Abstract
This article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic engendered a sort of global, yet unequal, liminal phenomenon. Further, ritual and performance may occur as responses to such liminal crises and act as a form of Turnerian social drama, whereby mankind attempts to ‘relive, re-create, retell, and reconstruct their culture’ (St John 2008, 6). Confronted with such a socio-environmental crisis, London-based dancer Hayley Matthews attempted to harness this inchoate potentiality, as well as her own vulnerability, to critique the structures under which she lived before. First, I introduce Matthews’ work and the network of women performing outdoors she founded, ‘Sanctuary on the Fault Line’. Ethnographic descriptions of Matthew’s performance provide contextual illustrations of her motivations and ambitions as she seeks to ‘rewild dance’. The article demonstrates how communities of practice and liminality act as useful frameworks to examine green training methodologies which attempt to critique some of the economic, social, and environmental barriers dance artists face in the UK. Examining Sanctuary as an anti-structural case-study developed during a liminal re-examination of social structure provides a significant glimpse into the complicated tension between the ideals of egalitarian eco-narratives and the regimented structures they attempt to circumvent.
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