Conceptualising the Natural and What Embodying This Might Feel Like
By Zara
Following on from the points addressed in the previous article, I am writing with awareness that what is ‘natural’ and what ‘natural’ means, is interpretable and varies between individuals.
We investigated an assortment of explanations for the noises we had found, explanations that we had both learnt to characterise as ‘natural’. We questioned whether these were truly ideals or not through creating further experimental material that encapsulated how we would experience existing in such situations. For example, one of the many explanations for the initial noises we were working with was that these were sounds of pain.
I searched for and experimented with noise samples that could similarly be interpreted as noises expressing pain. The idea of an animal in serious pain should be upsetting and yet imagining the noises as an animal’s voice expressing pain only made us want to laugh. This could have perhaps been due to how uncomfortable we would be with opting for a more serious response, yet if there was a genuine cat in front of us, injured and making those noises, we knew we would not respond so lightheartedly…
This then caused us to start considering the nuance of these recordings being low-quality and evidently artificial, and to start considering and how this made the cause and the details of the sound ambiguous and indiscernible. This lead us to question how we could use low-quality aesthetics in the music track. We were interested in how low-quality audio was audibly an artificial reproduction, and how due to being artificial, it involved the loss of detail and made us feel particularly confused and unsure about the cause and deeper context of the noises. We were developing our visions of nature and the natural through this degraded digital audio and a limited insight. We felt this reflected our broader understanding of our concepts of nature and what is primal and decided to incorporate this aesthetic into the music, using the original audio found online.
I danced to the noises imagining that this was what the sound was expressing, and furthermore that I was the animal in pain. The movement material and experience of dancing made me experience feelings of disenfranchisement and powerlessness. Common motifs in my material involved the hands behind the back and small, enclosed positions.
As uncomfortable as I was with it, I had interpreted pain as an integral and fundamental part of nature, vital in order to sustain its existence, and much less controlled or alleviated with interventions among natural life. My idea of living ‘naturally’ would involve me existing without access to many interventions and tools to control many forms of both physical and emotional pain. According to my concepts of what is ‘primal’ or ‘natural’, living more ‘naturally’ in today’s world could move those who do so further to the bottom of health disparities, hypothetically undermining relative freedoms, agency and social mobility, which again exemplified how universally romanticising my own concept of the ‘natural’ was a flawed mistake of mine.
According to my own notions of the ‘natural’, the idea of living more naturally in a world where it seems nearly everywhere and everyone is tied to and affected by power structures, and inequitably dependent upon economic systems for support, safety and stability, seemed more complicated than at first glance. I wanted to reflect this in my dancing and the experience of trying to embody one’s learnt concept of ‘the natural’ in a world that under many circumstances makes this difficult and unfair [1].
We wanted to investigate what it would mean to us, here and today, to live more ‘naturally’, from the standpoint of what our own learnt concepts of what ‘natural’ meant and what this meant for our own bodies and ways of living. We wanted to explore why it seemed so appealing and yet how this would truly feel to us, as beings tied to and dependent on today’s infrastructures, to speak broadly, covering and connecting the respectively different ways in which we had felt restricted by concepts of ‘the natural’. As the project progressed it became more and more evident to us that we were working with raw emotional responses to imagery and concepts, in order to paint subjective depictions of them coloured by our associations, and to develop commentary on the experience of trying to fulfil conceptualised roles.
We both had different reasons we felt that setting expectations using questionable and interpretive concepts of what is ‘natural’ upset and restricted us, and wanted to find a means of catharsis for this. We both were also ourselves guilty of having romanticised our own subjective ideas of the natural.
[1] OECD. (2019). 2 Inequalities in health and its determinants. In Health for Everyone?: Social Inequalities in Health and Health Systems. (pp.44-89) Paris, France: OECD Publishing. doi: https://doi.org/10.1787/3c8385d0-en