Planting Dance

Plant narratives, for example, in the 1866 ballet La Source, reinvented at the Paris Opera in 2011, explore questions of diversity, hybridity, and adaptation. The original ballet was attended by people thinking about ethnic and exotic others at the same time—and in the same ways—as they were thinking about plants. This historical commentary on nature and bodies onstage was also, in its time, a theoretical inquiry about nature and bodies across cultural institutions and knowledge disciplines. The recent plant turn in the humanities has focused on the politics and theories of plant-based human life, but it is also a re-turn to historical plant-thinking. What are lessons still to be learned from plants, or more broadly, from current ecologies? What importance do an “ecology of practices” (Isabelle Stengers) or the “landscaping of time” (Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent) have for dancers and choreography?