Dance Culture, Ecology, and Wellbeing

The Anthropocene era marks an acceleration of environmental devastation through urban-industrial development, globalization, and overpopulation, impacting the health, wellbeing, and survival of all species on Earth. Anthropocentrism, which emphasizes human dominion over the natural world, fuels this existential crisis. Conflict, disenfranchisement, and instability, exacerbated by intensifying global economic-political uncertainty, deepen feelings of precariousness. Artists, scientists, and educators recognize that addressing these complex times requires a paradigm shift toward more nature-centric approaches to sustain life’s complex, intertwined web. Rising to the challenge are dancers who understand the primacy of motion to animate human-nonhuman relations that may disrupt anthropocentric discourse and positively transform the planet. My claim, which inspired interdisciplinary research that began in 2020, provides a springboard for this article focused on the study of dance culture through an ecosystem lens, necessitating mutual interaction between people and their environment. Indigenous concepts of relationality that value interconnectedness and interdependence offer critical perspectives on sustainable ecosystems, characterized as increasingly diverse and unpredictable. The discussion considers how movement, intrinsic to dance culture, facilitates relational reciprocity, to adapt and survive in dynamic contexts. Dance cultural knowledge systems that further ecological relations heighten wellbeing by practicing encounters with difference to navigate change. This approach moves toward an applied theory of dance anthropology or the study of dance culture, which restores and rehabilitates the system’s function to grow, develop resilience, and thrive in the future.