A conversation with Emma Bigé

A conversation with Emma Bigé about her book Mouvementements. The Ecopolitics of Dance, published by La Découverte in 2023.

Emma Bigé studies, writes and translates in the fields of dance, queer studies and environmental inhumanities. A Doctor of Philosophy, dancer and exhibition curator, she teaches epistemology at art schools and choreography centres. The rest of the time, she lives near a forest in the Périgord region and, whenever possible, rolls around on the ground.

About Mouvementements:
“Mouvementements. Movements within me which are not of me, movements through which I become conscious of my interdependencies with other earthly beings. Movements of my breathing, movements of my digestion, movements of my posture, which is constantly adjusting to gravity. 

When you spend time in dance studios, here’s what you can learn: we, human mammals, inhabitants of Terra, are jostled by a multitude of forces. Far from being motorised, far from being contained or containable in the little factories of our bodies, we are brimming over. Scientific ecologies persuade us of this; political ecologies call on us to make it an insurrectionary movement. And what if we learn, through somatic ecologies, to feel and celebrate our more than human excesses? At a time when earthly upheavals are increasing in number, this book examines how some forms of dance (collective improvisation, somatic practices, choreographic installations) are attempting to develop, within the folds of the globalised world, antidotes to anaesthesia. How we can weave our movements beyond the false boundaries of the individual and the human being. How we can dance-feel-think the tangle of our movements".

Admission free, subject to availability.

Photo credit: © defne erdur