Geography
Claire Revol, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sciences Po Grenoble, PACTE, 38000 Grenoble, France

As a philosopher by training, my work explores the poetics of inhabiting and environmental aesthetics, brought about by contemporary urbanization challenges and ecological collapse. I am interested today in autoethnographic methods, sensorial experiences of inhabited spaces linked to dance or performance practices. With Céline Perroud, choreographer at Rotations culturelles, a company that explores the relations between gestures in dance and in working the land, gesture of living beings, we have developed a research creation workshop called “gestes entre ciel et terre” (gestures between Earth and Sky) on the occasion of Paysage > Paysage.

On one hand, the landscape studies were shaped, by a relation to the horizon and the perspective developed in painting, and on the other hand, as a transdisciplinary fieldwork of the relations between society and nature in space. In our days, the notion of landscape has fleshed out to take into account the multiplicity of meanings involved in the apprehension of the environment beyond the visual (through sound, soundscapes, smell smellscapes, touch etc…) and the environmental aesthetic that seizes on the notion of landscape to describe the embodied experiences of the environment, in particular through the ambiance and atmosphere of lived spaces.

By adhering to this line of thought, we wanted to explore how the landscape is not only an image, but the experience of the ground, the meeting point between the Earth and the Sky as Tim Ingold notes. What is the place of the subsoil, or of the celestial vault and the stars that run through it beyond the atmosphere, in our landscape experiences as we traverse it? Generalised urbanization has profoundly transformed the way in which human society inhabits the land: our ground is more often covered in concrete, light pollution deprives us of accessing the starry sky, the seated posture which deprives us of our bipedal verticality is omnipresent in daily computer work… With Celine Perroud’s collaboration, we have developed a protocol of movements and postures based on our body’s verticality, which resulted in a score. We played this score with workshop participants at a farm in the Trièves on an outdoor dance stage, in a grandiose landscape facing the mountains in the beginning of August. It was not a question of looking at this landscape, but of bringing the body into this posture allowing one’s verticality to resonate experientially between the Earth and Sky.

We decided to observe the various ways we grasped the landscape, by repeating the same score at different times of sun's path. This allowed us to play the score at four different times of the day: evening, night, dawn and noon. The score that took place for improvisation was followed by a writing and sharing workshop to allow us to make narratives of these experiences focusing specifically on the place of cosmic elements in our grasping of the landscape. It was under the burning sun of noon that we were able to the most clearly feeling of the polarities specific to the vertical axis in the body.

This work leads us to question our contemporary cosmologies, which takes various forms; on one hand, this work on a score thought in a given time and place, was extended by a Planetary Dance adapted from Anna Halprin’s score, that we hold with Jennifer Buyck's invitation to celebrate Earth’s overshoot day. I also consider that this experience put me through the beginning of an enquiry of geobiology practices – energy practices for the care of living beings and their relationship to their habitat – which consider human existence between Earth and Sky.

To quote: Claire Revol, “Landscape”, translated by Kieran Puillandre, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/fr/detail/177565