Landscaping Dance
There is a great evergreen outside my window here in Vienna, and I am wondering what it knows. Not only the things most trees know how to do: give shelter, provide protection, calm – oxygen! But this grand tree between Westbahnstraße and Seidengasse, which must be very old, could tell me about the Vienna of another time. The past, for sure, but also the present; perhaps even the future. It seems to contain multiple kinds of time that transcend the shoppers coming and going below it, preparing for a holiday linked to the solstice, and to evergreens.
The dancers in Elizabeth Ward’s choreography, named for the ivy plant that can poison or benefit its ecosystem, give us a gift. They are dancing themselves, without pomp – wearing their own clothes even as they put on the costumes or characters created only by movement. They gloss the baroque, the tap or disco along with the postmodern dance forms that allow them to burrow, root, reach, flower and flourish in the light and dark space of an hour. The piece takes us fully into plant being – becoming plant – beyond imitating or representing plants.
Is it possible for us, the public, to see diversity in bodies as we see it in plants? Not just what we call “garden variety”…but opening up the stage, the theater space to the nature that is everywhere inside as well as outside. The choreographer’s skill is to cultivate the different bodies collected here – dance makers in their own right – bringing to the project different styles, each with their weights, releases, and tensions. The moments when these bodies create sympathies (exerting force without touching) or join their forces together bursting with primal energy, become major events. Something is happening; the nature we think of as outside is coming into the space of the theater.
The choreography gives us plant narratives, but it is not manipulating either its performers or its public to get us to see something in particular. Offered to my view, but not in my face, I see different tropisms (minute movements toward the light, toward the gravitational pull), I see the parterre (in gardens as in baroque ballet); I see the points of the compass and the cosmic movement of the spheres; I see the spasm and gyration of seed vessels taking flight. The piece does not program these elements, it explores and almost seems to demonstrate them, without the burden of representation. It creates a space in which nature is happening.
The dancers themselves flourish in this environment. They are not dancing for us, but somehow with us. There is no pumping, no show, no waste. I would like to say that I am back in New York at the Judson Church at the moment of a dance revolution – but I am in Vienna, 2022. A certain kind of avant-garde dance, one that was interrupted by war in the last century, is taking root here. This piece, by a choreographer who has come from somewhere else and planted herself here, germinated during the Covid lockdown. It was developed in a garden. It recalls the many gardens where the choreographer worked for years, and her understanding of the cycles, and time frames, of plants and planting.
Without words, dancers are closer to the flora and fauna that, historically, they often represent onstage. In this choreography they take on dance styles, represent ideas, forms, or forces of nature, in their individual and collective movement.
Choreography of plants gives us a different way to think history. Through this piece, we may reflect on the effect of empire on the current geological era, sometimes called the Plantationocene: its development into plantation monoculture. We see the possibilities of the alternative plant narratives that flourished all over the world and did not depend on domination.
We can also re-think our present through plants: what choices are we making, in the city? In Vienna, everywhere I walk, there are signs about plant-based foods and plant materials making up bags and clothing. There is empire built into the environment here, but it is being questioned, studied, re-set here.
Plants are also shaping how we see the future. They created our world; we cannot live on this planet without them. They too, were somewhere in the past our common ancestor – at the origins of life. And they help us understand that this planet has different forms of time, different futures, not all of them chronological.
Hedera helix brings all of these ideas to its audience. This is a timely piece, one of the first to come out of the cocoon of Covid. And its magic is to show us in dance different kinds of time, parallel worlds of growth and decay, that perhaps we only began to watch as the world slowed, and changed. That we know perhaps better, now, to watch for.
Felicia McCarren is the author of four books on dance, most recently One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet: La Source 1866-2014. Professor of French at Tulane University in New Orleans, she is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford (2022-23) and will hold the Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair at EHESS Paris in Spring 2023.