Whole part Whole

Dancing Fort Spokane. This site housed a TB hospital for Native Americans and briefly a Native American boarding school in the early 1900s. Located at the confluence of the Spokane R. with the Columbia River

This past year has been full of explorations of river, rock, trees, topography, and what matters about these. Once again, I find myself dividing up things - reducing them to their parts then putting them all back together into ‘landscape’. One of the tenants of somatic work through work is ‘Whole-Part-Whole” (from Irmgard Bartenieff)

The Pacific Northwest is the land of watersheds and systems thinking. Inherent in the ecological research (at least freshwater) is a very holistic (though hierarchical) viewpoint. This does not exist everywhere. For instance, during my time working on rivers in the Southeastern US this idea of cause and effect, continuity, whole-part-whole, and ‘watershed thinking’ was uncommon.

With streams, each scale makes up the whole - macrohabitat. stream reach (kilometers), stream network , to watershed to basin, ecoregion, and so on. Each unit and scale interacts and serves an ecological purpose. Cause and effect (an element of Systems thinking) aligns well with watershed studies, but also any kind of ecological study.

Abundant federal land, protected areas, undeveloped areas, outdoor recreation, water protection and conservation, The ‘River Continuum’ concept all led us to this point in thinking about connections and connectivity in our systems - especially streams and rivers. The Keystone vertebrates that really keep me thinking whole-part-whole? Fish - especially anadromous fish.

People are part of this whole-part-whole world. And different groups of people have different ways of being part of the ‘whole’. Emblematic species - like Pacific salmon = whole-part-whole and connectivity through their life history, natural history, and interaction across vast landscapes of the Columbia Basin and the Pacific Ocean. Where and how people connect to nature is where we can align our system to natural systems and connectivity. The felt-sense of this connection is what I am most interested in.

More visioning for the Global Water Dance project 2021. And trying to keep in mind that this one ‘part’ - an event or series of events over the next 5 months, is just that - a part of a bigger ‘whole’ of the work I want to do connecting art, science, landscape and embodied experiences.

#GlobalWaterDances

#LabanNature

#DanceEcology

#Danceyourgratitude

#LatindancerSpokane