Dancing with hyperobjects: Ecological Body Weather choreographies from Height of Sky to Into the Quarry

Abstract

Abstract Timothy Morton claims that hyperobjects – things ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’ such as global warming, the total sum of all the nuclear materials on earth, a weather system – have completely altered how we think and experience, forcing us into confronting the fact that we must relate to them as fellow objects. In this article I argue that Body Weather-based dance practices, developed by Japanese dancer Min Tanaka on his Hakushu farm in Japan between 1985 and 2010, attempt to form corporeal and kinaesthetic relationships with hyperobjects through training dancers to sensitize their bodies to their existence as part of what Morton calls the mesh. I discuss two Body Weather-related projects: Morleigh Steinberg’s 2004 film Height of Sky about Oguri’s two-year danced investigation of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts of Southern California, and my own work in North Texas, Into the Quarry. This work, I suggest, provides a model for how to develop a radically different relationship with our environment, one based on the mutual interconnection of interobjectivity.