tethered:
in the echoes of movementbodies within landscapes
26–08–2021
︎ movement, photography, writing
︎ more-than-human world, phenomenology, sense of place
︎ Hampstead Heath, London, UK
︎ co-authorships
Photographer Elena Torrano and Dance Artist Yasmine Lindskog Visanko collaborated on this shoot in Hampstead Heath, London, UK. They explored how the body relates to natural landscapes. How the body embodies the spaces it inhabits, moves with the landscapes, and how landscapes in turn support the moving body. Blurring and blending the lines where the body converges with nature.
Credits
Photography by Elena Torrano
Movement/Writing by Yasmine Lindskog Visanko
As a dance artist, I’ve always felt movement traversed art and athleticism. Being this converging point where art and sports meet. However, as I carried on with dancing through the years, I came to the realization that movement is not only an art and a sport, but rather a philosophy of life, a way of living, being, and feeling with your entirety.
Movement offers these cathartic experiences of releasing trauma, emotions, and connecting so deeply to the self, the other, the world. Movement invites people, place, nature, and energy into the body. Openly twirling the dance of the other together, dissolving the defined and distinguished and creating a rare moment of existing within the in-between, the echoes, the ambiguity. Movement is a perpetual becoming of collaborative endeavors, shared authorships, and physical negotiations.
The impermanent nature of dance, the fleeting art form that it is, is what creates this deeply understood way of living. Of experiencing with the acute awareness that this moment will never be lived again; of welcoming vulnerability and indulging in the pleasure of risks; of attending to the other and having the capacity to listen, notice, respond; of creating magnificent and imaginative worlds within empty spaces; of maintaining playfulness at any age and time; of embodying the places we are a part of in order to feel the genius loci; of discovering the hidden language within the body.
Whether it be through the experience of watching movement, or moving yourself, these values, qualities, ethos of movement, endure through any perspective you hold. In the ephemerality, we are arrested by presence and drawn into the intricate worlds the moving body echoes through space and time.
Movement is an art that can never be captured, archived, or notated. Within its existence of experiencing, feeling, and reciprocating energy between the presence of others, the art that occurs in that moment of time can never be contained. The feeling of the moment can never be felt in its entirety through films, Labanotation, or photography. It can only be experienced in the now, and asks for total attentiveness and presence, and afterwards it is merely a ghostly echo of what materialized. Perhaps in our world heavily infiltrated by images, there is something calming about knowing that movement can never be caged. The giddy and anticipated energy of the unexpected, the unknown, something about to happen, to unfold, lives on. We can only be ready, at any given time, to immerse ourselves into the presence and spontaneity of movement.
Movement offers these cathartic experiences of releasing trauma, emotions, and connecting so deeply to the self, the other, the world. Movement invites people, place, nature, and energy into the body. Openly twirling the dance of the other together, dissolving the defined and distinguished and creating a rare moment of existing within the in-between, the echoes, the ambiguity. Movement is a perpetual becoming of collaborative endeavors, shared authorships, and physical negotiations.
The impermanent nature of dance, the fleeting art form that it is, is what creates this deeply understood way of living. Of experiencing with the acute awareness that this moment will never be lived again; of welcoming vulnerability and indulging in the pleasure of risks; of attending to the other and having the capacity to listen, notice, respond; of creating magnificent and imaginative worlds within empty spaces; of maintaining playfulness at any age and time; of embodying the places we are a part of in order to feel the genius loci; of discovering the hidden language within the body.
Whether it be through the experience of watching movement, or moving yourself, these values, qualities, ethos of movement, endure through any perspective you hold. In the ephemerality, we are arrested by presence and drawn into the intricate worlds the moving body echoes through space and time.
Movement is an art that can never be captured, archived, or notated. Within its existence of experiencing, feeling, and reciprocating energy between the presence of others, the art that occurs in that moment of time can never be contained. The feeling of the moment can never be felt in its entirety through films, Labanotation, or photography. It can only be experienced in the now, and asks for total attentiveness and presence, and afterwards it is merely a ghostly echo of what materialized. Perhaps in our world heavily infiltrated by images, there is something calming about knowing that movement can never be caged. The giddy and anticipated energy of the unexpected, the unknown, something about to happen, to unfold, lives on. We can only be ready, at any given time, to immerse ourselves into the presence and spontaneity of movement.