Jiara Sha
Livable Futures graduate student fellow 2023-2024
Dance, Ecology, Technology, The Ohio State University
Biography
Bumping into, playing with, and meandering in different and ever-morphing movement modalities, I continue to wander and wonder, to be moving-moved, touching-touched, and sensing-sensed...
My current practice lives at the intersection of dance, ecology, and technology. i seek to create visceral and vulnerable encounters, where different bodies, materials (organic and artificial), and technology co-compose emerging and evolving mesh of relationships, where one relates to another in one’s own various and varying states of embodiment, moving-moved, and touching-touched by another in the dailiness as well as in moments of instability, disorientation, and fragmentation.
I attempt to explore dance-making as a practice of noticing, re-imagining, breathing into, and enlivening those spaces, paces, and relationships that fall outside of, in between, or at the fringe of our society’s normatively circumscribed orientations and temporalities.
Q & A
What makes more livable futures for you?
I am not sure how I think of “futures,” but in each moment, I am noticing, attending to, and moving with the flickering of livability in the cracks, between the edges, and at the fringe. From time to time, I find myself intrigued by a snail’s tentacles wiggling, a coral reef’s hyperbolic structure, a slime mold’s porous and morphing presence, or a diatom finding its habitat on a plastisphere; and fascinated with indigenous folk culture as well as the more-than-human world where co-presence, response-ability, and intra-active agency are embodied in their dailiness of being and living.
What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?
I am reading Erin Manning’s The Minor Gesture, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and re-reading Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. I am moved by Bayo Akomolafe’s pedagogical inquiry and “expedition into the posthumanist cracks, that swirl with new response-abilities” in troubling times. I am listening to and moving-moved with the minor pacings, unmooring sentiments, and feral perceptions, at the speed of curiosity, care, and trust.
What practices are sustaining you?
Contact improvisation, somatic practices, and wandering-wondering have been sustaining practices for me. Wandering in this more-than-human world, I wonder: how can dance afford us to attune to a subtle yet wondrous scale inclusive of different beings and things alongside us, participating in their shimmering, wiggling, and murmuring?