Wilting Flowers in Dance. Choreographic Approaches to Floral Ephemerality Alexander Schwan
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WILTING FLOWERS IN DANCE. CHOREOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO FLORAL EPHEMERALITY ALEXANDER SCHWAN Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. Animation In cultural history, the tropisms and nastic movements of plants have been closely intertwined with the topos of transience. Floral movements, like the opening and clos ing of a blossom, its coming into bloom and its withering away, gradually emerged as a leading metaphor of ephemerality. A radical understanding of this transi toriness assumed its exemplary representation in the largest class of seed-bearing plants, the Magnoliopsida or angiosperms, which encompasses all owering plants, includ ing grasses, shrubs and trees. Plant movement, and specically the movement of owers, has become a regular allegory for the eeting and impermanent nature of life, especially the life of human beings. — My thanks to Matthew Vollgra, Princeton University, for translating this text from the German, and for his valuable suggestions on the thematic complex of plants and expression. — Shakespeare, William : » Sonnet XCIV«, in : id : e Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. by Colin Burrow, Oxford : Oxford UP, , . — On the movement of plants, cf. as historical work above all Darwin, Charles : e Power of Movement in Plants, London : Murray, . An excellent overview of the problems of plant movement can be found in Koller, Dov : e Restless Plant, ed. by Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh, Cambridge, MA / London : Harvard UP, . On the cultural history of owers, cf. Goody, Jack : e Culture of Flowers, Cambridge / New York /Melbourne : Cambridge UP . Specifically concerning the human-plant relation, cf. Bühler, Benjamin / Rieger, Stefan : Das Wuchern der Panzen. Ein Flori- legium des Wissens, Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, [ = Edition Suhrkamp ]; Marder, Michael : e Philosopher’s Plant. An Intellectual Herbarium, New York : Columbia UP, . ALEXANDER SCHWAN e parallel between human and oral ephemerality is paradigmatically formulated in the parallelismus membrorum of the th Psalm, a text that is recited to this day within the context of religious funeral services : Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. / For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. / As for man, his days are as grass : as a ower of the eld, so he ourisheth. / For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. ( Ps. :–, KJV ) It would seem to require only a small mental leap to move from this extremely power- ful concatenation of human being and ower to an analogy between oral move- ments and dance movements. Yet the idea of dancing owers did not emerge out of the blue : it had numerous precursors in the eld of literature, one of which being the rhetorical gure of prosopopoeia, an address to nonhuman and often inanimate objects as ensouled and moved agents of Nature, which itself goes back into Biblical and ancient literature. Another early intimation of the dancing ower motif appears in the phantasm of a human’s transformation into a ower or plant, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an exemplary portrayal of Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree. e ancient Neoplatonic tendency to ascribe dance movements to inani- mate natural objects such as planets and stars may have also inspired the notion of dancing plants. In any event, it is within the Neoplatonically-infused culture of the Renaissance that one nds the very rst explicit reference to dancing owers. e th stanza of Sir John Davies’ Orchestra or a Poeme of Dauncing ( ) draws such a direct comparison between plant movement and dance movement as it applies the verb » dancing « to owers that, agitated by the wind, yet remain xed to the place of their growth and thereby in the mode of sessility. e text even extends the plant- human analogy into the realm of emotive gestures, as when it describes the accidental contact of owers as an act of kissing : — Isa. :, where political victory is expressed by nature : »e mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the eld shall clap their hands.« — Ov. Met. : : » in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescent.« On the history of the impact of Ovid’s depiction of Daphne, cf. foremost Papapetros, Spyros : On the Animation of the Inorganic. Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life, Chicago / London : U of Chicago P, , –. — On John Davies’ idea of dancing owers, cf. especially the older studies by esiger, Sarah : »e › Orchestra ‹ of Sir John Davies and the Image of the Dance «, in : Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes ( January ), –; Garber, Frederick : »Wordsworth at the Universal Dance«, in : Studies in Romanticism : ( Spring ), –, here –..