Basic Transmutation / Alien-Migration

Aniara Rodado and Jean-Marc Chomaz Music created by: Jorge Barco / France

In Transmutation de base (Basic Transmutation), choreographer Aniara Rodado and artist physicist Jean-Marc Chomaz create a participatory space for immersive human-plant interaction. While the dancers perform movements derived from scientific research into the movement of plants, into mechanical transduction, morphogenesis and collective plant movements, the audience is invited on stage to be immersed into the olfactory scope produced in real time by the large distillation apparatuses that are blown, on purpose, as ‘glitches’. In order to address and destabilize human stereotypes of how plants are considered, Rodado distills symbolically highly charged plants.

Contact microphones and hydrophones amplify the micro- frictions emerging from a ‘sound kitchen’, a ‘alchemist factory’, completing the immersive smell scape with a sound scape to create intriguing effects of synesthesia. This piece aims at emphasizing the need to slow down to a ‘plantamorphized’ temporal scale, and engage in other sensorial interaction modes than the human-centered sight beyond cognition in times of environmental crisis and anthropogenic excesses.