PASSING BODIES - Choreographing Ecocritical Routes is an ongoing artistic research conversation between Eylül Fidan Akıncı and Tery Žeželj, which culminates in a day-long event at Theater Rotterdam in the frame of the European network ACT: Art, Climate & Transition.
It aims to connect ecocriticism, choreography, and activist practices of place making and is designed as an exchange of discursive practices. Choreographing Ecocritical Routes centers on the importance of body, mobility, and space for ecocritical activations in the performing arts. This exchange will take choreographer Eiko Otake’s film A Body in Fukushima as its focal point.
13:00
Choreo-dramaturging of Anthropocene Lecture
by Eylül Fidan Akıncı
In conjunction with the screening, Akıncı will give a lecture to contextualize Eiko Otake’s extended performance series as an artistic response in the aftermath of Fukushima disaster. What is the performance artists’ task at the age of Anthropocene? As the public and scholarly conversations tackle the term “Anthropocene” and its propriety to name the geo-ecological epoch we are in, it becomes clear that we need critical and creative tools to retain sight of the planetwide commons of disasters.
14:30
If trees would cry, we would cry too
Sound walk by Tery Žeželj
As a bridge between the film and the lecture, Žeželj will propose a site-sensitive walking activation to recalibrate the mind and body to perceive things unmourned and unmournable along the path: What is worthy of mourning in our society? How do we collectively deal with ecological grief? How can we mourn other bodies? How can art make mourning visible and shared? Can mourning cultivate a different attitude towards the environment?
15:30
A Body in Fukushima
Film by Eiko Otake
The film was crafted from tens of tousands of photographs, taken by William Johnston, of Eiko Otake in the surreal, irradiated landscapes of post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima, Japan. Eiko travelled six times to evacuated, desolate Fukushima since the triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown—of 2011. From her second trip forward, she was accompanied by Johnston (also a professor of Japanese history and public health at Wesleyan University) who documented her body in places of nuclear contamination.
Relay lectures - a coproduction between Bunker & Theater Rotterdam - is part of ACT (Art Climate Transition), a European cooperation project on ecology, climate change and social transition. In an era of climate breakdown, mass extinction and growing inequalities, we join our forces in a project on hope: connecting broad perspectives with specific, localised possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we ACT.
Theater Rotterdam
Link to Event