Climate change is bringing South Pacific Islands into the focus of global attention. Because of their precarious geographical position (their low elevation above sea level), climatic changes pose a threat to the livelihoods of their inhabitants. According to the latest IPCC report, within the next decades the first island states could be uninhabitable. The precariousness of South Pacific Islands is aggravated by the fact that forced migration due to climatic conditions is not yet recognized internationally as a reason for flight under current legal definitions.
Against this backdrop, the PhD project explores the corporeal experience of the climate crisis and its consequences. From September 2025 to August 2026, D. Castillo worked with South Pacific Islanders in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Tuvalu, many of them dance practitioners. During this research in place, the study focused on how individuals sense climatic changes through bodily practices and corporeal techniques. Dance practitioners are particularly trained and skilled in corporeal perception, space perception, and examining the spatial relation between human and geographical bodies (such as atolls, islands, islets, lagoons, sea floors and beaches). For this reason, dance practitioners are profoundly suited to trace how climate change is sensed, felt, and experienced on a corporeal, everyday level.
Based on an understanding of social choreography that situates the social dimension of choreographies in the moment of the aesthetic – and thus in the individual, corporeal perception and experience of a dancer – two focal points form the central research interest of this PhD thesis: (1) The theorizing of the corporeal experience of climate change and (2) its choreographic negotiation in performances of South Pacific Islanders.
