舞草舞木 / Dance Grass Dance Tree is a performance by Zheng Bo that cultivates intimate human-plant relationships and kinship. In doing so, Zheng seeks to provide a positive counter to global crises of the economy, security, health and migration that have triggered cascading systemic shocks and generated a state of profound instability. As these challenges persist, the climate emergency continues to escalate unabated, compounding the vulnerabilities of societies already grappling with concurrent crises and rising political tensions.

Commissioned by AGWA as part of the Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Asian Art, this performance is choreographed by Zheng and Tyrone Earl Lraé Robinson who collaborated with two dancers and five Western Australian plants. Set atop a sparsely populated garden located inside a modern gallery space, the dance unfolds within a setting that isolates and elevates the presence of each plant. This garden-come-stage emphasises the preciousness of each plant and the precarity of their, and our shared existence.

Their work 舞草舞木 / Dance Grass Dance Tree draws on the notion of ‘making kin’ to consider how all of the Earth’s life forms are bound to fragile ecologies. To be kin with the surrounding plants is to have an enduring relatedness that is mutual, obligatory, pleasurable and accountable. The performance thereby poses a critical question: to whom is one truly responsible?

As the piece unfolds the beauty of sensual interactions between humans and plants is brought into focus, with lines and shapes that gesture across difference and energetically play with multispecies flourishing. In this way, Zheng creates a speculative alternative – a possibility of living in a subjective, symbiotic way with other life forms. Further to this, by excavating the roots of deeply entangled global structures this work considers how we might resist the extractive frameworks of our present moment, and come to view the ecological crisis as extending beyond human survival alone.

To interact intimately with the grass and the trees requires a reconfiguration of how we get to know life forms different from ours. For pleasure is both a noun and a verb that holds a moral and an ethical dimension. Pleasure is slowly cultivated over time, it is reciprocal and requires sensitivity to the needs of the other. Pleasure is what enables us all to form meaningful, lasting attachments to others. Connecting with plants in this way moves beyond language as a mode of recognising and understanding what we see. Rather than observing the plants Zheng invites you to sense and contemplate the way they live. Studying the outside world is also an opportunity to examine your own interior world.

By thinking with our entire bodies about the relations between humans and plants – contemplating how these bonds can be lasting, to a certain extent equal and ideally pleasurable – 舞草舞木 / Dance Grass Dance Tree suggests a reconfiguration of how we perceive and communicate with all of the Earth’s life forms. As the performance suggests, building multiple alliances between people and plants might recompose what it means to be human. Let’s find ways of becoming world-together.

Commissioned by The Art Gallery of Western Australia as part of the Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Asian Art, and presented in collaboration with OFF-base Dance.

— Courtesy of the artist and Art Gallery of Western Australia.