Adventura Botanica: Dance as a Medium for Ecological Care
Adventura Botanica: Dance as a Medium for Ecological Care

Summary/Abstract: This curatorial essay describes Odd Johan Fritzøe’s multimodal dance work Adventura Botanica, performed by Elisabeth Christine Holth at the 2023 Environmental Emergencies Across Media conference in Kalmar, Sweden. Using dance, sculpture, movement-activated lighting design, and improvisation-based music by the SPUNK group, this work mediates ecological themes in complex and yet approachable and even sometimes humorous ways. Though initially inspired by Darwin’s interest in multispecies pollination, Adventura Botanica offers numerous imaginative entry points for the audience. The process of preparing the space and the sculpture, the performance itself, and the energetic, curious responses of the audience created a nexus of embodied engagement with the conference’s theme. This chapter describes both the production’s overlapping intermedial layers and the phenomenon of critical vulnerability in reception, drawing on Lars Elleström’s intermedial theory and recent posthumanist approaches including Christine Daigle’s. A human body enacting nonhuman life processes does not necessarily come across as glib anthropocentrism but rather opens up a space for imagining other bodies and vulnerabilities on a threatened planet.

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