Dancing with the Stars: Learning to Move like the Earthlings We Are

If behind our ecological destruction lies a worldview of human exceptionalism and exemptionalism, at surface level our actual living—“our” referring to the civilizational majority and our coexistence—is characterized not by accumulation and acceleration, but, I will claim, by a trembling standstill. We think we are steadily evolving and growing, but in reality we are the sedentary ones. We grind and grind but never get anywhere. It’s not that we don’t move but that our movement is rigid and nervous. We have grown pandemically impaired, strangely immovable in spite of our incessant rush. How can we begin to relax this retrograde movement? No simple solution suffices, so I explore not a singular answer but an approach: dancing as a loving affirmation of an ontological intimacy that is endemic to the very fabric of our planet and our own embeddedness within a wider ecological self. How might a dancing cure reanimate and reconnect us—with nature, with the places we inhabit, with each other, with nonhuman people, with ourselves—and remind us of our responsibilities towards all Earthlings?