For several years now, you have been developing choreographic research around the movement of plants. How does Growing piece fit into this line of inquiry?
Madeleine Fournier
With Growing piece, my working process emerged from a more intuitive impulse than in my previous creations. While searching for narratives around these vegetal metamorphoses, I came across the myth of the Heliades. After the death of Phaethon—the son of the sun god Helios—his sisters mourned him for months. At the end of this mourning, they were transformed into poplar trees. Unlike other stories from Greek mythology, this metamorphosis does not occur as a divine punishment, nor as part of a patriarchal narrative about women’s condition, in which they are made to submit by “forcing” them into a new form. Here, the morphological change is linked to grief, to pain. It is the force of sorrow that drives their transformation and alters their physical appearance. Paradoxically, their lives continue in a vegetal form, which binds them to stillness. It is this extreme reduction of movement that interested me. I wanted to work at the threshold between stillness and motion; to invoke myth in order to speak about the epic journey of a plant that, despite its near immobility, continues to strive toward the light. I also drew on personal experiences to raise, more collectively, the question of grief as a life transition. It’s a process of identification that I connect to this force of the living: what form does life take when it is hindered, constrained, almost brought to a standstill? I’m not trying to deliver a message about resilience; rather, I’m interested in how the exploration of movement can allow joy or hope to emerge, despite adversity.
How did this “physiological” interweaving between the plant body and the register of emotions take shape in your work on stage?
In my show Labourer (2018), I presented an experimental scientific film, Croissance des végétaux, which showed the evolution of plants, from their budding to their death, sometimes their dormancy. Watching it again, I realised that this question of emotions intertwined with the plant body had been present, in a latent way, in my work for several years. In Growing piece, the idea is to approach this subject by embodying it through dance. To do so, I drew on my practice of tropism—the movements of plants—which I have long explored quietly in the dance studio and which has shaped both the body and the imagination of several of my creations. I felt the need to question the potential for spectacle of these movements, which at first glance might seem unspectacular.
I introduce a layer of the grotesque to expand the work around the mask and emotions. While the piece deals with grief, there is also a form of humour that unfolds around the plant’s quest. My approach consists in associating an emotion with a plant tropism. For example, heliotropism, a plant’s search for the sun, becomes a bodily movement toward light, upward, and is linked to a pure feeling of joy. Gravitropism, on the other hand, is a pull toward gravity, toward the ground. It belongs more to the realm of sadness. The whole challenge of this research lies in developing an expressivity of gestures and body starting from movements that appear abstract. Music plays a crucial role in bringing this emotional score to life on stage. With the musician Julien Desailly, we explored how a melodic shift within a repetitive motif could alter the emotional curve. By changing the tonality, the body orients itself differently in space, and the movement transforms. It’s a constant dialogue where the music sometimes drives the body, and sometimes the body drives the music. This allows us to work toward making this score of gestures legible for the audience.
What were your inspirations in shaping the music performed live in the show?
In the show, we use a Balkan bagpipe called Kaba gaida. It’s a rather unusual, quite rustic instrument, made from goat skin that forms an air reservoir. The sounds it produces are close to the human voice, almost like cries. There’s something of a lament in these deep tones. Julien Desailly sometimes plays it in a traditional way, drawing on Bulgarian folk melodies, but also in a more experimental manner, producing repetitive and minimalist sequences. We drew on principles of motif repetition typical of traditional music, which we tried to make more archaic, as if stripping music down to its bare bones. One of the pieces in the performance is even called “the prehistoric bourrée.” Julien Desailly explores the instrument in every possible way. In another section, he manages to produce extremely low, repetitive sounds, almost like cracking noises, by working with sub-pressure, creating the impression of electronic music. That piece has actually become our “techno.”
There is also this crown of flowers, which is a central element of the scenography. What does it represent in relation to the overall theme of the piece?
This crown of flowers obviously evokes the funeral wreaths placed at burials, signalling mourning and the rituals surrounding it. In the myth of the Heliades, the metamorphosis takes place around the tomb of their brother Phaethon. Here, it becomes a crown.
It was the scenographer Andrea Baglione who proposed this idea of a crown suspended above the stage and resting on the ground. The design comes from a 19th-century crinoline motif she found in a decorative arts book. This resonated with our desire to draw inspiration from the Romantic era of the early 20th century and from the large painted backdrops found, for example, in Nijinsky’s dance productions.
It was interesting for us to introduce the sign of the vegetal, which is the theme underlying the entire piece, through scenography, since it is not directly illustrated in the dance or the costume. We also wanted to pay tribute to the “decorative” plant, so omnipresent in the decorative arts that we no longer even notice it.
Finally, the crown creates a very strong relationship to space, functioning like an optical device, a kind of focal point that directs the gaze toward a vanishing point in the black depth of the stage, toward mystery. Over the course of creation, we also realised that it subtly alters the perception of time. The figures moving within the centre of the crown seem slightly slowed down or accelerated, as if emerging from the past or moving toward the future. This allows the audience, I hope, to experience the idea of cyclical time and the perpetual metamorphosis of the living, a process that contains every moment of the cycle, a movement that, in dying, is reborn, and in being born, dies to what it once was.
Interview conducted by Marion Guilloux in February 2026