Communal Choreographies: Claiming the Embodied Public Sphere in Recent Climate Activism.

From 2022-2023, the protests by the activist group Letzte Generation (Last Generation) have created a large echo, both publicly on site as well as in mass- and social media. Especially their blockages of roads in various German cities – achieved by sitting and gluing oneself with one hand to the ground – have led to debates reaching from extreme positions such as allegations of terrorism up to expressing sympathy regarding the cause of climate activism. The precarity of the actions is crucial, deliberately exposing the body in hazardous situations such as stopping moving traffic with the sheer bodily presence of the activists as a means of blockage.
In this piece, I am exploring how dance studies’ conceptions of choreography in an expanded sense can enhance the understanding of topical social movements such as the ones by Letzte Generation, in the urban embodied public sphere. I am especially focusing on the affective dynamics that these immobilizing actions are triggering, particularly for passersby or car drivers whose everyday motions are interrupted temporarily. In these protest situations, corporeal confrontation (bypassers, verbally or bodily attacking activists) is met with corporeal cooperation (protesters and police), so my argument. The connecting momentum between these actants is the formation of affective communities: socially and emotionally glued to the ground on the one side, outraged and confrontative on the other side. My hypothesis is that here, the idea of social choreography is shifting into one of communal choreographies: The campaigners base their protests on an emotional investment in their cause (the threat and urgency of climate emergency), thus engendering a particular protest community while also generating opposing situative (temporal) counter-communities on the ‘other side’.
In this context, I am furthermore examining the power dynamics prevailing even in non-violent resistance and thus question the idea of the so-called passivity of bodies in this realm. My argument goes that Letzte Generation’s seemingly passive, immobile bodies, indeed, segue into an active mode, pro-actively stopping traffic’s flow in the case of the road blockages. Such a logic of non-violence, then, cannot be regarded as mere (physical) inertia, but creates a complex web of violence dynamics