Presentation short abstract

This talk explores frictions and dilemmas emerging in dancing-with Utterslev marsh as a multispecies care practice in more-than-human ecologies. I ask how relations and (a)symmetries of care are reshuffled, as I recognise that perhaps the marsh is my caregiver rather than the other way around.

Presentation long abstract

Since 2020, I have been dancing on a platform by Utterslev marsh, a nature-culture in Copenhagen. The marsh is protected, recognized as the second-largest designated natural area in Copenhagen; a lively and living place, full of birds, snails, insects. However, the marsh is also heavily polluted, and the pollution occasionally results in mass death of fish and other animals by asphyxiation.

Utterslev marsh is a place I grieve, love and try to care for. I feel that we have become witnesses, friends and kin. I started dancing on the platform during the COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark, a very lonely time in my life. I would go to the platform almost every morning; I would watch the seasons and the weather change. I would notice more and more with each morning, with each passing year.

Dancing, I honor the ecologies and multi-species lifeworlds of the marsh. I offer my time, the energies and the movements of my body. Dance is a form of embodied listening, of moving-with, a caress in motion.

At the same time, I am haunted by questions of what I really (can) do for the marsh, questioning myself as an invader. I feel that my dancing perhaps mostly benefits me. I am but a recipient of the care from the marsh. This re-positioning, while ripe with ethical dilemmas, offers possibilities for practicing gratitude, porosity, for un-mastering my ways of being-with the more-than-human world; and a re-shuffling of asymmetries in care relations.