Manuela Infante's ESTADO VEGETAL Announced At Baryshnikov Arts Center

Baryshnikov Arts Center presents Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State), an exuberant and polyphonic one-woman show written and directed by Manuela Infante,one of the most prolific voices in contemporary Chilean and Latin American theater (May 2-3). Created by an all-woman team and developed in part during a 2016 BAC Artist Residency, the individual stories of Estado Vegetal-in a dexterous performance by Marcela Salinas-branch out from a motorcyclist's collision with a tree and proceed to imagine a scenario in which plants decide to reclaim their kingdom. Probing the concepts of plant intelligence and communication, the work examines the impossibility of dialogue between humans and plants and proposes a post-anthropocentric theater.

Infante says, "I believe the speculative exercise to be fundamental for a profound transformation of the way we understand ourselves as beings in the world. To conjecture that the world is more than a construction of the human being, to remember that we are surrounded by forces, beings and other things that exceed what we know or will ever know about them, is a practice that I consider absolutely necessary today."

In Estado Vegetal, Infante subverts the assumed hierarchies of existence that place humanity above everything on the planet. The script itself is arboreal[1], with individual stories branching out from a single event. Using a looping pedal, Marcela Salinas can de-individuate herself and speak as many, and she and Infante have considered how theatrical time and movement can express the passage of time outside the human experience.

Infante has been making theater since 2001, when she founded the acclaimed Teatro de Chile, which disbanded in 2016; she has, through varied approaches, challenged anthropocentrism in her theater now for a decade. The writer/director often takes theoretical texts as the kicking-off points of her work, and Estado Vegetal was inspired by the revolutionary thinking of philosopher Michael Marder and neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso. The latter writes, in his 2015 book Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, "Plants could live very well without us, in general. But without them we would die out very quickly. And yet in many languages...expressions such as 'to vegetate' or 'to be a vegetable' are used to indicate a condition of life reduced to the minimum. 'Vegetable, to whom?'...If plants could speak, maybe that would be one of their first questions to us."

The creative team includes Rocío Hernández (design), Ignacia Pizarro (prop design and construction), and Carmina Infante (producer). Supertitles are by Alex Waghorn, with translation by Bruce Gibbons, Alexandra Ripp, and British Council Chile. Co-production: Fundación Teatro a Mil.

Manuela Infante's Estado Vegetal is performed in Spanish with English supertitles. Performances, which run 90 minutes, take place May 2 & May 3 at 7:30pm in BAC's Jerome Robbins Theater, 450 West 37th Street. Tickets are $25, and can be purchased at bacnyc.org.