Le Sacre du printemps

dance performance

Zheng Bo 鄭波

12 August
Högsveden nature forest
Dalarna, Sweden

Le Sacre du printemps 
Zheng Bo 鄭波
Högsveden nature forest in Dalarna, Sweden
12 August Le Sacre du printemps 
13-14 August Journey into the (post) anthropocentric landscape of Dalarna

Eco-facilitation
DACE – Dance Art Critical Ecology
Rickard Borgström & Rebecca Chentinell 

I wish to explore that which don’t revolve around humans, but rather focus on the other living world. In this case the realm of the forest. Is it possible to interact with it and not have the human in the center? – Zheng Bo

Le Sacre du printemps, dance/performance
Zheng Bo seeks to cultivate eco-sensitive relationships between human beings and beings of the plant world. The first iteration of Le Sacre du printemps were a serach to find forms of movement for a kind of eco-sexual dance, where humans like pine trees was considered dancing bodies. It posed a great challange even to imagine what such dance would look like;The pine trees are more than 20 meters tall and between 60 and 300 years old, much bigger and older than the human dancers. 

This summer Zheng Bo and the dancers revisit Högsveden to nourish their relation and understanding of the nature forest through developing a dance/performance, where also a human audience is invited. In relation to the complex web of elements of the queer ecology of the nature forest, they practice a trans-species
sensing choreography. The audience is invited to sense the immersive relational diversity of Högsvedens nature forest. The eco-sensitive score serves as a prototype to be shared with more dancers and practiced with other nature sites and ecologies.

Journey into the (post) anthropocentric landscape of Dalarna, accompanying program
In addition the guests visits unique biotops with rich biodiversity and sites of man-made markings, such as the creek Rogsån, and Ställberg gruva, where they experience the land through colour observations, nature medidation, poetry and soundworks. The journey offers a reflection space on unforeseen consequences of the engineering and extraction that has been done over centuries in the landscape. The different stops are hosted by local artistic initiatives that works in the intersection art/dance/science/ecology. 

Le Sacre du printemps*
Ecosensibility: Zheng Bo
Eco-facilitation, artistic development, production:
DACE – Dance Art Critical Ecology
Rickard Borgström & Rebecca Chentinell
Dancers: Harald Beharie, Ossi Niskala, Víctor Pérez Armero
Production Assistant: Heta Asikainen

Thank you
Sebastian Kirppu

* An early phase of the project was exhibited at Symbiosis – Erotics curated by DACE – Rickard Borgström & Rebecca Chentinell at Färgfabriken fall 2021, followed by the world premier of dance/film Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen)  at the 9th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di VeneziaThe Milk of Dreams.

ARTIST AND CURATORS 

Zheng Bo 

(b. 1974, Beijing, lives and works on Lantau Island, Hong Kong) 

ZHENG Bo is an ecoqueer artist of ethnic Bai heritage. Through drawing, dance and film, they cultivate kinships with plants. These relations are aesthetic, erotic, and political. For them, art does not arise from human creativity, but more-than-human vibrancy.

Zheng Bo lives in a village on the south side of Lantau Island, Hong Kong. Guided by Daoist wisdom, they grow weedy gardens, living slogans, biophilia films, and ecosocialist gatherings. These diverse projects, alive and entangled, constitute a garden where they collaborate with both human and nonhuman thinkers and activists. Their ecological art practice contributes to an emergent planetary indigeneity. 

In Le Sacre du printemps Zheng examines intimacy between human and tree through an eco-queer-sexual dance method together with five dancers, conditioned in a Nordic ecology and context. The sexuality and agency of humans as well as trees are exercised as dance-scores, where both humans and trees are considered dancers (although trees may dance very slowly), where they rely on their bodies and movements for interaction, charged with desire, lust, erotic and ethics. For more information: zhengbo.com

DACE – Dance Art Critical Ecology
DACE is a platform for curatorial and choreographic explorations on dance and choreography in a More-than-Human World, initiated by Rickard Borgström and Rebecca Chentinell in 2019. Central to the duo is how the body functions as an interface towards the surroundings. Consequently, they invite artists who engage in the rapid technological, environmental and political changes, with a multitude of bodily approaches, and how this might affect our actions, thinking and artistic practice.

DACE traces new bodily sensitivities and interconnections between human, technology and nature in a more-than-human environment. DACE seeks new aesthetic paradigms in the shifting nature of our ecological systems in the geological era of human-made nature. For more information: dace.nu 

PRODUCTION
DACE – Dance Art Critical Ecology

COLLABORATION 
Ställberg gruva, Rogsån, Lindsbergs kursgård

SUPPORT
Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Region Dalarna,
IDP the Swedish Arts Grants Committee´s International Programme for Dance,
IASPIS the Swedish Arts Grants Committee´s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts, TINFO Theatre info Finland