What takes your breath away? Notes towards somatic training in times of ecological crises

Evoking our environments as collaborators and interlocutors in performance training through the attentive modes that somatic approaches foster moves towards an open, responsive readiness as a foundational skill for performance training in times of climate crisis. Paying attention to the continuous collective cycles of sensory-motor looping, breathing, learning, and unlearning re-centres the focus of training towards a speculative practice that looks for ways and spaces for all bodies to access creative modes of being and to hone these skills together over time. The theories and practices entwined in this article emerge from the bodying forth of training in a university setting, including teaching in undergraduate and postgraduate settings and also from practice-based research projects. Developing this work forms a somatic-poesis approach, that is, a making with and through the body moving, the body in its doing, undoing, and redoing; its being, becoming and unbecoming. It is a training practice based in movement embedded with all other sensory registers; its score always starts in the middle. This is not neat, linear, or always explicit; there are interruptions and distractions that offer their own ways of knowing through image and text.