WILD FLOWERS

DANCE

19 Mar

Recently landed: Wild Flowers

Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballets and Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Flora, especially for Fjord Review.

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In transparent specimen bags, arranged in a circle, float Lemon Myrtle, Warrigal Greens, and Red Bottle Brush. Alongside which, as an incarnation of said flora, coil Yara Xu, Benjamin Garret, and Montana Ruben. But it is more than skin deep. It is as if the two are one and the same, indivisible. The flowers are the dancers, and the dancers are the flowers. Zeak Tass is Kangaroo Paw, Emily Flannery is Red Waratah, Kassidy Waters is Flowering Gum, and Elijah Trevitt is Red Banksia. On the opening night of the world premiere of Frances Rings’s Flora, a collaboration between The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre, at the Regent Theatre in Melbourne/Naarm, specimens have been uprooted and are being dried, and in the process, they are becoming artefacts. The living is being collected, the harm of which is forever felt.

10 Days references the specimens collected by Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, from which botanical illustrator, Sydney Parkinson, completed 674 detailed drawings, with notes on their colour, and 269 watercolour illustrations. In a lengthy process of extended removal, from Parkinson’s drawings, 743 copperplate line engravings were created to form what would become Banks’ Florilegium. 1400 flora specimens were “ripped from their native Story and their cultural home”[i]. Like the fauna collected alongside the flora, equally indivisible from one another, such collections today reveal a loss of diversity. Revealing the process of Banks and Solander’s ‘discovery’ in this manner, the separation of First Nations meaning, and Indigenous knowledge systems, from the collection they amassed, burns beneath the spotlight. For these specimens were first removed from place and then separated from meaning. On a stage white like the parchment of the page, Tass and Waters duck and weave, as they search for the breeze that once circled their forms, and the sun overhead that once enabled them to photosynthesise. As the specimen sleeves are removed, their rectangular silhouettes remain illuminated on the stage with a tomb-like quality. Only this time, importantly, the ten flora specimens have been selected for their particular significance to First Nations peoples.

[i] “Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) removes hundreds of species from their natural environment… Banks’ ‘discovery’ is the largest collection of its kind at the time.” Flora printed synopsis, The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre, Melbourne/Naarm, 2026.