Contribution short abstract:

In Ulaanbaatar, at a choreographic workshop titled Lost Rivers, it was in circles, under one sky, where participants learnt to move together, beyond cultural differences, to respond to an ecological crisis. Choreography, this paper suggests, offers creative ways to deal with the politics of crises.

Contribution long abstract:

In Mongolia, people believe we all live under two domes: the dome of the ‘ger’ and the dome of ‘tenger’. While the ‘ger’ symbolises the domestic family, ‘tenger’, literally meaning the sky, gestures towards a shared world in which we all live. This paper reflects on the author’s participation in a weeklong choreographic workshop in Ulaanbaatar, both as a mover and an anthropologist. The workshop was part of a larger experimental art project titled Lost Rivers. Recursively analysing, on the one hand, the conceptual discussions during the workshop and, on the other hand, the choreographic process of movement development, the paper seeks, ambitiously, to put into dialogue two different kinds of circularity that emerged during the workshop. Conceptually, participants highlighted that, contrary to the temporal linearity underpinning discourses of the Anthropocene, Mongolian cosmology espouses the cyclicity of life. Rivers may disappear temporarily, but the right human deeds could persuade spirits to revive the rivers. Choreographically, our collective work developed around circular movements that conjured images from water vortices to a flaming fire. Each day of rehearsal began with movement exercises in a circle, where we practiced how to sense and respond to one another. Both conceptual and movement differences, which some scholars would call ‘alterities’, prevailed during rehearsals. However, rather than overcoming such differences, the choreographic modality compelled a privileging of connections, correspondences, and creativity. It was in circles, under one sky—the ‘tenger’, where we learnt to be together, move together, and make something together, beyond analytically delineated differences.