Exploring The Body–Landscape Relationship Through Dance Film

In this paper, I reflect on the body–landscape relationship based on my experience with directing and choreographing my dance film Human Habitat in which a dancer takes us on a journey from a sustainable to a destructive relationship with the Arctic landscape. I outline the background and thoughts involved in producing a dance film in the Arctic and analyse the characteristics of the dancer’s bodily interventions with the landscape. I investigate the properties of being embedded in a processual landscape and examine the consequences of these properties for choreographing movement in a landscape. I further outline how the film evokes kinaesthetic empathy and therefore fulfils my intention of bringing the Arctic into people’s awareness. My examination has a phenomenological approach, and I draw on processual theories of landscape, material specificity and kinaesthetic empathy.