Body Habitat collaboration project is fueled by a collective curiosity and investigation into the human body and its endeavors into and on the natural landscapes. The ones we either imagine or encounter: both wild and populated.
In addition to being dancers and artists, Body Habitat collaborators are natural scientists by both formal study (Lisa: geology, Lily: psychology) and through the honing processes of aging and the times we’ve inhabited the planet. From this focused perspective, body and planet became the frontiers still vitally alive and seductive to us. Our bodies and our planet are a continual object of affection, our palette, our messy medium, gallery, and stage all in one immense bundle. We’d be lying if we didn’t add that we’re attracted to the endless-ness of working with the body and planet, too. Just when we think we grasp a sense of something essential to being a human body, it slips through the fingers and toes like sand. Then there is goes into the next sensation or unrealized place, beckoning us further afield, into more and surprise.
Body Habitat project’s art is often time-based, like dancing our bundled up bodies with the trees and shrubbery in the oldest city park in Seattle, Washington on one of the coldest December days on record (2009). One day in our 6-day dancing in the urban landscape project. Or like six Body Habitat dancers each marking their personal territory making animal body “feral sculptures” in the sand at Manzanita Beach, Oregon in the early spring coastal-forest drizzle.
Body Habitat project’s art also thrives in improvisation and the assemblage of remnants. We photograph, video, audio-record, write and make things from, for, and of what we do, and the landscapes we inhabit. We sometimes dress in costume, or roll in the dirt, add a song, decorate our bodies in leaves and lichen. At the end of a project or somewhere along the way, we might present-show-share-listen-discuss what we are doing, thinking and feeling. We call this our performance art.
