How people and animals dance together

Sometimes we come across projects that, from their very inception, seek to break out of the confines of art, feeding off the economic and social fabric of the contemporary world before departing in search of their raison d'être elsewhere. When the art system encounters the public sectors of welfare and care, public education or independent organizations, careful consideration is given to the role of the artist and their intentions: for whom is art that encounters a community? Who does it favour? Who is behind the project and why is the community “necessary” to the artist? Questions such as these are at the heart of relational artistic practices, projects and works that, from the outset, seek to engage with people not as an audience, but as participants, initiators, living and thinking material. In Marie Bruel's idea, we saw a tension towards this type of question, but at the same time she showed us a curious relationship between the subject of her research – the transhumance of people and animals – and this straddling of two worlds, between art and the world, stage and square. Transhumance also straddles the boundary between different worlds and, like other human activities of the past based on subsistence rather than capital accumulation, has a fundamentally strategic character: it moves across territories, collaborating with human and non-human actors through a cyclical and persistent practice of give and take.

For many, especially those who do not live in a pastoral context or who do not have a family history in what we now call rural areas, the term transhumance sounds bucolic and mysterious. It is also called wandering pastoralism and refers to the seasonal movement of herds and flocks together with the human community across vast geographical areas. In Italy, we mostly see solitary shepherds moving with sheep, cows, goats, donkeys and dogs, but in other parts of the world there are transhumans of alpacas, buffalo, horses, camels, dromedaries, llamas and reindeer. It is one of the oldest activities in human history, dating back to the Neolithic period, and even today its fundamental principles are incredibly similar to prehistoric forms of nomadic farming. Some ecosystems have a direct correlation with transhumance, which, by crossing territories cyclically, has inseminated, fertilised and beaten them, defending them from landslides and fires.

In popular imagination, “nomads” wander aimlessly from place to place, but in reality their movement is opportunistic, a term that should not be interpreted in its moral sense of “using something at the expense of others”. Instead, it refers to the relationship between nomads and space, i.e. the environment and natural resources. People who practise a nomadic lifestyle based largely on the use of natural resources are heavily dependent on their availability and long-term maintenance. Consequently, living on the move involves developing a resource management strategy and sustainable ecology policies. Nomadic pastoralism (although today it only exists in a semi-nomadic form) is a human activity that has been around for so long that it can be understood as an integral part of the landscape and of the very idea of landscape that we hold in our collective memory. It can be understood as the intangible property of a territory, the cultural root of a people. In Alpine areas, for example, there are still forms of transhumance that follow paths dating back to prehistoric times, moving up into the mountains in summer and down to the valley floors and plains in winter, thus following the temperatures and seasonal blooms of large geographical areas, going beyond provincial and regional boundaries. This is how, through the culture of transhumance, communities that are very distant from each other still find common ground in terms of values, dairy and artisan products, skilled workers, languages and incredibly similar practices, and it is on this basis that channels of communication, encounter and exchange are created and constantly renewed over time.

These and other considerations led to the creation of Transhumance, a multidisciplinary performance project that originated in Marie Bruel's hometown of Pau, in the French Pyrenees. The project is rooted in dance, but the research also draws on other disciplines: anthropology, gathering material on the memories of shepherds; education, with dance and contemporary performance training courses in primary and secondary schools; social welfare, with workshops in residential care homes for elderly people and people with disabilities; Finally, the project works closely with the institutions in the places where it branches out, first and foremost the municipality of Pau, but also in Casablanca (Morocco), where Bruel lives for part of the year.

The dialogue and aesthetic relationship between pastoralism and performance is difficult to imagine, but it begins to come into focus if we start with movement. If we understand nomadic pastoralism as the movement of people and animals interacting with each other and, together with the environments, ecologies and communities, creating a choreography of exchange; but not only that, the same movement also dialogues with urban centres, regulations on crossing cities, border policies, private and public land ownership, the value of soil, the maintenance of natural resources, the relationship of care and the economic relationship with animals, walking, walking in remote areas, and so on. One could go on forever. Research dealing with soil, large geographies or, in general, a “sense of origin” often has an immersive and all-encompassing character. Everything or almost everything can be connected to it, like roads that radiate out from everywhere into a capital city. For this reason, Bruel's project is strategically conceived as an itinerary in which the different places and periods that follow one another in the research and production give rise to different choreographic creations that analyse specific aspects of transhumance.

Transhumance is currently in the first stage of its itinerary – including the residency in Verbania – and focuses on places of exchange in urban areas as nerve centres for the movement of people, animals and goods. The most interesting environment for this phase is therefore the city market, because it preserves in its ancient heritage exchange and encounter, trade and gathering, the open space exposed to the weather in every season, sounds and voices, debate and dialogue. The main element of this first choreographic creation is in fact the bell. During transhumance, the bell has several functions: it allows the animals to follow the path by listening to each other, it allows the shepherd not to lose the animals along the way, but also to recognise them because the sound of the bell is often like a name, and each animal has its own. The type of bell chosen by Bruel comes from Pau and is normally used on cows. It is not too large or heavy and is held by the four dancers, who shake it with sharp movements, in sync or intersecting with the steps and other movements that make the body resonate with the ground. The four bells are therefore used to create both a choreographic score, as they are placed at different points in the square, delineating the space of the performance, and a rhythmic score, with their ringing and dragging on the ground.

One of the most fascinating aspects of how transhumance becomes a choreography is the process of passing on the creation to a group as four dancers alone cannot convey the sense of a mass in motion. In the long-term programmes devised by Bruel – school courses and workshops – the choreography is therefore taught step by step to entire classes, but also to elderly people and those with mental or physical disabilities living in care homes. The choreography is thus adapted to the bodies, their capabilities and potential, but also to their ability to remember the steps, follow the group and keep the rhythm. It becomes a collective interpretation, a way of moving together whilst learning to listen to one another and communicate with others. Unintentionally, this echoes an interesting aspect of wandering, because it is not always the shepherd who leads the way. In fact, when moving through the mountains, flocks do not always follow the exact same path, but rather move about the meadows, spreading out or finding new routes, with the aim of reaching the freshest and best grass more quickly. Sometimes a flock left to graze on its own returns to the mountain pasture by itself as the sun goes down. At times it is the shepherds who lead the sheep; at other times, however, they follow them and put their trust in them, in a game of mutual trust and understanding.

During her residency in Verbania, Marie Bruel also conducted a number of interviews with shepherds who practise transhumance in various ways. The farms that organise the transhumance routes in the Alto Vergante area collaborated on the project, in particular Susanna and Paolo Tondina’s farm, in Nebbiuno, and Antonio and Nilla’s farm named Su e Giù, in Invorio, as well as the very young shepherdess Aurora. The accounts paint quite different pictures, yet they all highlight the hard work and the difficult physical and economic conditions that make this practice almost unimaginable. Susanna Tondina recalls the first transhumance she undertook with her brother at the age of 13, in the 90s, with a group of animals and shepherds. Their young age had forced them to economise on food and comforts. Of that experience, she recalls hunger and, so to speak, extreme conditions. Over time, Susanna and her brother have resumed their father’s settled livestock farming and reintroduced transhumance on routes where it had not been practised since their grandparents’ youth, involving several farms. Today, they all organise an annual event for the autumn transhumance as it returns to the valley floor, alongside activities to map the territory and inform the local community, as well as a weekly market for their produce. This fosters networking, the exchange of knowledge and the passing on of heritage to new generations.

This is just one example of how transhumance can be part of the contemporary era. The Transhumance project recognises the limitations of what a choreographer and a young dance company can do, but what it brings us through the performance is something that has nothing to do with dance and Art with a capital A. It’s the image of an active, living and sensitive movement, destined to spread further, across territories and time.