Abstract
Increasingly unstable climate events such as floods and other natural disasters have become part of the grand narratives of the Anthropocene that create distance, fear, anxiety, hysteria and apathy that are part of our everyday lives. In asking how can we-as-humans survive both the real and grand narratives of this epoch, my own survival story of Desperado (memories of our family sailing boat) became an anchor for COPE (Choreographies of Participatory Ecologies). These choreographies, as series of guided performances/survival tours, involved tactics and strategies/mechanisms that contributed to an ecology of participatory practice. The instructional video Lilo Safely drew together actions of rafting, resting and recovery as a way to take care of other, to deconstruct the instrumental way of being-with the planet, encouraging us to include the non-human, the neuro-diverse, into our own stories of surviving with and beyond, through the practice of Rafting-with.
Highlights
Unstable climate events such as floods and other natural disasters have become part of the grand narratives of the Anthropocene that create distance, fear, anxiety, hysteria and apathy that are part of our everyday lives
Lilo Safely: Instructional Video was developed as part of my research project into participatory performance practice, Choreographies of Participatory Ecologies, that became COPEing – where I enacted survival drills, boat trips and walking performances in Auckland, Dunedin, Prague, Lisbon, and Rarotonga in the Cook Islands
Lilo Safely was the beginning of the immersive performance, RAFTING, that was held in the Black Box studio at AUT University in Auckland, New Zealand as part of my final PhD examination in November 2017 (Houghton 2017a)
Summary
I embark on this research following the Māori proverb that describes an image of a person walking backwards into the future as a way of being in the world. I wondered how the threat of a changing climate would affect the way the sea might be experienced by our children These watery memories were located in my body, affecting the sense of where I had come from and where I was going, Desperado, my waka, was built from an individual kahikatea (New Zealand native tree) selected by my father from the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand. It was felled from a sustainable evoking a bodily experience of being a child at play, in submission to the powers of the ocean in an open way that has no fear: a release from control of our landbased existence. I peel back the layers of Desperado’s construction to its origin and sail this journey RAFTING INTO DARKNESS – ASSEMBLING in the skeletal frame of her hull within which I DIGITAL ARCHIVES situate the remains of my father’s memory
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