2024 video research planthroposcene
DANCE IN PLANTHROPO-SCENE
A body-based research, dance practice, prefigurative initiative and video essay inspired by Natasha Myers’ invitation to vegetalize our sensorium and collaborate with plants.
It is a long-term body-based, community-based research project and a dance practice focusing on tissular fantasy and cellular intelligence in a quest to delegate agency to the peripheries.
It invites to engage with, and attune to, different self-organization and communication strategies emerging both on somatic/visceral and social/cultural levels: from communities of cells and bacterial colonies inside organisms to the circular dramaturgy of folk dances and grassroots prefigurative social movements.
It is informed by BMC approach, plant studies and ecosomatic perspective, particularly Laura Sewell’s ecological perception and Karen L. F. Houle’s concept of becoming plant. This approach invites unlearning somatic and mental habits within co-creative zones where habitual boundaries and roles dissolve.
Alongside dance practice, the project focuses on the notion of co-creating atmosphere, opening reflection and experimentation around placemaking, commoning and self-organizing within more-than-human sociality.
Within the project, a porous Plant Babes collective was instigated during an artistic residency at Przystawy (Poland), following the need to practice new forms of creating, sharing and solidarity.
We were remembering our first encounters with plants (picking up wild sorrel from the yard, admiring poisonous foxglove, hanging out with old willow), reflecting on inherited in our geopolitical and cultural bonds relations with them, exchanging different ways of collaborating with plants and their allies within our dance practices and co-fantasising about supportive and resilient Berlin dance scene/forest.
CREATIVE TEAM:
Concept & facilitation Dorota Michalak
Research & performance Julek Kreutzer, Maryna Makarenko, Dorota Michalak, Cary Shiu
Music & rhytmics coach Borys Słowikowski
Voice Carina Khorkhordina
Camera Maryna Makarenko
Editing Asidron
Animation Maja Zagórska
Participants of Plant Babes gathering in Przystawy (PL) Akseli Aittomäki, Joske Beckers, Michela Filzi, Aaron Lang, Dorota Michalak, Magdalena Meindl
SUPPORT:
Tanzpraxis Scholarship by The Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe