It is already quite a while ago I read the book Geographies of Us. Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages edited by Sondra Fraleigh and Shannon Rose Riley (Routledge 2024) The reason I started reading it is because I contributed a small text as one of the practice pages and wanted to know it what kind of context it ended up in. If I would have understood the scope of the book I would have included a bit more theory and reflection, but anyway, the book is a fascinating collection and I am happy that Shannon Rose Riley invited me to join. She edited with Lynette Hunter one of the first books about performance as research, Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research – Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) which I contributed to as well. Geographies of US is a strange title, which probably refers to the attempt at taking a global rather then US-centric view. Most of the contributions are linked to dance and to philosophy, the main interests of Sondra Fraleigh, a well known figure even outside the dance world, but span across indigenous approaches, de-colonial awareness and place thought, with texts by Adesola Akinleye, philosopher Edward S. Casey and many, many others, all in all 20 chapters divided into four parts with fascinating titles: Part I Enworlding, Rewinding, Decentering, Transit/Pluraling, Performing, Attending to, Dancing; Part II Horse, Lion, Queer Animal, Skin; Part III Tree, River, Carbon, Stone and Part IV Place, Plasma, Pluriverse, Potato.
The text I found most affinities with is, unsurprisingly Riley’s “Moving with Cats” (158-182), not only because of the focus on performing with cats and lions and post-human theory but also because of an explicit reference to performance as research as methodology. I did, however, turn some corners in the article by Casey, “Awe and Empathy” (316-332) to remember terms like co-implacement, the idea that “place in the natural realm is never entirely isolated” but “exists always and only in relation to other places” in a “composition made up of a set of contiguous places”. (319) And “affect transmission”, a term used by Cynthia Willett, that takes place in animal communication as clusters of affects “that together signify entire states of emotional being” and “become building blocks of entire animal societies”. In the case of trees or fungi he prefers to speak of “significant forms of intra-species and interspecies semiosis” rather than affect (328).
I should have turned more corners, though. The book is filled with different ways of combining body and place, site and identity and movement and many of the practice pages included exercises or suggestions.
 
 
Fraleigh, Sondra & Riley, Shannon Rose (eds.) Geographies of Us. Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages Routledge Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance. London and New York: Routledge 2024.