastics productions but also the psychic lure of the abyss. That’s one of the spaces of eco soma, the shadow side of ecosomatics, the pause around “knowing.” Eco soma sits less immediate in my ear than words that include “somatics”: it slows the speed of consumption and reception. I conceive of this as an ecopoetic move to notice and imagine.

To get back to my Glasgow group: queer and trans people of all kinds have a long nonbio heritage of seeing things levitate and vibrate. Queer and trans people can and need to see things beyond what is there, to imagine otherwise. Pessoa is part of that lineage. Queer aesthetics overlay the mundane with the club, sometimes inside ourselves and sometimes outside, proud and loud. Some of us have to live life in disquiet. We can do this: survive in difference. Many minoritarian groups born in identity-formations can find these new intimacies and then talk about them to the little glowing Zoom square.

In the Scottish session the alternate orientation to the (eco-queer-crip) dust bunny quickly becomes a talking point, a shared narrative, a shared laughter, and an affective nugget of connection.

And now, in my writing here on this disquiet dérive, it becomes an argument around orientation and autoethnographic writing and eco soma ways of being speculative. Little sparks, opened up through taking time and creating new rhythms, sensitize me to looking and being in familiar spaces and finding escape vectors. I come back to the somanaut: inside, outside, fantasy, reality, and dust bunnies as animate furry creatures. The little diver in my painting explores a new world, combining disquiet in habitus, inner sense, and world integration. Vibrating.

Note about Image Descriptions

In keeping with contemporary disability culture practices, I offer descriptions for each of my images and plates. In doing so, I had to make many decisions, the same ones that people face who audio-describe art or films. After trying out different approaches, I decided that unless I specifically know the self-identification of performers, I do not give racial or gender markers in my image descriptions. This still feels complicated to me, but it emerges from the fact that my images come from different national frameworks that have different social justice framing for racialization (i.e., the process by which people are caught in or utilize “racial” frames). “Race” is not a visible or biological thing. Gender does not fit into binary frameworks. I do acknowledge that it is fruitful to undo assumptions of Whiteness or binary gender as norm.

Racial and gender markers around performances are part of the chapters. The performers have read my writing and have approved the way I describe them, or they suggested other terms that I then adopted. In the plate section, where images are divorced from the text, I have asked people in solo images for their preferred self-description.

1. Social Somatics: Tentacular Methods on the Horizon