BLOOM EXPLORATIONS

DANCE

22 Nov

Recently landed: Bloom Explorations

Gracia’s written response to Recoil Performance Group’s MASS-bloom explorations, especially for Fjord Review.

If you are an insect in the superorder Endopterygota, you have the super ability to experience complete metamorphosis. You can transform from the four stages of life — egg, larva, pupa, adult — in a process called holometabolism. One such creature who can do this is the Darkling beetle, who emerges in the fourth stage with a thick protective exoskeleton, and another is the adaptable super-performer and co-creator Hilde I. Sandvold, in choreographer Tina Tarpgaard’s MASS-bloom explorations. For three days, Sandvold, as part of Recoil Performance Group’s MASS-bloom explorations installation at Dancehouse, recasts herself as a super-sized larva guardian, a super-worm with a vertebrate. Dressed head to toe in a latex costume the colour of her tiny co-performers, thousands of live mealworms in the larval or second stage of life, Sandvold and the mealworms have formed a symbiotic relationship that reads as a tale of regeneration. For mealworms, it has been unearthed, have another super power: the ability to eat and digest polystyrene, thanks to microorganisms in their guts which can biodegrade plastic.[i]

My prior relationship with mealworms is as a wildlife carer. Mealworms are what I feed to microbats and more recently a Dusky antechinus, a small carnivorous marsupial endemic to Australia. When the juvenile antechinus we’d named Bingo could hunt and kill his own mealworms and crickets in his enclosure, he was ready to be released back in the wild. The mealworms were indicative of his maturity. And now, in the darkness of the Sylvia Staehli Theatre, the mealworms I know as something to feed to another animal in care, and who reside in a sealed container in my fridge, I am in turn now watching feed on three days’ worth of polystyrene. As part of the Membrane Project, Copenhagen-based Recoil Performance Group’s MASS-bloom explorations beckons you “to come close to the perishability, decomposing and death that all living beings on the earth are confronted with and eventually become part of,”[ii] and celebrate the container of mealworms in your fridge, the cycle of life, whether you are squeamish or otherwise. What nourishes the antechinus is also capable of cleaning up human detritus.

[i] Rob Jordan, ‘Can mealworms help solve our plastic problem’, Stanford Earth Matters magazine, Stanford University, 19th December, 2019, https://earth.stanford.edu/news/can-mealworms-help-solve-our-plastic-problem, accessed 17th November, 2023.

[ii] MASS-bloom explorations”, Dancehouse website, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/whats-on/mass-bloom-events/, accessed 17th November, 2023.