Life Moves: Inspired by the borderlands - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Celeste Nazeli Snowber
Borderlands between water and land inspire my body to move. In my site-specific dance, I am invited into a linguistics of creation where the slowing down of time provokes a somatic response. As a landscape dancer and writer, I am caught in the poetics of the natural world, drawn to call and respond to the moving elements of the earth, which move through me. For almost three decades, I have danced in connection to the British Columbia terrain, conscious of being a visitor on this earth. I dance, wander, and wonder on the unceded traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples.
My love of walking in nature has, over the years, turned to dancing in places between land and sea, shoreline paths, and marine parks. My site-specific dance practice has birthed poetry, books (including the forthcoming Dance, place and poetics: Site-specific performance as a portal to knowing) and dance performance which I share with public audiences in a variety of settings.
I explore inner and outer landscapes, where movement and poems arise from the textures of water, sky, wind. My body is the earth and the earth is my body, a reciprocal relationship between nature and flesh. This is a conversation, not a performance, in which I listen and respond to the changing colours, weather patterns, birdsong, and tides. Ultimately I am a tidal creature, formed by the Atlantic, where I was raised, and transformed by the Salish Sea on the edge of the Pacific, where I have lived most of my adult life. Site-specific performance becomes an art of moving backwards and forwards — a perceiving with my whole body.
Somehow, I cannot merely walk on the path, but am called to move my limbs in response to the animate earth. I am invited into a deep somatic attentiveness, where art emerges. I am created and recreated in this dance practice — humbled to be dancing upon humus, in partnership with sea and wind, herons and eagles, never knowing who may appear from the more-than-human world. I move in awe as a lover of creation, in the company of a world brimming with life.
Through these conversations, I know there is an environment in danger, and that I am part of this ecology, not separate. Dancing in relation to the land and sea opens up a deep communion with the earth, where everything is connected. Sensuous knowledge becomes the inspiration to be an advocate for caring for the planet in a time of ecological crisis. The earth roots me in my body and I become porous for the living creation to work within.
There are lessons here — dance has brought them to me. There is a profound change within the human spirit when dancing in and with the natural world. A poetic grammar touches the depths of being and unleashes the textures of a wild landscape, even on the edge of urban life. Through the soles of my feet, the breath in my lungs, I listen to the pulse of the earth.
