Dr Beatrice Jarvis
Afilliation: Kingston University
Panel: Magical, Material, Practice
Dr Beatrice Jarvis is a choreographer, somatic practitioner, and interdisciplinary researcher whose work is grounded in an attentive relationship with land, body, and the more-than-human world. She is Course Leader for BA Dance and Senior Lecturer at Kingston School of Art, where she cultivates pedagogies rooted in embodiment, listening, and ethical presence. Her practice-based PhD explored somatic movement in post-conflict landscapes, and her AHRC-funded MA at Center for Community and Urban Research ( CUCR, Goldsmiths) integrated choreography, spatial inquiry, and ecological thought. Her research has been presented internationally, including at dOCUMENTA (13) and Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Beatrice publishes on somatic ecology, maternal embodiment, Gaelic language and land, and choreography as a practice of care. She is completing certification as a TRE® practitioner, extending her work into trauma-aware facilitation. Across her practice, movement operates as a mode of ecological listening, shared responsibility, and reverent response within uncertain planetary conditions.
Weblink https://www.kingston.ac.uk/about/staff/dr-beatrice-jarvis
Talk Title: Ritual in the Bog: Collective Somatic Scores as Ecological Stewardship
This 20-minute sharing emerges from sustained practice-based research in the peatlands of Donegal and explores the bog as ritual ground, necrobiotic archive, and more-than-human teacher. Moving between spoken poetry, embodied score, folklore, and ecological reflection, the presentation asks what forms of collective care and ecological stewardship become possible when the body learns directly from saturated land.
The bog does not open quickly.
It receives weight slowly.
Water beneath water,
breath beneath breath.
Peatlands preserve through latency. They hold bodies, carbon, water, memory. In anaerobic bog conditions, decomposition is slowed and organic matter remains chemically suspended across centuries (Clymo 1984; Belyea 2006). Rather than approaching the bog as scenic backdrop or environmental symbol, this work treats peatland temporality as methodological instruction. The bog teaches slowness, pressure, restraint, and attentional endurance. It interrupts contemporary cultures of acceleration and extraction, asking instead for forms of listening structured by patience, repetition, and proximity.
The sharing will weave poetic texts, spoken ritual fragments, and collective somatic scores developed through
slow walking and land-listening practices conducted in Donegal bogs since 2019. Participants will be invited
into subtle acts of embodied attunement: altered pacing, weighted standing, suspended speech, breath
calibration, and collective listening. Through these practices, the body becomes porous to atmosphere,
moisture, instability, and ground pressure.
Stand long enough
and the ground alters your balance.
Remain quiet enough
and the bog begins to speak in pressure.
The work engages Irish mythic figures such as the Cailleach and the Bean Feasa not as archetypes but as vernacular ecological intelligences embedded within weather, stone, feminine memory, and ritual endurance.
Drawing on trauma studies and feminist ecological thought (Caruth 1996; Cvetkovich 2003; Neimanis 2017), the presentation proposes ritual as a communal practice of remaining with unresolved presence rather than seeking catharsis or cure. In landscapes shaped by extraction, silence, rural precarity, and ecological degradation, the bog becomes a site of collective recalibration and more-than-human relation.