Alexandria Davis is an assistant professor of dance in MSU’s Department of Theatre as well as an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, researcher, performance deviser and certified dancer in health care. She wrote, choreographed and is directing "Echoes from the Banks of the Red Cedar," an immersive dance theatre production presented by the Department of Theatre from Feb. 14-22 at the Fairchild Theatre in the MSU Auditorium. The play is inspired by the William J. Beal Seed Experiment conducted at Michigan State University since 1879 and the longest-running scientific study of its kind.
I first learned about the Beal Seed Experiment at a faculty gathering following my first official Department of Theatre faculty meeting. Kirk Domer, now the department chair, enthusiastically shared the history of Beal Botanical Garden, located directly outside the IMC 34 studio where I teach most of my dance technique classes. I was fascinated by the ongoing ritual of unearthing seeds buried in specific locations over an extended period of time, known only to a select group I refer to as the Beal Seed Experiment legacy keepers.
For me, seeds are connected to so many things in "Echoes from the Banks of Red Cedar." I have primarily connected seeds to the beliefs, cultures and lived experiences that shape the ways we coexist as members of Michigan State University. What happens when you consider the possibility that you yourself are a seed — that you are history expressed within and outside the core of your spirit that is and always will be?
I also love that the Beal Botanical Garden is referred to on MSU’s website as a “living laboratory” with over 2,000 plant species. Even if a plant didn’t originate in Michigan, its migration and inclusion in the garden add to the identity of the evolving arboretum and our ongoing conversations about climate change and invasive species.
As a dancer in medicine, I often work as a teaching artist where the overarching objective of my facilitated choreography, dance and improvisation experiences are to enlighten my students and peers to change as a way of life. For me, performance is research: our minds, our bodies and our spirit/life forces evolve with each breath, each unconscious processing of energies and circumstances of space and time, both seen and unseen. By bringing awareness to the phenomenon that to live is to change through an accumulation of lived experiences and unspoken influences, I am also advocating for people to become aware of the echoes that influence the way we create evidence of our existence.
As a choreographer and postmodern artist, I often facilitate creative processes as a form or methodology of embodied storytelling. The Beal Botanical Garden has been an evolving site for civic-minded investigations of identity and interpersonal dialogue in classes like my DAN 354 choreography lab, where I guide students through processes like my Dancing Back to Self performance methodology, which asks students to examine the impact of dance and performing arts as tools for socialization.
In fall 2023 and 2024, climate change and the role of the witness influenced a series of solo performances using the moving monologue phase of the Dancing Back to Self with students. These performances took place in Beal Botanical Garden.
One exercise that led to the first iterations of "Echoes from the Banks of Red Cedar" asked students to look into the opaque pond at the garden’s edge, near the staircase leading up to the library. As students meditated on what it was like to look into a body of water that yielded no direct reflection, I asked them to think about what it meant to choreograph a dance about their history and identity for an audience that lacked an understanding of the many circumstances and experiences that led to who they are today.
This was followed by a series of questions, which I asked the students to answer while exploring the garden. The first question: if your heart were fruit, what would it be? The second question: if your body were a plant, how would it smell and how would it feel? The third question: what is your relationship to water? Then the fourth question: what question does your life answer?
After the students concluded their nature walks and answered the questions, I asked them to take a piece of paper and draw six boxes to begin devising a solo performance for the garden:
In box 1, I asked them to reimagine themselves as a plant they most relate to from the garden and draw the plant in an opaque pond. How they move from box to box is based on their memory of how they navigated the garden.
In box 2, I asked them to think about what they and the plant share in common.
In box 3, I asked them to think about what they and the plant need to reach their full potential.
In box 4, I asked them to consider what the greater MSU campus has that will positively impact the fulfillment of that need.
In box 5, I asked how they might go about satisfying that need based on the resources identified around MSU.
In box 6, I asked them to explain in detail how they and the plant will change or evolve once that need is met.
After each box was completed, the students were asked to read their boxes like a story, “Once upon a time, there was a (insert reimagined plant person name) in search of their reflection in an opaque pond in the center of Michigan State University…” After they read the story, the students were asked to improvise for a specified duration (8-counts to 64-counts), purposefully searching for movement that embodies the story’s meaning and motifs.
What comes out of this part of the Dancing Back to Self process for the practitioner is always enlightening and inspiring, leading to interpersonal conversations about the parts of ourselves we believe belong to us or need to be refined for inclusion in a community of artists and scholars navigating higher education in pursuit of opportunity and success.
The experiences during the Dancing Back to Self moving monologue phase of the process further illuminated that we are all here at Michigan State for a reason. For many of us, that reason relates to our desire to advance our socioeconomic status in pursuit of success and opportunity.
As a postmodern dance artist, I am a firm believer in the concept of “death to the author,” the idea that meaning ultimately belongs to the audience, not the creator alone. My hope is that the "Echoes from the Banks of Red Cedar" audience begins to investigate the ways they might be planting their identities and beliefs about belonging with opportunity and success. The echoes are an amalgamation of triumphs, setbacks and histories in conversation with the many trailblazers, like the first 10 women to attend school at MSU, as it relates to our present sociopolitical commentary surrounding an ever-evolving artificial intelligence that, for some, is frightening and hard to fully comprehend because of its ability to distort the “truth.”
My goal has been to artistically shape the echoes I have heard about the history and legacy of Michigan State University from various contexts into a performance that exists both in and outside of time and across spaces relevant to the evolution of this campus, which sits along the headwaters of the Red Cedar River. I want the audience to engage in dialogue about what they see and what it reminds them of. I hope the echoes of those dialogues evolve into colorful discussions about what it all may or may not mean and why it matters.
This story originally appeared on the College of Arts and Letters website.
