Table Of ContentPALGRAVE STUDIES IN MOVEMENT ACROSS EDUCATION,
THE ARTS AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Dance, Place,
and Poetics
Site-specifi c Performance
as a Portal to Knowing
Celeste Nazeli Snowber
Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education,
the Arts and the Social Sciences
Series Editors
Alexandra Lasczik
Faculty of Education
Southern Cross University
Bilinga, QLD, Australia
Rita L. Irwin
Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy
The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
This series is a new and innovative proposition in the nascent and growing
space of movement studies. Emerging and established scholars who are
beginning to work within the contemporary practices and methods of
movement, seek resources such as this series seeks to provide. Education is
very much tied up within an awareness of space and place, for example, a
school can begin to take on an identity of its own, with as much learning
taking place within its corridors and playgrounds as occurs in the class-
rooms. As learners interact with these environments through movement it
is essential for researchers to understand how these experiences can be
understood, allowing for a very interdisciplinary approach. This series
specifically explores a range of movement approaches, including but not
limited to walking research, a relatively new and exciting field, along with
several other paradigmic lenses. The series will be commissioning in the
Palgrave Pivot format.
Celeste Nazeli Snowber
Dance, Place,
and Poetics
Site-specific Performance as a Portal to Knowing
Celeste Nazeli Snowber
Faculty of Education
Simon Fraser University
Surrey, BC, Canada
Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences
ISBN 978-3-031-09715-7 ISBN 978-3-031-09716-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09716-4
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To my beloved, Shawn
F
oreword
Dance, Place and Poetics: Site-Specific Performance as a Portal arrived
today with an invitation to sit with it, dance with it, and write a preface for
it. I was desperate to crack the cover and release the magic that I knew
would be set free, but I made myself wait, honouring the pedagogy of
contemplative pausing that Celeste’s work always inspires. I start the kettle
and spoon green chai into my favourite clay mug. Once I hear the rolling
of the water, I wait for it to cool slightly so as not to burn the tealeaves. In
these moments, I am cultivating a slowing down so that I can open myself
to the words waiting for me. Finally, I settle onto the chaise, book in hand.
As I read Celeste’s opening words, I was raised between the sea and a
field of blueberries in an island town on the edge of the wide-open Atlantic, I
am newly amazed how she manages to write my heart. Sliding into the
pages of her book is akin to the body’s sigh when it slips, chin deep, into
a soaker tub of just-hot-enough water sprinkled with essential oils and
fresh flower petals. Such a spiritual bathing calls on us to pause, to discon-
nect so that we might reconnect differently. This is the heart of embodied
inquiry—cultivating space to explore visceral knowing made possible by a
oneness with/in our inner and outer landscapes.
As I wander through Celeste’s ruminations and contemplations, I am
swept up and carried in her rhythmic responses (both poetic and dance) to
relationality with the earth. I cannot help but to engage in my own lus-
cious conversation with all creation and the natural world. She invites me
to attune—to enter into a living attention where the rhythm of my own
breathing is in relation to all things. Within this relationality, I find the
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viii FOREWORD
sacred. More than simply recalling those places and spaces that formed the
loom on which my own inner fibres were woven, I experience a visceral
recollection of being with/in those places. While I am not a dancer, the
earth and the sea have long called to me to move to their rhythms. Celeste’s
work and words remind me why, when I connect with my bodyspirit, I
cannot help but to dance on park benches, make snow angels in fresh
powder, and give myself to the sea, trusting its buoyancy to release the
burdens I forgot I carried.
The body knows what the mind cannot always articulate.
Celeste’s book is an invitation to be receptive to what is before us and
within us. It is a call to be open to the unexpected and to be surprised by our
emergence. Through this visceral intimacy, we recognize ourselves as stu-
dents of the earth, our bodies portals to wisdom born in relation with soil,
wind, water, and sand. You will find hope, humanity, and wholeness with/
in Dance, Place and Poetics: Site-Specific Performance as a Portal—not only
in Celeste’s visually, poetically, and rhythmically stimulating text but also
in the re/awakening it inspires in readers.
Dean, Faculty of Education Ellyn Lyle
Yorkville University,
Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
S e ’ P
erieS ditorS reFace
This is the third book in a series entitled the Palgrave Studies in Movement
Across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences. While the series is
focused on how movement may be practiced, lived and researched, across
an interdisciplinary plane of subjects and topics, each book brings to the
series a deeply engaging concept that draws us into a particular focus.
Celeste Nazeli Snowber offers us intimate yet socially engaged opportuni-
ties to experience dance, place and poetics through her conception of site-
specific performance as a portal to knowing. The work brings together her
commitment to embodied ways of knowing, learning and inquiry that
many of us associate with her scholarship and artistry. In this book, we
witness how it all comes together as she lingers with considering the peda-
gogy of place. Movement in this book is in everything—and indeed, there
are embedded videos to emphasize the duration of performance that lifts
off the page and into our places of being and becoming. She embodies,
enacts, enlivens, emboldens, and encourages: she is a dancer who lives and
breathes movement. The book will inspire all who read it to breathe deeply
and to move in new and refreshed ways. It will also inspire us to think dif-
ferently about the places we inhabit and how we respond to those places,
through a variety of lenses, critical and creative. We invite you to take up
the boldness of this work, in your own practices.
Bilinga, Queensland, Australia Alexandra Lasczik
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Rita L. Irwin
ix
a
cknowledgementS
This book has been long in the making. I feel I have been created and
recreated in my own practice of dancing, writing, and sharing these per-
formances over the years. I am in gratitude first of all to the natural world,
and the more-than-human world where I tread lightly and humbly walk
and dance as a guest. I am thankful for all the communities that I have
been part of over the years which have inspired me and have been a sup-
port to this work, including my arts-based research communities, dance
communities, Interplay community, and all the friends, colleagues, stu-
dents, and public who have attended performances.
In particular I am grateful to the staff at the UBC Botanical Garden,
including Dr Tara Moreau, Andy Hill, and Douglas Justice who have had
so many conversations in one form or another while I was an Artist in
Residence and beyond. Their passion, vitality, expertise, and love for all
things botanical and its importance within the scope of the planet has been
an inspiration. I am also thankful to the photographers over the years who
have been with me on performances and taken photos of this work in such
sensitive and thoughtful ways. Chris Randle, Carolyn Sullivan, Tamar
Haytayan, Ron Long, Yuya Takeda, Michele Mateus, Wendy Wagner, and
Martin Elliot—you are all artists who bring an aesthetic lens to everything
you see and capture.
I am thankful to Rita Irwin and Lexi Lasczik who have spearheaded this
series on Movement in Education and Palgrave for taking up this work.
Both Rita and Lexi have been amazing art-based scholars who continue to
inspire me and without their vision, this series would not be possible.
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