Meeting the Universe Halfway

The working title of the work, Meeting the universe halfway, more familiarly MUH, refers to Karen Barad's book of the same name. Inspired by it, in this work, we strive to place ourselves on the edge of the wider (more-than-human) and the interactions of the body's

materiality (intra-action) through the practices of art. Holistic bodily listening expands our awareness to experience ourselves and each other as part of a larger whole, a constantly re-forming field of energy/materiality. We experience that the body, viewed as energetic (or vibration, noise or resonance), remains non-instrumental, because energy as a concept reaches for something beyond the visible form of the objectified body. It is something that connects us to both our own inner being and the rest of the world/universe. We are at once the same and yet different.

We like MUH as a way to seek and increase understanding of the materiality of the body and the radical experience of being part of the materiality of the world that opens up through it, through the professionalism and practices of art. It is precisely in this, in somatic identification with the environment (ecosomatics) and on the other hand in agency supported by the body, that lies the topicality and politics of energetic work.

We are considering how the dancer's practised bodily listening can turn into a poetic terrain of words, which, by listening with headphones, the audience member can find alongside and in between watching, routes to understand and experience the world more richly through their own bodily listening and visualisation. Can the boundaries of the body be dissolved in a positive way, making space to recognise and know our own and shared corporeality more powerfully? To this end, one phase of the project is to produce a poetic text and edit and record it. This work has already been done to some extent in previous residencies, and that knowledge, as well as the know-how accumulated through Energpriests' other projects utilising the art of words, creates a strong foundation on which to build the textual world of the project. At the end of this application, you can find an excerpt from the text written by Krista-Julia Arpo for the project in 2020 as an example of the terrain we have moved through so far.