“Whitewater Exercises” is a video collage capturing a five hour window in which I engaged in information gathering with Forti and Naumann’s movement styles. I consider this a process piece leading to the development of my larger project on the relationship of art and conservation, ultimately to an artist/ranger sensory water walk project.
Movement and repetition are methods of corporeal research that can bring about both an awareness of the self and an awareness of one's surroundings. In search of enduring ways to create intimacy and understanding between ourselves and our natural surroundings, I set out to use two established methods of exaggerated body movement to explore the riparian habitat of Whitewater Preserve. I chose Simone Forti’s “Crawl” and Bruce Naumann’s “Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square” to contrast a dancer and an artist’s methods for the purposes of establishing my own method of repetitive exploration specifically for riparian habitats.