Contribution short abstract:

While we have yet to adequately address anthropogenic climate change, artistic practice offers insights into sensing and comprehending our changed relations with the world. Sydney Dance Company’s Impermanence, a response to Australia's Black Summer fires, offers ways to feel these challenges.

Contribution long abstract:

The climate crisis grows, swells and inundates, pushing life and lives, human and more-than-human, perhaps beyond what can be endured. Yet, we who have produced this have yet to address this in any adequate way; indeed, we appear to be standing still. Bruno Latour (2018) argues that anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a matter of concern that involves learning ‘how to get our bearings, how to orient ourselves’ (p 2, emphasis in original) towards these futures. Yet, as Justin Westgate points out, ‘the challenges of the Anthropocene are therefore many, but the immediate one is with sensing and comprehending it’ (2017: 238). One problem is that use of the language of ‘extinction’ draws on responses that are not immediately visible or felt.

Artistic practices offer ways to feel, think, move and listen to these challenges. This paper focuses on Sydney Dance Company’s Impermanence conceived in response to the traumatic damages wrought by fire, initially that of Notre Dame in 2019 and then the Australian Black Summer fires of 2019-2020. This performance offers an exploration of both human and more-than-human mobilities as bodies and sound make visible the underlying narrative of these fires and their devastation, what may be thought of as “pretheoretical intuitions” (Roholt 2014) of bodily capacities in movement as a means to explore what happens ‘when we cease to understand the world’ (Labatut 2020).