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Vines

VINES is a site-adaptive workshop and performance created by Melanie Kloetzel (kloetzel&co.) with dramaturgical support from Brandy Leary (Anandam Dancetheatre). Using state-based and durational approaches, the work explores how the human body can corporeally adapt to urban spaces by rigorously embodying growth patterns from climbing plants.

The VINES process asks dancing bodies to adopt ideas from the more-than-human world to impact a series of spaces, just as, perhaps, plants do when enacting a reclamation of abandoned or disused areas. 

With deep appreciation for concepts of relationality, which have been emphasized by Indigenous communities around the world, VINES considers what it might mean to identify with plants as kin. Through an investigation into the growth-oriented movement patterns of vining or climbing plants, the VINES process offers a framework for translating such movement into the human body. In this way, the process helps us consider whether an embodied translational approach can engender a sense of kinesthetic empathy with our more-than-human kin.

The work has enjoyed research development in both Toronto and Calgary with support from Canada Council for the Arts.

A workshop installation of VINES took place as part of the Fluid Festival in November 2024 and a performance work of VINES will premiere in connection with New Works Calgary, with a live presentation of Emilie Lebel’s ‘field studies’ performed by the UltraViolet Ensemble in February 2025.

For more about this research process, see:

‘New Directions in Site Performance Practice’

and

Climate Art