Andrea’s Field Notes
Urban Weeds As Agency -> A Dance
Andrea Haenggi has a research-based creative practice she calls Ethno-choreo-botan-ography that employs her roles as a Choreographer, Interdiciplinary Artist, Dancer, Embodied Scientist, Fieldwork Movement Specialist, Somatic Educator and EPA agent. Her sensual-bodily-tough works confront audiences with a world beyond humans.
My choreographic practice reveals sensorial, bodily and affective experiences, questions and thoughts are developed through the engagement with the unwanted spontaneous urban plants, we often call weeds. The choreographic practice shoots out to explore themes of immigration, cultivation, feminism (female desire), vegetal philosophies, taxonomy and sexuality. The radicle goes into the cracks, looking at value, comfort/discomfort, maintaining, emotional labor and care. ____ andrea haenggi, weedy choreography
Urban Weeds Garden (1067 Pacific Street Urban Lot in Brooklyn, NYC) – 2017
As an Embodied Scientist and Fieldwork Movement Specialist she explores neighborhoods in transition through the agency of the non-humans. The plant-body encounters with spontaneous urban plants in spaces like “vacant lots’, sidewalk cracks, treepits and highway medians are documented through movement language and visual documentation. They are shared with other humans and non-humans as part of the process and allow for new ways to move, understand shifting ecologies, and to highlight under recognized histories and stories.
I believe they are more than only humans in the world.
I insist that humans and nonhumans of any culture, race and gender has the rights to have a place, to be opportunist and to act with no fear. This totality is what I call resilience. I insist that gestures and movement is thought.
photo 1 and 2 by photographer Julie Lemberger
