LANDSCAPING 0.2 - DAS UNKARTIERTE LAND
Inhabitants
In this section we are sharing the choreographic principles that we have worked on in the studio, during the rehearsals for the creation of the piece Das unkartierte Land.
Becoming dancing plants
Dancing Plants is a series of videos I made in Santarém that document the movement of different kind of plants, caused by windy weather conditions in the forest. We develop a task where the performers are presented with this video and copy the movement of the plants with their bodies, choosing one of these variations:
- copying the movements while being rooted in one place as the plants that are presented in the video.
- copying the movement of the plant using only one body part (hands, head, feet).
- unrooting the dancing plants as the movement is copied and at the same time displaced in space.
The practice of becoming a plant is an exercise of acknowledging plants as dancing beings. In this practice, the plants become the choreographers that put the human body in movement. Inspired by the Amazonian Perspectivism, where plants are seen as humans in the form of plants, in this process, the plants are acknowledged as dancers in the form of plants.
Erst als Bianca uns gebeten hat, ihre Videos Zuhause nachzustellen, ist mir aufgefallen, dass meine Zimmerpflanzen nie Wind abbekommen. Außer ganz kurz beim Lüften.
The presence of nonhuman organic material: the agency of potted plants and a landscape of ventilators
We invited a group of potted plants the rehearse with us, and from their arrival in the space, one of our main creative principles developed: the possible interactions and impulses coming from this human-plant-co-living.
We took care of them, moved with them, talked to them. They breathed with us, they moved us around, the rustling of their leaves told us stories to listen to.
Even if we were sensitive to their agency, the feedback that plants offer is, many times, hard to perceive. The interactions that were created with the plants, were thus inspired by spatial constellations of our bodies in the space: how we could arrange their presence and ours differently; how we could move them around and how we could move us around them and how we could move us around while moving them. From these spatial, moving arrangements we investigated how these interactions affected our performing body.
Ich erinnere mich, dass ich mich gewundert hab, wie leicht du bist. Einfach so, ohne Erde, einfach nur Plastik.
In an echo of the Dancing Plants videos, we built a landscape of ventilators that we used as a tools to make visible the invisible movements continuously going on in plant life: by recreating vegetal movement-ways like the ones I encountered in the forest in Santarém, we created a rehearsal setting where non-human and human bodies were constantly moving and being moved – by wind, and by each other. From there, we also started experimented with big plastic foil sheets to expand the ambiguity of moving and being moved onto non-organic material.
Fotos: Martin Miseré