The seminar with Prof Nigel Stewart from Lancaster University marks the start of a series of meetings entitled Dance Ecologies curated by Katarzyna Pastuszak. The series will explore how performing arts address the post-humanist discourse and respond to the climate crisis.
02.06.2025, 13.30-15.00, UG Main Library
Moderated by Katarzyna Pastuszak (Between.Pomiędzy Research Group, Department of Performing Arts – Institute of English and American Studies, UG)
The series is organized by the More-Than-Human Studies Lab (Center for Sustainable Development UG) and the Between.Pomiędzy Research Lab (Department of Performing Arts Research, Institute of English and American Studies UG). As part of the first seminar in the Dance Ecologies series, Professor Nigel Stewart will give a lecture entitled The Four Epistemes of Environmental Dance: Spectacle, World, Dwelling, Void.
The lecture will survey Nigel Stewart’s four epistemes or paradigms of environmental dance. These are: Spectacle, typified by outdoor performances that emphasise visual representations of nature; World, characterised by socially engaged and eco-activist dance which provoke conversations about our responsibilities towards the natural world; Dwelling, exemplified by rural dance works that build a reciprocal relationship with the sites within which they are immersed; and Void, typified by some forms of butoh and other experimental somatic practices that confront unmasterable environments of unimaginable scale and force.
Nigel Stewart will give particular attention to methods from the World and Dwelling epistemes through which dance has generated alternative ways of understanding and knowing the other-than-human world that, in turn, suggest an entirely different basis for living in a sustainable partnership with it.
This lecture will refer to, but not be limited by, the following chapter: Stewart, Nigel (2015) “Spectacle, World, Environment, Void: Understanding Nature Through Rural Site-Specific Dance”, in Victoria Hunter (ed.) Moving Sites: Investigating Site-specific Dance Performance, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 364–84. ISBN: 978 0 415 71325 2. Published: 30 March 2015.
Attendees are encouraged to read this chapter beforehand, though this is not a requirement and any who don’t are equally welcome.
The seminar will be held in English.
The seminar with Prof. Nigel Stewart from Lancaster University is held as part of the UG “Visiting Professors” program (supervisor – Dr. Katarzyna Pastuszak.).
Nigel Stewart
Nigel Stewart – a dance artist and scholar. He is Artistic Director of Sap Dance and is presently Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, UK, and a Visiting Professor of Dance at the University of Gdańsk. He has danced for various European choreographers, including Thomas Lehmen, and as a solo artist. Apart from his choreography for Sap Dance, he has worked as a choreographer, director, and movement director for Louise Ann Wilson Company, National Theatre Wales, Odin Teatret, Theatre Nova, Theatreworks Ltd., Triangle and many other companies. He is currently developing a performance exploring the relationship between the pipe organ, the human body, and breath; and a solo choreographed from improvisations in the forests of California, Czechia, England, and elsewhere. Nigel is the author of many articles and chapters on contemporary dance, dance phenomenology and environmental dance; and is co-editor of Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts (Peter Lang 2005). He is currently completing two book- length series of essays. The first theorises environmental dance, including his own rural site- specific dance works, in terms of environmental aesthetics and values. The second uses phenomenology and hermeneutic ontology to explore the relationship between choreography and the visual arts in dance works by several twenty-first century choreographers.
