Presented by The Blackwood in collaboration with Toronto Dance Theatre
Do nerves, rivers, skies, spit, dreams, drool, and language separate or bind us? If scenes of intimacy are spaces of sharing, are they also spaces of separation?[i] How can we attend to ethical dispositions, erotic edges, and aesthetic commitments to the world and those with whom we share it? How are the ethical and political being redefined by queer conceptions of intimacy and sex ecologies?[ii] As the earth’s resources are depleted and bodies are spent, how is our overflowing expressed? Is the future of our wet dreams to be realized at or beyond the edges of what is already known?[iii] How do the performing arts reconsider the intimacy between touching and trusting and knowing, and what is accounted for in that reconsideration? What can be learned or unlearned from intimacy coordination and choreography for new ways of acting, living, sensing, and thinking in this world?[iv]
How can we attune ourselves to the world-to-come? Presented alongside three choreographic works premiering in Toronto in winter 2024—Weathering, FACE RIDER, and Odd-Sensual—the Attunement Sessions inquire into the profound aesthetic, environmental, geopolitical, philosophical, sexual, social, and technological questions necessary to approach difficult problems about how we live, think, act, build, sense, and move together towards an imperiled future.
Through artistic provocations, thought-experiments, and experiential exercises, the sessions foreground the necessity for deeper attunement to the processes of destruction and disaster making the world as we know it (accumulation, alienation, contamination, disembodiment, displacement, extinction, extraction, settlement…) and forms of composing and imagining the future we want to live in (affinities, edgings, interdependencies, proximities, solarities, wet dreams…).
Framed by a series of questions, the sessions bring together choreographed and improvised, intimate and planetary, descriptive and speculative approaches by participants from diverse disciplines and practices including art history, black studies, choreography, dance studies, decolonial environmental humanities, disconnection studies, feminist science & technology studies, Indigenous philosophy, intimacy coordination, poetry, queer and transgender studies, visual arts, and more.
[i] John Paul Ricco, The Decision Between Us: Art & Ethics in the Time of Scenes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
[ii] See Sex Ecologies, ed. Stefanie Hessler (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021).
[iii] In the words of Erin Robinsong, “Of minglement, before or during, 400 years of a dry dream.” See her new book of poetry Wet Dream, an expansive ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Wet Dream (Kingston: Brick Books, 2023).
[iv] For more on the practical and contextual skills of intimacy coordination, see CINTIMA at https://www.cintima.co/.
