Slow Dancing is created in collaboration with a mated beaver pair, the three of us actively (and temporarily) interfering with the flow of a wetland stream and the lifeforms in that stream — the beavers, through the construction of their dam, and I by making simple formal dance postures with my feet in the stream nearby. The list of participants does not end there, however. Each of the wetland plants and all the life forms in that stream are also intimately involved in this entanglement

Various thinkers in evolutionary biology define environment as being nothing but the phenotypical expression of DNA code. This means that our DNA does not stop expressing itself at our fingertips, or in the case of a beaver, at their whiskers. Rather, they would argue that a beavers DNA, as an extended phenotype, continues to expand as far as the effects of their dam might reach (Dawkins, 2016).

My own research invites us to imagine these individual expressions of DNA as they intra-act with the extended phenotypes of others in a unique and ephemeral dance.