dance for plants

dance for plants is an international research group dedicated to the creation, articulation, and propagation of a situated practice. We collectively generate strategies to make dancing for plants easier in the present troubled worlds. How is this practice related to more-than-human knowledges, ontologies and bodies? What are its requirements and obligations? What can it do and how can it be done? How does it matter? What can it teach us and how risky is it?
We facilitate workshops, perform at people’s homes for their plants, take part in exhibitions and conferences, collaborate with artists, activists, institutions, scholars, witches, gardeners, dead people, pets, bodies of water and many other humans and nonhumans, in order to proliferate experiences, scores, texts, frameworks, movements, affects, thoughts, stories, images, intimacies, ethics, gatherings, and myriad wiggling materials as companions for fomenting new responsible ways of dancing for plants.

On this page, you can discover our home performances, dive into our multilayered compost community and check out our calendar to learn about our past and ongoing activities. Scroll further to meet the team and get in touch!

performances.

We usually perform at our audience’s homes. Our dancing involves plants, humans and their entangled (hi)stories. We have done this in many different places, usually concentrating on documenting our work through body memory and oral technologies (no pictures!). We invite you to have a look into what we do by reading this short fabulation of a dance for plants visit.

1.

Today we’re meeting Oom and Ee at their home. This time we are seven of us, because they have both a garden and a luxuriant apartment (sometimes we would come in smaller groups, adapting to our audiences’ ecologies). Oom and Ee are introducing us to their plants, revealing some of their stories. Ee acquired this one from a lover, another was planted by Oom’s grandmother when she was a kid, the small one up there just grew last week out of nowhere so now they’re watering her carefully, this one’s leaves have been getting a bit sick for the past few months, Ee stole a sprout of this purple one in Madrid’s botanical garden… It’s always such a drama-web of living/dying/loving together.

2.

Once we’ve partially mapped the affective entanglements of their co-histories, we are reaching dance time. Oom has already disappeared into their favorite fluffy sofa while Ee is grabbing a book before jumping in as well. They will be with us from a distance, but they are not directly watching the show. It’s a dance for plants. Some people are surprised at first to know that they won’t watch, but this kind of participation allows humans like Oom and Ee the possibility to awaken other sensitivities that would often flourish in the third step.

3.

After thirty minutes, (sometimes it’s longer, sometimes shorter), we rejoin our human hosts and together with Oom and Ee, we cast a circle. We are sitting on the wooden floor of their living room, with steaming cups of herbal tea. This moment is always the core of the encounter: a vibrant intermingling of un/folded involutions is buzzing in the air. Each of us, hosts and dancers, will take a time to share about his/her/their experiences, arousing the morethanhuman dance-stories, re-membering in/visible movements and presences, weaving the intra-active fabric of our multispecies world making.

compost.

We think with knowledge-as-humus.
We are dedicated to the ubiquitous queer knowledges embodied in the entangled performances of the myriad earthlings.
How critters and things make and unmake/are made and unmade by things and critters.
Plants and humans are continually affecting/becoming affected by one another in their inter(intra)active becomings. And they are simultaneously shaping and being shaped by a tentacular web of other coworkers.
Our own small community is unfurling in webs of mycorrhizal conspiracies* making our compost hot and juicy. As part of our companion species, we are gratefully indebted to feminist science studies scholars for speaking worlding-words, and providing wormy soils to grow the powerful, decolonial, kin-making, troubled stories necessary to play the non-innocent games of dancing for plants on a damaged planet. And plants set the rules.
Their chemical insights are already laboring at every corner of our naturecultural capitalistic assemblages: they are feeding us, healing us, housing us, dressing us up, and breathing out the air we live from.
But plants are *mattering** in many other ways. They are skillful fomenters of symbiosis/sympoiesis technologies, the unruly knowers of team world-designing, relentlessly queering identities, time, space and bodies. They are the compost kweens.

Dancing for plants is a risky practice. It has to be an ecological disturbance.
Plants and dancers are becoming with each other in new arrangements of molecular, social, anatomical, and ontological performances.
They are rendering each other capable, in caring loops, of addressing and being addressed, alluring and being allured, inducing and attuning* movements.
Knowledge-as-humus is the kind of thinking-with that we grow to go dancing-for (and vice-versa: a dancing-for kind of body being the one that we cultivate for thinking-with to thrive)!
This compost is an attempt to acknowledge the weaving that makes dancing for plants (and therefore dance for plants) possible, while situating it in an ecology of practices*. It is ongoing and open-ended, has and is various places. It is (full of) many things and people, plants, books, stories-to-come and half-forgotten tales, haunted fleshes and fertile frictions, partial empowerments, joyful entities, dead bodies and excitable matters. And there are countless ways for you and your kin to jump on the pile. Here is a link to a clandestine territory occupied by some of us. Feel free to join us there – post an image, a text, a thought or anything qualified to make the muddle messier. Linking is a way to connect, licking another, and they are many more. Let’s conjugate! (slurp).

calendar.

coming soon

January/March 2019

Linneaus University
Växjö, Sweden

We will be part of the Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices Conference taking place at Linneaus University, on January 23-25, 2019. It will be the occasion to launch our Performed Residency as part of the collective exhibition that will happen over the next two months (February/March 2019) in Växjö’s konsthall.

« We face an unparalleled historical situation of global multispecies suffering, variously known as the Anthropocene, or the New Climatic Regime, and signalled by alarming states of exposure and precarity in more-than-human worlds. The question of how to nurture liveable futures for ‘us’ – while also asking who and what might be included in this ‘us’ and with what consequences – depends on our abilities and willingness to re-negotiate means of entering into relations and, indeed, conversations with nonhumans, be they other species, microbes or machines. »

June 2019

Les Bazis
Sainte-Croix-Volvestre, France

We will be in residency at Les Bazis, in the rural french Pyrenees, touring our ‘home performances’ to the local gardens! More info coming soon.

2018

August 2018

Le Petit Versailles
New York City, USA

We gave a workshop at Le Petit Versailles on 26th of August.
“Le Petit Versailles, A GreenThumb/NYC Parks Department Garden that began in 1996. This 20 ‘ by 60′ garden with entrances on both Houston Street and Second Street was created by Peter Cramer and Jack Waters on the site of a former ·chop shop.” It is appropriate that a stage dominates the garden because the gardeners are committed to providing a space for performers, filmmakers, and visual artists to show their work. A narrow brick path slopes down from the Houston Street entrance and splits to circle the low wooden platform that serves as a stage. Narrow beds filled with shrubs, perennials. vines, and annuals border the walls of the adjacent buildings. The path continues through an arbor covered seating area, to the gate on Second Street. Le Petit Versailles is a project of Allied Productions, a not-for- profit arts organization, and has an active performance and exhibit schedule during the summer months.”

June 2018

Statens Museum for Kunst,
Copenhagen, Denmark

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.

June 2018

University of Copenhagen
Denmark

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).

April 2018

Aalto University
Espoo, Finland

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.”

February 2018

Cité Internationale des arts
Paris, France

We were invited to facilitate a workshop in the atelier Pathways to desire curated by Tarek Lakhrissi and Lucas Morin (Bétonsalon) as part of the larger event We are not the number we think we are at the Cité internationale des arts.
“We are not the number we think we are will offer a unique experience for 36 hours non-stop, involving hundreds of artists, researchers and thinkers from various geographical and disciplinary backgrounds. At the heart of the project: within working spaces, focusing on heterogeneous groups of people and collectives, gathered temporarily around pressing issues of our contemporary world. They will take over multiple spaces within the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, a meeting ground open to the dialogue between cultures where visitors will be invited to reflect on the present and map together pathways for the future. The common thread of this boundless programme is the fictional world of The Compass Rose (1982) a book of short stories by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin.”

2017

October 2017

Dome of Visions
Aarhus, Denmark

As a collective ending to a one month residency with Performing Arts Platform, we hosted an evening at the Dome of Visions. We performed small circles for plant-storytelling where each of us, visitors and dancers, shared chosen tales of our relationships to plants – the ones that counted in our lives, the dead ones, the talkative ones, the flowering, the disturbing, the obstinate, the contaminating, the collaborative ones. The many plants that worked with us in the studio for the past month were present as well. We had a secret-dances session for them as well as those growing in the dome. And after the best magical pumpkin soup ever (cooked by our friend Malte), every visitor could choose/be chosen by a plant. Some of them went back home together.

October 2017

Secret Hotel
Mols Bjerge, Denmark

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.

October 2017

Performing Arts Platform
Aarhus, Denmark

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.

September 2017

Tinsgryd, Sweden

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!

May 2017

Brussels, Belgium

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.

February/March 2017

Japan

Three of us traveled to Japan for two months. We got involved in the fruitful entanglements of local plants and their people. You can have a glimpse at our inquiry on our Instagram, which documents multitudes of potted street plants and the many ultra-cared-for trees in parks and gardens. Naturecultural japanese landscapes and practices, echoing their bonsai friends, are assembled in specific ontological cuts, distributing in/visibilities, im/mobilities and morethanhuman agencies that moved us/our bodies and dances in nourishing ways.

2016

December 2016

Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs
Paris, France

We were invited to the art school Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris by Stéphane Degoutin to talk about what we do. Jean went to present our group and co-facilitate a feedback session with the students who were presenting their art projects for animals as a contribution to the exhibition Haunted by Algorithm.

November 2016

DANSEatelier
Copenhagen, Denmark

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.

October 2016

Berlin, Germany

We gathered with friends/family at Niusha and Jean’s home for a three days workshop. All of the plants in the apartment joined as well. We worked with singing as a core body practice (an important part of our dance making), to entangle ourselves with more-than-human physicalities. We dragged up our clothes and voices, vibrating with the presences of plants and other not so visible people and collective patterns. Since then, the relations to private, mundane places and secret encounters have kept on feeding our conspiracies.