Laura Kirshenbaum
performance
The French landscapist Gilles Clement once said that a botanical garden is a combination of landscape and environment, a hybrid convergence of personal memory and scientific facts, encapsulating the events of the past into the hopes of the future.
Botanical gardens around the world are an integral part of the cityscape, fulfilling numerous missions in the scientific fields. They are also like a refuge to cities’ inhabitants in times of need. They are archives, botanical exhibitions, and a reservoir for the future. Plants as providers, nature as a commodity.
Faune / In the Garden touches and listens to these diverse living systems, coexisting in already reciprocal entanglements.
Three passers-by visit botanical gardens. In their own manner, they garden the garden and co-create a performative constellation that keeps on transforming according to each garden’s unique habitat and forms of living; interconnectedness as a guiding principle takes us on a journey of seeking otherwise kinship in critical times.
Then… how to be, to take part, to become a plant? To be intermingled with the garden’s abundance? How to learn a garden by heart?
This collective ballade invites you to (re)experience Zagreb’s botanical garden of from our passer-by point of view, to be together in order to linger, observe, sense and reconnect with the familiar.
The maximum number of audience members is 25 per performance.
CREDITS AND PARTNERS: By and with Laura Kirshenbaum in collaboration with dancer Lisanne Goodhue and musician Myriam Pruvot
DRAMATURGICAL SUPPORT: Talia de Vries
PRODUCTION AND ADMINISTRATION: Lucille Belland / Golden hands
With the voice of Zagreb’s botanical garden director Vanja Stamenković
TEXT: Laura Kirshenbaum in collaboration with Lisanne Goodhue and Myriam Pruvot
COPRODUCTION: ICI-CCN de Montpellier – Occitanie – dans le cadre du projet Life Long Burning soutenu par la commission européenne (Montpellier, FR), Festival Antisezona (Zagreb, HR), Réseau Nos Lieux Communs- programme Nomades, l’Atelline – lieu d’activation art et espace public (Montpellier, FR)
RESIDENCIES: CCN of Roubaix / Ballet du Nord (FR), kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk, BE)
With the support of DRAC Occitanie, Occitanie en scène, Montpellier City and the Botanical Garden of Montpellier / The Faculty of Medicine.