Dance artists Maria Kerin and Rachel Sweeney have been creating work together since 2019.
Spatially we explore embodied timelines of
cultural heritage
ecology
wellbeing
that inform both imaginary and real-time understanding of body-place relations.
Our ongoing dance ecology practice engages through
transdisciplinary research
facilitation
participatory workshops
community projects
performances
Consciously striving to dance at the thresholds and slippages of artistic and environmental disciplines, we ask how adaptation might act as a strategy to inform our conscious encounter with radical change.
Our shared creative practice is based in ecological thinking with and through the body, and is directed towards community building processes motivated towards enhancing ecological futures. Since 2019 we have developed broad community alignments, inviting others to participate in co-creative embodiments and eco-civic actions.
Our eco-somatic work is developed through what we describe as the ‘multi-temporal body’, drawing on adaptive physical processes as a means to engage with diversity in the landscape through time-based movement practices in order to build communities of knowledge and wellbeing, in a slow but urgent devotion to radical change.
Guided by eco-feminist ethics, more-than-human philosophy and phenomenology, we focus on bringing rural communities together to share creative approaches to adaptation as a strategy for climate, cultural and societal change, moving towards a post carbon world.
We have created a broad range of adaptive site-based collaborative and participatory arts projects locally and abroad, working with key stakeholders in sustainability and environmental processes through our choreo-curatorial process.
These are described in this online site, but the radical archive is in the bodies of all who participate and in the space between them.
The Floating Village offers a transdisciplinary approach that applies our eco somatic method to explore layers of diverse bodily consciousness; to include deep listening (unearthing individual and collective repertoires holding cultural memory), somatic spatio-temporal practice (mapping composition), and geotemporal inquiry (geological and meteorological conditions).
Since 2018 we have been working with rural communities in transition using this transdisciplinary approach, drawing on place making and sense making. With academic backgrounds in fine art, theatre studies, philosophy, ecology and contemporary dance studies, we weave these critical fields to expand the relational; identifying multiple communication strategies, articulating thresholds between disciplines and inviting co-creative alchemy.
Dancing with other disciplines and embedded in an ecological matrix, we look to plants to teach us modalities of co-species inhabitation, adaptation and co-creation.
We are developing a choreo-curatorial process that …
radically hosts new audience/artist creative platforms
embraces inclusivity through invitation
reconfigures contemporary performance as a post-ritual practice
applies a social permaculture process as a means to bringing threshold knowledge to the centre
The Floating Village focuses on developing co-creative practice in rural contexts, through body and movement knowledge. Coming from dance, choreography and visual arts perspectives, this combined approach to body land relationships draws from both archaeological and ecological inquiry, exploring with urgency transdisciplinary methods to co-create with communities, both real (established) /imaginary (future). This forms a choreo-curatorial practice that is committed to nurturing an ethical space that can hold diversity and yet support creative autonomy, motivated by soft devotion to radical change.