LONELY SPECIES / XL

“Species loneliness is the gnawing fear that we are alone in the universe, with a desperate hunger for connection with other life. It is a new form of collective anxiety: we are disabled creatures dislocated in a wounded landscape.”  - Michael V. McGinnis

A detached human stumbles upon the earth. She ignores, dominates, controls. She sows, reaps, mows. She digs, searches and descends. Deep in the ground she finds something she lost a long time ago. 

Lonely Species is a mime-performance about alienation from nature and loneliness in a time of extinction. Bodine Sutorius and Nikki Ong explore new ways of coexisting with the land from which they were once born. They attempt to capture the complicated relationship between human and landscape in a physical and musical language. 

As research for this performance, Bodine and Nikki walked the Kungsleden trail in Swedish Lapland. They hiked 440 kilometers through dense forests and past snow-capped mountain peaks, separate from each other. For twenty-four days they exchanged their urban existence for the rugged landscape, trying to find answers to the questions underlying this performance. Can modern humans still be wild? How do you connect with non-human life, when the world you live in is so human? Can we still feel part of an ecosystem?