Reclaiming the Metamorphic Imagination: Ecosomatic Practice and the Poetics of Myth in the Age of Ecological Disaster (extended version)

How can we approach the heritage of Peter Brook’s performative engagement with other worlds in the shadows of anthropogenic ecological disasters? The article performs a poetic and theoretical dialogue between ecosomatic and dramaturgical pedagogical practices. Our aim is to expose the wounds of separation between nature and civilization and the inability to grieve for ecological losses that pervades contemporary society. We are called to approach the training of the imaginal and physical world of the performer through the recollection of an ancient solidarity with the nonhuman and with matter and through an engagement with our mythic cultural heritage. The space we are interrogating to understand how to become eco-embodied artists lies outside of theatres, and it is not empty: it is where the river passes, where the dunes begin, where the bark pulverises - a theatre physically not yet revealed to human cognition that works through processes of care, response-ability, and cultural resistance. The text feeds on the lived experience of La Selva, a participatory ecosomatic and regenerative arts residency held in the Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast (Rome, Central Italy) in October 2023. La Selva (literally, the forest) is explored as an emergent order of radical relationality that foregrounds the metamorphic thresholds between life and death constituting a key topos in Greek myth. This trespassing into the mythic announces a movement of social inclusion and civic resurgence.