2024
research planthroposcene
DANCE IN PLANTHROPO-SCENE
A BODY- & COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH
It invites to engage with, and attune to, different self-organization and communication strategies emerging across visceral and socio-cultural spheres: from elements, communities of cells and bacterial colonies inside organisms to the circular dramaturgy of folk dances and grassroots prefigurative social movements.
Plants direct my attention towards immersion and reciprocity of metabolism, dissolving rigid boundaries between organisms and their surroundings, mixing the cellular and cosmic, material and energetic. Learning with plants is a labour of giving in to the sensations and pleasures, tangible conditions of ours, diving into the affects, animacy and mysteries of material world. It offers a prism to rearticulate human-environmental relations and tools to practice biocentric, environmental modes of awareness, relatedness and collectivity.
My practice is informed by i.a. Body Mind Centering, 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 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, learning 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-phantasising about supportive and resilient Berlin dance scene as a forest ecosystem.
CREATIVE TEAM:
Concept & facilitation Dorota Michalak
Research & performance Julek Kreutzer, Maryna Makarenko, Dorota Michalak, Cary Shiu
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