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Calendar Estado Vegetal Manuela-Infante-
Estado-Vegetal

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May 9–12, 2019
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O Image Descriptions Edlis Neeson Theater
First Floor, Accessible via the Griffin Entrance on Pearson Street

Estado Vegetal (vegetable state) is the latest THIS PERFORMANCE IS PRESENTED IN

Manuela Infante, Estado Vegetal
Photo: Maida Carvallo
FUNDING
This engagement of Manuela Infante is made possible
through Southern Exposure: Performing Arts of Latin
America, a program of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in
partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
genre- bending work by writer-director SPANISH WITH ENGLISH SUPERTITLES.
Manuela Infante—her first “vegetable play, not
an animal play” that tests the limits of
anthropocentrism, which has been her prime
artistic interest for ten years.
Created with an all-woman team, the play uses ACCESSIBLE EVENTS
Infante’s sublime sense for comedy and theater
in service of philosophical concepts about plant ASL-INTERPRETED PERFORMANCE
intelligence and vegetative soul. The individual FRI, MAY 10, 7:30 pm
stories of Estado Vegetal branch out from a
collision with a tree and proceed to imagine a ASL-INTERPRETED PERFORMANCE with
scenario in which plants decide to reclaim their AUDIO DESCRIPTION and RELAXED
PERFORMANCE
kingdom.
SUN, MAY 12, 2 pm
Experimental performer Marcela Salinas
(shown here) plays all of the characters by An optional live audio description for patrons
recording and building on her voice with live who are blind or have low vision is available
looping. Infante, who is also a musician, for use. Headsets can be reserved by calling our
Box Office at 312-397-4010.
designed and operates the sound. Rocio
Hernandez’s dynamic, expressive stage design
renders the plants onstage effectively as For this relaxed performance, house lights will
coactors rather than mere props, establishing an not be kept at a low glow and some blackouts
will occur. Patrons needing to exit the theater
undeniable network of similarities between
humans and plants. can be assisted by an usher.

In one sense, Estado Vegetal probes the human Relaxed performances are for people with or
need to communicate; alternately, by staging without disabilities who prefer some flexibility
the possibility of communication between in regard to noise and movement in the theater.
plants, it also anticipates a post-anthropocentric Typically, stage lighting and sound have been
theater. The work raises Infante’s concerns with adapted by the artists to be less intense. Patrons
time and image, how perception is shaped, and are free to leave and reenter the theater as
the cognitive effects of something vanishing. necessary, and the theater lights are kept at a
Attuned to both the durational being and glow to facilitate movement. Sensory rest areas
hidden language of plants, Estado Vegetal are available outside the theater for patrons to
interrogates the value of a life that takes more take a break before returning to the show.
time to process information or translate it into Volunteers, many of whom are members of the
motion. It is hard to look at difference in disabled community, are present to assist.
people, or anything that photosynthesizes, in
the same light after this.
Estado Vegetal draws inspiration from the
revolutionary thinking of plant neurobiologist POST-SHOW TALK
Stefano Mancuso and plant philosopher
Michael Marder, who has said that “to FRI, May 10, immediately following the
recognize a valid ‘other’ in plants is also performance
beginning to recognize that vegetal other
within us.” Infante responds: “In accepting The audience is invited to stay for a brief
plants have other ways of being is to insist on conversation with Manuela Infante and
the independence of things. Our notions are Associate Curator of Performance Tara Aisha
transformed, and we need to learn to not Willis.
subjugate ethics to similarity. We must find
ways to develop an ethical thinking towards
that which is radically different from us, in any
way.”
During a 2015 residency at The Watermill
Center, a laboratory for investigation founded
by Robert Wilson, Infante began to process
ideas of the Nonhuman Turn and Object-
Oriented Philosophy, which studies the moment
of independence from subjectivity possessed by
things and nonhuman forces.
With Realismo, which premiered 2016, Infante
challenged the idea of humanity as the only
measure for everything. The play proposes
objects as vibrant things with a certain
effectivity and voice of their own—things that
acquire an irreducible degree of independence Manuela Infante, Estado Vegetal
from the words, images, and feelings they Photo: Isabel Ortiz
provoke in the humans. It was her first take on
a new form of “realism” that engages ideas
infused by the Speculative Realists. Other
important influences are the video art of Peter
Fischli and David Weiss (Der Lauf der Dinge),
the ideas of Graham Harman, Bruno Latour,
Jane Bennett, and Manuel DeLanda, and the
genre of slapstick.
Presenting Estado Vegetal at the MCA, a place
for contemporary art and culture, also creates
ties between the work and American pop
culture and history in unexpected ways. The
North American tour is exactly 40 years after
Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life
of Plants. This platinum-selling soundtrack
accompanied the film The Secret Life of Plants,
which was based on a 1973 book of the same
title by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. To Manuela Infante, Vegetative State at Singapore
translate the book’s complex information, International Festival of Arts, 2017
Photo: Call The Shots
Wonder adapted the breakthroughs of African
American agriculturalist George Washington
Carver and experimented with the scientific
findings of Jagadish Chandra Bose, who
developed instruments to measure plants’
responses to stimuli. Wonder is also an early About the Artist
adherent of digital sampling synthesizers and
famously used this technology for The Secret
Life of Plants. Infante and Salinas experiment Manuela Infante is a preeminent playwright,
similarly for the music and sound design of director, screenwriter, and musician. She earned
Estado Vegetal. an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University
of Amsterdam.
Since starting her first group, Teatro de Chile,
Infante has often declared that she uses She regards her plays as essays in a corpus of
theater in service of philosophical inquiry; in broader currents of thought that stems from
order to build fictions, she dissects the theoretical writings, science, and cultural
construction of reality itself. While Chile has a studies. She characterizes her work as “a kind of
long, ongoing history of directly political ‘irresponsible philosophy’; irresponsible in the
theater, Infante’s is better described as sense that we strive from stealing from theory
ontological. Moreover, as her career has gone to make work, and not having to inscribe myself
on, her work reveals growing investment in responsibly/responsively back into the academic
what she calls the “contemplative dimension” of corpus. My work is about letting ideas acquire a
theater. She celebrates art’s resistance to utility material life of their own, watching them find
or consumption; rather than clarifying what is their way into the material world, into our
unclear, she says, it should make mysterious bodies and our relations, and thus into time.”
what is mundane.
Infante is widely celebrated for feminist re-
Infante’s early breakthrough plays were bold envisioning of famous historical figures,
reinterpretations of historical figures and combining slapstick humor, prose, and
narratives. With Estado Vegetal she is memorable mise-en-scènes for works such as
challenging anthropocentrism and making a Cristo (2008), based on the life of Jesus of
claim for the nonhuman and otherness, Nazareth. What's He Building in There? was
questioning modern man’s superiority and developed through a 2011 residency at The
autonomy. Watermill Center, where she worked with
visual art curator Camila Marambio and Juan
Esteban Varela, an internationally recognized
magician who is blind. On the Beach (2012)
was curated by Robert Wilson and premiered
at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York,
and Don't Feed the Humans (2014) was
premiered at the Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. In
2016 she debuted at Kyoto Experiment with
Zoo, a lecture performance examining the
themes of humans in exhibition and linguistic
differences through Darwin’s On the Origin of
the Species. She has toured her theater
extensively in Latin America and to Holland,
Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, the United
States, and Mexico. Estado Vegetal has toured to
Spain, Singapore, Switzerland, and Korea.

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