Anthropogenic climate change brings South Pacific Island states into the focus of global attention. Due to low elevations South Pacific Islands are put in a precarious position, since rising sea levels threaten the livelihoods of their inhabitants. Aaccording to the latest IPCC report, as early as the next decade the first island states could be uninhabitable. The precariousness of South Pacific Island states and their inhabitants is exacerbated by the fact that climate migration is not yet recognized as a reason for flight under current legal definitions.
Against this backdrop, the doctoral project builds on D. Castillo‘s exploration of climate change and the bodily experience of it. In addition to a performance and a choreographic work, in which he artistically explored the individual experience of changing environmental conditions in exchange with inhabitants of South Pacific Island states, he deepened his understanding of choreography as epistemological and social practice in times of climate change during the PhD Academy ‚Re-presencing‘ Venice in the time of climate change (Venice International University). Based on an understanding of social choreography that situates the social dimension of choreographies in the moment of the aesthetic – and thus in the individual, bodily perception and experience of a dancer – two focal points form the central research interest of this dissertation: (1) The theoretical discursivization of one‘s own precarious bodily experience and (2) the bodily negotiation of the postcolonial phenomenon ‚climate change‘ in choreographies of South Pacific dance companies.
