Notes on Musicallity
I moved house two years ago. Up until that time, I would walk along the banks of the Bow River on my way to work at the Central Library. Over time, whenever I found myself walking here, the urge to dance would overcome me. To be clear, the last thing I am thinking about while dragging myself into work for 9:00 am is dancing. Somehow, because my mind was not yet full of the day, the river had full reign over me. I thought of this experience when reading about the Weltgeiss (or musical laws of nature), a theory spawned by Estonian biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll who believed we are natures instruments, and that the music of nature is always being composed because it is always becoming. Uexküll envisioned nature's music as something that is not a creation of various life forms. Instead, he proposed that the environment, divided into highly specific fragments called Umwelten, influences and orchestrates the actions of individual organisms. All organisms are equipped with organs that allow them to perform the unique tune composed by their environment (Grosz 43). Looking back on those mornings along the river, I am able to see my body as the instrument it was, and how it was — quite remarkably — being played by the surrounding environment. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “We spill over into the world and the world spills over into us” (Wall Kimmerer 103). So there I was, this organism, spilling over in the very way I was specifically equipped to — being urged to play precisely the tune my milieu, the Bow River Valley, had composed for me.
Geologist Marcia Bjornerud (2020) reminds us that we live in a polytemporal world. The earth has many tempos, moods and modes, and there are rhythms and tempos slower than we can fathom in our brief human experience. She suggests in fact, that the world is made by and of time (Bjornrud 5). The conscious embodiment of these rhythms and tempos was what first struck me with the work of Nadia Vadori-Gauthier of Paris. She shares the same impulse to explore the effect of the vibrational movements of both water and non human life on her body and in the world. Through sensation and movement, she enters into a non-hierarchical and non-anthropocentric relationship with earth and space, but also into vibratory resonance with places and the materials of her surroundings (Vadori-Gauthier 2018).
Nadia Vadori-Gauthier, Une minute de danse par jour 15 07 2019/ danse 1644 8:58 p.m., Caussadere, Saint-Mezard, Gers. Wheat has been harvested, (One Minute of Dance a Day), Duration 02:00, Image courtesy of Nadia Vadori-Gauthier: http://www.uneminutededanseparjour.com/en/category/elements-nature/earth/
In an attempt to align myself with these (similar) vibrations, I search for the locus of them in my immediate environment, and document them through video. I absorb and align with the gentle fluid movements I find in water (currently in rivers and wetland streams that run through my city) as the water interfaces with the earth, the wind (air), the light, and other lifeforms. I also dance, but in the privacy of my studio. Through my body and my materials, I perform these vibratory movements. It is in this manner I come to understand the complexity of rhythms I experience in my surrounding environment. Moving them through my body is a way of processing and learning from them (Godoy and Leman, 8). The practice becomes a series of iterations through which I learn more about myself and the world I am intimately connected to.