We were invited to take part of Anarchive: memory #05 curated by Luis Berríos-Negrón at Gammelgaard on September 1st. We performed Seems like the last Pokemon of the summer has disappeared already (possible ghosts of a Virgo season garden party). 

In this piece, Blåbær and Loup are playing with their bodies as (an)archiving technologies. They follow the threads of a long term ongoing research within the collective dance for plants. What do our bodies memorise, what kind of knowledges do they create, channel or relay? What is left from a dance after it happened, and of the stuff that made this dance possible? What did the dance change, in the garden, in the bodies, in the world? When is this change happening? Did the dance happen yet? Is it happening now? 

The rural art center Les Bazis, organised our first ever tour in the Pyrenees! We visited 12 gardens, met amazing plants and their humans. You can read some of our daily adventures on our insta. And Geörgette Power made a cute book about it.

Loup gave a lecture at La Gaîté Lyrique as part of the event Cohabiter : assemblages terrestres on May 28th, in a panel gathering Anna Tsing, Vinciane Despret and her. She talked about the politics of dancing for plants and other exciting things. Some excerpts of her text got published by Klima Magazine. You can read it here: Dancing is an ecosystem service, and so is being trans.

Loup facilitated an Ecosystemic meditation for the Journée de la Biodiversité at La Gaîté Lyrique.

Cet atelier est une invitation à re-sentir nos relations à notre propre milieu. Au cours d’une méditation guidée, Loup nous invite à nous accorder aux différents mouvements et pratiques des êtres qui constituent un écosystème donné : plantes, insectes, climatiseurs, nuages, néons, courants d’air… Ce processus propose d’interroger physiquement, pour la renverser, la notion de services écosystémiques habituellement attribuée exclusivement aux non-humains. Après un voyage mental connectant aux manifestations et performances photosynthétiques, géologiques, Wi-Fi, électriques ou pollinisatrices, l’attention se dépose doucement sur nos propres corps pour introduire et expérimenter l’hypothèse somatique de services écosystémiques « plus-que-non-humains ».

We were part of the collective two months exhibition in Växjö’s konsthall (Multispecies Storytelling, January 23-March 10).
We staged a dance for plants station at the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. Locals were invited to bring plants and share with us their plant-stories and care tips. For nearly three weeks, we inhabitated the gallery space dancing, singing, sharing, reading, researching, cooking, caring,..: plantsitting! During the opening hours, visitors were invited to enter the space, meet the plants and join the plantsitting practice. We also facilitated there group workshops and created scores and frames for the visitors to explore on their own/tell their own multispecies stories.

We performed BEFORE THE PLANTS for the opening of the Multispecies exhibition. The performance took place at the gallery, launching the presence of dance for plants in the two months long exhibition at Växjö Konsthall.

On June 15th, we presented our piece Tactics for a solo at SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, for the event SMK Fridays: GREEN (in collaboration with SLSAeu GREEN Conference).
Visitors were invited to join a six hours on going conversation where we generated dance strategies together, for them to perform a solo for some plants in a hidden part of the museum.

We facilitated a workshop as part of the SLSAeu GREEN Conference on June 13th-16th in Copenhagen University.
The participants were invited for a two hours session in the University dance studio where the local plants of the campus were gathered. We offered a step-by-step guided first approach to our practice, addressing questions together, sharing tools and dances.
“The 12th European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference 2018 is centered on the theme of green, providing a resolutely cross-disciplinary platform to explore one of the most pervasive and broadest tropes of our times. Alongside this central theme, the organizers also welcome provocatively un green and prismatic proposals from experts in all academic disciplines and professional fields.”
The Art Programme of the conference was co-curated by Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology and OU(VERT).

We were invited at the first Radical Relevances Conference at Aalto University, on April 25th-27th. We joined the panels and we facilitated a workshop, inviting the participants to dance for the giant plants inhabiting the University buildings. We shared some scores, weaving one-another stories, exploring carefully how to receive and give and gathering body-based knowledges of becoming-with and dancing-for.
We were also part of the collective exhibition: we shared some screenshots of our Instagram thread, spontaneous glimpses of a lively inquiry, in which we collect plant-stories by paying attention to the threads that bind us to our green companions. How do these threads look like? What do they taste? Who is pulling, who is holding?
“Radical Relevances is a conference and peer reviewed multidisciplinary journal addressing complex global phenomena of our time, such as climate change, biodiversity, income inequality, and mass migration. We invite researchers and artists straddling multiple (or within one) disciplines to submit papers and artworks that go beyond the rational and explore what is relevant to lived experience.”

As part of our collaborations with Performing Arts Platform, we had Christine Fentz and her Secret Hotel as companions for a week of residency in Mols Bjerge National Park. We learnt so much, dancing for the trees, herbs and bushes that grow in this special place. When dancing for plants that are less closely related to the daily presence of human bodies, the plant-stories are taken over by myriads of other-than-human co-tellers – big people and very small ones, visible and not-so-seeable, waggling, creeping or elusive, but always entangled in loquacious material-semiotic performances.

Performing Arts Platform invited us for one month of local rooting as part of their Connection Residency. We shared our studio with an amazing crowd of plants, taking advantage of this larger timescape to make kin with our green companions in new manners, encountering all of them at once and sharing daily work and dramas. This experience was a deep and intense process. We went out in the city to meet local plants and their people, hearing their stories and dancing for them. We hosted a workshop for the Black Box Company dancers, got involved in AURA‘s monthly Slow Seminar, and performed different kinds of talks and public interventions.

We gathered for a week in the midst of the forests of Småland. We worked on our team processes, discussing and framing our politics and their ecologies, unfolding the performances of our collectivity and our extended communities. We made a lot of good food for each other and of course we danced for the local plants. You can see some of them in pictures!

One sunny week-end, we gathered in Gaëtan’s garden in Saint-Gilles. We had invited some local dancers to join these two days of research. It was the occasion to improve our sharing/teaching strategies. We staged performative classes and went to dance for some people’s plants in the city. In one special session, we tried out some documenting practices at our friend David’s. Stella took the opportunity to take some photos and our friend Salomé started her practice of making dance-drawings of plant/body assemblages, an ongoing part of our research.

DANSEatelier invited dance for plants to host three days of research in their studio. We sneaked into Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction as a space to share our work and matters, discuss and move together. Haraway and Strathern (+some chosen heideggerished karaoke) helped us listen to what “worlds world worlds” and what moves move moves. We started to practice plant-storytelling and we danced together for the plants.