Ndjara Dance Company: Shift

Image: Daria Rodinova

Shifts in ecological communities

Shift is an afro-contemporary dance piece by Ndjara Dance Company, performed at the festival by dander - coreographer Njara Rasolomanana and musician Senja Suvanto.

This dance piece, still in development, addresses the shifts in animal movement due to climate change.

Changes in resources and changes in environmental conditions force species to change their behavior, their routes and their distributions. Species that can move, move, but many are immobile, as plants and fungi, and their shift happens slowly, through generations.

Mismatches in timings, phenological mismatches, between organisms dependent on each other impact a large number of species . As an example, organisms that produce their offspring in seasonal environments need to time their reproduction with the occurrence of food. Many bird species travel thousands of kilometers to their breeding grounds, from Africa to the Arctic, to find food. Yet, climate change impacts the timings of insect peaks differently from bird migration times, causing declines in the survival of birds’ offspring in the Arctic .

As the climate warms up, many species’ distributions are shifted towards the poles. This delimits  the distribution of many species as such, but also due to competitive species expanding their distribution to areas previously dominated by the other species. As new species invade an area, or local species decrease or increase in abundance due to the changes in climate, the communities change. Some species would not survive with a competitor, while loss of a species could allow another species’ populations to increase and thrive. 

While species would need to move to survive, it is not obvious they can!