“Rewilding the Body” Performance – INSTINCT Dance Festival

Rewilding The Body begins, of course, with wildness — the idea of it, the space it occupies in the human mind. People travel to wild places seeking to “reconnect with nature”, to be faced with landscapes so “other”, so magnificent and unknown, as to be shocked into feeling alive. But humans, like any animal, are natural. We ourselves are nature. Moreover, most of the landscapes we consider ‘wild, ‘untouched’, or ‘pristine’ are not so at all, having existed in sustainable symbiosis with human stewardship for thousands of years. Still, the feelings evoked by these landscapes are strong, they open a sense of loss so deep we’ve forgotten it’s there. It is something within us that wild nature triggers, an inner wilderness. But what is ‘wild’ exactly? A renunciation of control? Identity beyond categorization? A return to instinct? And what is wildness today? Can reinhabiting it in the here and now help break the mold of colonial extraction, in which ‘wild’ framed a racial otherness and inexhaustible natural world against which to define civilization and progress? This piece — a trio for a dancing body, a live sound set, and projections — is a question: can we rewild the body? But it is also a proposal and declaration: yes, we can, we must, like our lives depended on it – because they do. It is a letting go, but also a coming home.

By Anna Riley-Sheppard with Lana Harris (Sound) & Skip Rosamilia (Visuals)

​