Line Dancing with the Land: Embodying Place and Community

With communities around the world facing intensifying impacts of climate change and increased risk to natural hazard events, fostering tight-knit and resilient communities is necessary now more than ever. In this paper, I synthesize pre-existing research examining the value of dance – especially outdoor, communal dance – as an opportunity to create connection to self, land, and others. I also review historical/social patterns that have created a barrier in land-body connections in settler colonial culture. An additional component of this capstone, which is summarized and discussed in this essay, is an outdoor movement session which I hosted for WWU students as well as Bellingham community members at a city park, which was followed by an open discussion regarding my aforementioned research topics. By combining these approaches to understanding the value of outdoor community dance as an intervention towards resilience, I have underlined a yearning for joyful spaces of creativity, opportunities to connect with the land in reinvigorating ways, a hope for long-lasting community spaces, and an understanding of the impacts of settler colonialism on our role within nature. Through this collection of knowledge, I encourage readers to seek out ways to join or create communities that emphasize these strengths, and to center joy and dance amidst challenging and destructive times.