Nala Walla:The Permaculture of Movement

“Art is the most highly evolved technology that exists.” These words come to me through wires and satellites connecting a cell phone in Rhode Island to my home line in Montreal, Quebec. More importantly, these invisible waves allow the voice and thoughts emerging from Nala Walla to reach me, and now, you.
Nala Walla lives off the grid on an island in Puget Sound where she leads events and workshops that weave together the principles of Permaculture with those of dance. She is a Gaia University Associate, artist and founder of the Bcollective . Her techniques and philosophies, “Zone Zero,” “bodyversity” and/or “bodecology,” which put emphasis on the how of living and doing, as opposed to the usual “what” or “why”.

Her philosophy comes from her upcoming performance collaboration with Mark Lakeman, founder of the City Repair Project in Portland Oregon. The event “Waterhouse” centers on the construction of an outdoor shower or “waterhouse” in the garden of her home. The waterhouse will be built using natural building materials found on location and will have attached greywater ponds to treat the used water. Participants will also develop an awareness of their bodies through the physical building process. The aim, according to Nala Walla, is “to create a type of experience that closer approximates the building process of old villages where it was more of a sacred process.”

It is a fairly well accepted fact that hunter-gatherer societies did about 4 hours of “work” per day. The rest of their time was spent in storytelling, song, dance and play. Too often today, we have managed to convince ourselves that “the norm” means working 9 to 5 while rarely engaging with our bodies or our artistic abilities.
“Art is a social technology, a soft technology…it’s been here as long as humans and it’s what keeps the species adaptable and relevant” explains Nala Walla.
In 1994, Nala Walla started a Masters in Dance and Ecology with the University of Washington. After a couple of years, she left, feeling jaded with academia. “I went sailing up to the Yukon with my partner…I learned more about my body and about ecology than I could ever have learned in any school lab.”
Recently she spent 12 days with a woman named Tamara Ashby who is doing a PhD on women dancers in rural areas. Tamara flew in from England in order to get a feel for the type of performance art that Nala Walla does. Using academic language, Nala Walla's art can be characterized as “durational performance.” This is meant to encompass artwork that goes beyond the usual time constrained quality of what has traditionally been considered “performance.” The duration in this case is life-long. “Life is my work and my play,” she laughs.

When asked what defines “art” she says “Well, it’s a complex issue…The way I see it, if you’re using your graphic design skills to do ad campaigns for Proctor and Gamble… it’s not art unless you’re using your skills to help the current situation...
If people could just recognize the sacred aspect of every instant of their lives, where everything they do is a form of art…”
Nala Walla will be graduating from Gaia University this coming winter. You can find out more about her upcoming events, watch videos of her performances and read some of her writings at bcollective.org .