SHADE AVOIDANCE – a contemporary dance piece for plants and four dancers
Plants are often thought of as static, yet their movement simply differs from our human understanding of motion. Plants observe their surroundings and can intensify their own growth as they compete for light. They can distinguish between the shadow cast by an inanimate object, such as a stone, and the shadow cast by another plant. Likewise, plants can sense nearby plants that might compete with them or shade them in the future. Plants perceive the quality of light reflected from neighbouring plants as well as volatile compounds emitted by other plants.
Competition for light has an important impact on plant development… The responses to shade are generally referred to as the shade avoidance syndrome (SAS), and involve various developmental changes aimed to outgrow the neighbouring plants, and are characterized by enhanced elongation, reduced leaf expansion, decreased branching and ultimately early flowering.
Proprioception tells us where our limbs are without needing to look at them. While our other senses are tuned outward, receiving external signals such as light or sound, proprioception gives us information about the body’s internal state. There is no single organ for proprioception: it is an integrated system spread throughout the entire body. Plants, too, possess both static and dynamic forms of awareness, much like humans. Plants can sense gravity.
Pori Dance Company’s work SHADE AVOIDANCE, created for the emptied premises of Pori’s old Anttila department store, explores the shared worldview of humans and plants through the remembered scent of eraser rubber. The dynamic emptiness of this abandoned retail heaven shapes a plant-like reality—a model of a plant universe where the senses are nourished by photons rustling through the pages of a mail-order catalogue. The shared movement of plants and dancers reaches toward the light and bends into interspecies communication. The performance is stretching growth, shifting dynamics, and organic motion.
The world is the breath of living beings, not just a fragmented space between the Big Bang and the birth of the existential sense.
