FLORESCENCE IN DECAY

Premiere – 23rd – 25th of March 2023 at the Grand Théâtre Luxembourg

‘In the beginning we were all the same living creature, sharing the same body and the same experience. And things haven’t changed so much since then. New forms and new modes of existence have proliferated. But even today, we are all still the same life. ‘

– Emanuele Coccia, METAMORPHOSES –

Change is everywhere, metamorphoses abound: a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, an acorn becomes an oak, from an egg hatches a bird; the sea becomes cloud, only to rain down again, creating a stream; a rock becomes a boulder, a boulder becomes sand; wood burns to ashes, and from ashes grow flowers. Nature is change, and we are part of it.
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Drawing on images such as these, Florescence in Decay, Elisabeth Schilling’s new group piece for nine dancers, is a physical meditation on continuity, repetition, and change. Engaging different layers of time both within and beyond the scale of human experience, the piece explores the rhythms of a world not unlike our own through ideas of metamorphosis and cycle: becoming and passing away, growing and maturing, transience and renewal.
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Drawing inspiration from the structures and textures of living and non-living beings, Florescence in Decay pulls stones, algae, corals, lichens, fungi and other forms into a swirl of becoming, enabling a constant process of creative evolution. Featuring music from Anna Meredith’s ANNO (performed by the Orchestre de Chambre de Luxembourg and Anna Meredith herself), which intertwines sections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Meredith’s electronic compositions and other partner pieces, Florescence in Decay interweaves the sensibilities of dance and contemporary music to explore sonic and dynamic textures and their complex patterns of change. In an environment of mutual immersion, the dancers sense their relations, ceaselessly making and unmaking them, creating temporary communities. Everything is potentially interconnected, every act has consequences. Even as colourful individuals emerge and move about, they are never entirely disconnected from their environments – they may build alliances with others, and as they fade, they are once again returned to the pulsating body of life itself.
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If our world, then, is a world of entangled becomings and sensations, we need all our senses to make sense of it – we need, in the words of the anthropologist Anna Tsing, new arts of noticing. Florescence in Decay acknowledges these arts of noticing, inviting audiences into a world that prepares the imagination for a different view on the vicissitudes of change, allowing us to mourn in the face of its violence as well as to celebrate its powers of renewal.

Rehearsal images