Heart of the Earth

Heart of the Earth explores our body’s reciprocal relationship with the places we inhabit and our need for wild untamed spaces. Shot in Golden Canyon in Death Valley National Park the film investigates the latent movement of the rocks, canyons, and cliffs through the moving body. By engaging the somatic movement practice of Authentic Movement, we encourage witnessing and embodying landscape as a way to intimately know a particular place. We invite sensing instead of making sense, encouraging direct experience with the natural world. We begin our process by simply being with and witnessing a particular environment, noticing the subtle shifts in light as the day progresses, the communication between local animals, and the direction of the winds. We then move with the landscape, mirroring the shapes of the local plants and animals to experience their movement, stillness, sense of rhythm and tone in our bodies. The sand, rocks and sage brush cease to be inert objects of perception with dancer at the center, but rather animate entities with which the dancer and camera are in conversation. There are many ways to engage, disrupt, shift and heal our communities, selves, and environment. This film is a quiet revolution of deep presence encouraging listening and conversation where we experience ourselves not as the center, but as a thread in a larger fabric of being.