Second Draft: Can Dance be an Effective Pathway to Climate Action

For my second poster idea, I want to examine whether dance can be understood as a meaningful form of embodied climate communication. Rather than focusing only on facts, statistics, and verbal explanation, this topic asks whether movement, bodily experience, and participation might offer a different way of engaging people with environmental issues. Specifically, I am interested in whether dance can create forms of climate communication that feel more personal, relational, and action-oriented than traditional approaches based on the transmission of information.

This idea emerges from a wider problem in climate communication: Public awareness of climate change has grown significantly, yet this has not consistently led to meaningful behavioural change (e.g. Moser, 2014). The paper identifies several barriers that help explain this gap, including information overload, emotional distance, limited personal relevance, and mistrust in institutions. These challenges suggest that knowledge alone is often insufficient. Climate communication may therefore need to do more than inform; it may need to create shared experiences that people can feel directly.

The poster will be structured as following: First, it proposes dance as learning, particularly its potential to foster environmental responsibility through embodied practice rather than one-way message (Tuckey & Bos, 2025). Second, it explores movement and social change as an action catalysator, e.g. Bojner Horwitz et al. (2022) shows how dance and music can support trust, connectedness, and cooperation, all of which are important for collective climate action. Finally, it will focus on experience rather than information, drawing on research which suggests that participatory communication can boost self-efficacy and encourage environmentally friendly behaviour (Plechatá et al., 2024).

The following two examples help to illustrate this: Cook’s (2018) “Melting Ice” uses choreography to communicate the realities of glacial and sea-ice loss through movement. A second example is “Mould With Me” by Anastasija Olescuka, which is a dance performance and interactive installation exploring the themes of resilience, transformation and decay through the lens of how fungi function. Created in collaboration with Norwegian biologists and mycologists Renée Jung and Sondre Eng; “Mould With Me” reflects a broader artistic interest in embodied ecological experience, even if it has not itself been studied in climate communication research.

Overall, the poster will ask whether climate communication may become more effective when it is not only understood intellectually, but also experienced physically and emotionally. Although direct evidence on dance and “pro-environmental” behaviour is still limited, this gap highlights an important area for further interdisciplinary research.