© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004425194_007 CHAPTER 7 Fragments of the Body, Landscape, and Identity: A Dancer/Poet’s Terroir Celeste Snowber The textures of identity and place are ever changing, yet as constant as the terrain that lives within my body. My limbs, tissues, cells, and blood hold mem- ory of particular ethnicities, and my relation to place is deeply connected to my embodied understanding. As a dancer, poet, and arts-based scholar, the heart of my work has explored the way the body integrates and inspires con- nections, ruptures, and creative capacities to place. I resonate with Adrienne Rich’s words, “Begin though, not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest in—the body” (2003, p. 30). The body holds a frag- ment of memory, conscious or unconscious, through the cellular landscape of skin, bone, tissues, and gestures. Here is the threshold for an embodied knowl- edge, which has the capacity to go beyond comprehension, and lies waiting to be discovered, holding possibility for deeper dialogue with how one traverses one’s own relationship with their history or herstory. Through poetry, dance, and the spoken word I have cultivated life-long practices of creating and recreating the fragments of what it means to be in connection to the natural world as well as my to own cultural identity of being Irish and Armenian. Place is both outside and inside my body, danc- ing in an ongoing relationship. There is a scent to the body’s knowing. We smell, touch, feel the sensate world within and around us and here is a habitat of longing and belonging. I draw on forms of poetic inquiry and embodied inquiry, rooted in autobiographical methods, which explore a visceral con- nection to language, the earth, and cultural identity (Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima, 2009; Richmond & Snowber, 2009; Sameshima, Fidyk, James, & Leggo, 2017; Snowber, 2012, 2014, 2016). As a site-specific performer, my work explores how an embodied expressive relationship to the natural world has the capacity to shift perceptions to the ecology of ourselves and the earth. For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV