at the edge of connection begins with the idea of collapse, a choreographic practice where orientation is not determined by fixed coordinates but by the resonance between body, sound and space. Movement emerges from the dynamics of sound waves and vibrations that shape unseen architectures. Here, vertical and horizontal axes lose their hierarchy: every point in space holds equal significance. Imagine you are a bat. Not a body, not a shape, but a persistent listening. A moving-with. The world is not fixed, not anchored by lines and walls or the certainty of ground, but by the weight of waves, of vibrations, of sound weaving through unseen architectures. You don’t touch, you sense. You don’t see, you hear. The air is thick with information. Every wingbeat carving space, every echo a map, every call a conversation. at the edge of connection explores the edges of what choreography can be, where structures dissolve, and where movement resists classification.

Clarinde Wesselink’s work is a disruption, a call to shatter the systems that dictate our perceptions, temporal experiences and bodies. As a choreographer, dancer, and visual artist, her practice rips into interconnectedness as a lived experience. By invoking Indigenous frameworks, where kinship and reciprocity shape reality, her work moves beyond anthropocentric boundaries, questioning entrenched separation. With a body attuned to the unpredictability of external forces, Clarinde’s work beckons us to dismantle the dominance of control and embrace a world where connection is a constant presence.

Rutger Muller is an electroacoustic composer focused on mysticism, the uncanny grey zone between tranquility and dissonance. His non-linear sound spaces are extrapolations of the microcosm of sound: timbre.

Clarinde Wesselink is researching relationality, or what I like to call connectedness.  What does connectedness feel like? Many neuroscientists and phenomenologists argue that it is so intrinsic that it is often barely sensed, and yet it is continual and constant. Connectedness is the product of moving while registering both the proprioceptive and sensory information that movement produces. The fact that this simple process occurs at the interface between body and surroundings sutures them together, or as some would argue, establishes their fundamental unity. Is it because of my experience as a dancer that I feel more easily able to access what these texts are describing as the way that moving produces perception? Dancing, like many other movement-focused activities, can bring awareness of connectedness with the world into consciousness because it directs attention to the proprioceptive information that movement produces, whether through the acts of receiving instruction about what to attend to or copying another’s movement. 

Connectedness, however, is not merely an individual experience. As many Native scholars argue, it extends across the entire human and other than human world. In his book Research is Ceremony, Shawn Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree) outlines Indigenous approaches to research among Native peoples in Canada and Australia, arguing that relationships do not shape but rather constitute reality. Lauren Tynan (trawlwulwuy) expands on what this might mean, by offering the example of two possible answers to the question: “How is the river related to the mountain?” One answer sees the mountain and the river as both part of nature. The other observes that the river flows down the mountain. The first, she argues, conducts a standard classificatory procedure by looking for the likeness between the two in terms of how they are the same, whereas the second answer considers the relationship they have to one another, i.e. their kinship. It is this second approach, for which she advocates in conducting research, that is reciprocal, respectful, and willing to consider all beings and entities as variously in relation and connected.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg) argues that connectedness both reveals itself and is built through patient observation and quiet attentiveness. It is then reaffirmed in choices made throughout one’s daily life as well as in ceremonial contexts. In addition to observation and patience, according to Simpson, an Indigenous approach to building connection requires creativity in devising contact with what one is observing so that a bond that is “based in mutual respect, caring, and reciprocity” can be forged. This connection must sustain and promote all life, rather than privileging some life over other life. As Simpson details, an Indigenous approach to world-making focuses on alignment with rather than domination over, and it promotes a willingness to de-center human superiority. It also encourages a constant re-positioning of oneself as a learner. Further, it validates bodily experience as a potential reservoir of knowledge.

In her essay “Land as Pedagogy,” Simpson elaborates further on how connectedness as kinship is developed by detailing the process through which a young Native girl, whose curiosity is supported by the community, pays close attention to her surroundings. As a result of that attentiveness, she discovers the deliciousness of maple sap. This process, as Simpson explains, entails first watching a squirrel eating the sap, tasting it herself, and then telling others who trust and support her exploration. Reading Simpson’s description, I try to imagine the girl’s attentiveness – her quiet alertness, intense focus, slight shifts of head and body, and a continual energizing of her stance that stretches in the direction of the squirrel. The squirrel the young girl is watching senses the texture of the bark, the pull of gravity, the smell of sap through its movements, just as the sap itself knows the vigor of the tree and the warming temperature as it begins to travel. The girl’s subtle changes in posture reaffirm her relation to the squirrel as she remains both strongly directed, yet also calm, so that the squirrel senses that she is not a threat. She also takes in the temperature and air currents, sounds of other creatures in the forest, and the changing light. Her physical energy, motion, and restraint undergird her understanding of all that is in relation in those moments.

Perhaps this is what the dancers in Wesselink’s performance are trying to do.