WALPURGIS
April 2025, MEXICO
Video by michela filzi ©2025
The piece draws inspiration from Walpurgisnacht, a springtime pagan celebration rooted in pre-Christian Germanic traditions, historically associated with witchcraft, fertility rites, and seasonal renewal. Over time, the Catholic Church appropriated and reshaped Walpurgisnacht into a Christian observance, erasing many of its original meanings. In Walpurgis, we return to its pagan essence, forging a dialogue with pre-Columbian ritual practices from Mexico.
The performance becomes a cross-cultural invocation, reclaiming suppressed cosmologies and honoring the healing power of the land and the wisdom of the feminine.
Rooted in ritual, movement, and ancestral knowledge, Walpurgis explores the intersection of German and Mexican herbal traditions, bridging geographies and histories through the lens of ecology, colonial legacies, and embodied practices. The piece interweaves dance, voice incantations, and medicinal plant knowledge to summon a space of reflection, resistance, and healing.
Focusing on four emblematic plants—Rosemary and Rue (of European origin, woven into Mexican practices) and Pericón and Jasmine (native to Mexico)—the performance unfolds as a living ritual. These plants become both agents of resistance and witnesses to the layered histories of colonization, cultural exchange, and ecological interconnectedness.
WE ARE ONLY HUMAN
March 2025, BRAZIL“We are human only in contact and conviviality with the non-human” is a video installation that portrays two dreams mirroring each other through images, text, and sound.
As part of the Dream Acting residency, Cris—a Caiçara, part of a traditional Brazilian population group inhabiting the coastal regions of southeastern and southern Brazil—offered her dream for the world. Her dream speaks of a deep love for nature and a desire to live in a world guided by dignity and respect for both human and non-human beings. It reflects a belief that all beings are sentient and deserve to live and thrive. Michela received this dream with a strong sense of resonance; Cris’s vision mirrors her own in all its generosity.
In the two videos, the audience witnesses an encounter between Cris—the dreamer, in her home and garden—and michela. Cris shares her knowledge—both ancestral and everyday—of the plants she lives with, tends to, and which in turn care for her.
Video by michela filzi ©2025
Video by michela filzi ©2025
In the second video, michela gives form to her imagination, awakened and shaped by the relationship to the dream she received. She expresses her own dream for the world and the stories that flow through Barra do Sahy, the base of the Dream Acting residency. With nature as the greatest source of inspiration, healing, and wonder, the images become a dance—a slow choreography of interconnection—and the music a sonic reverberation of the experience of being in this place, here and now, dreaming in a state of wakefulness.
Credits:
concept and creation: michela filzi
performance, support and collaboration: Beatix Joyce, Cecilia Erismann, Charlotte Watson, Teo Arjueyrolles
music: „só o Amor“ by Daniel Moray voice and guitar
„Barra do Sahy“: pandero and voice Maritaca, voice and arrangement michela filzi
„Carangueijo“: voice and creation michela filzi and Pedro Maia
video, editing and installation: michela filzi
technical support: Lucas Prada, Victor Naccashe
*Quote by David Abraham from the book „The Spell of the Sensuous“
SOLO FOR FORESTS
Video by michela filzi ©2025
Through somatic movement, sensory mapping, voice, and ritual enactment, "Solo for Forests" unfolds as a dialogue between the body and the more-than-human world. The work seeks to decolonize perception, expand the boundaries of choreography, and re-sensitize the performer to ecological entanglements. It is an invitation to listen—to the plants, to the forest, and to the ancient practices that have held space for healing and transformation across generations.
This ecosomatic inquiry is not only a performative gesture but a political and spiritual stance: reclaiming slowness, intimacy, and ecological attunement in an age of acceleration and extraction.
January - February 2025, PERU
"Solo for Forests" is an ecosomatic artistic research project exploring the deep interconnection between humans, plants, and ritual practices rooted in indigenous cosmologies of peruvian culture. It investigates how these ancestral relationships—shaped by reciprocity, reverence, and embodied knowledge—can be translated, re-imagined, and embodied within contemporary performance practices.
During a two-month residency at Sachaqa Centro de Arte, situated in the rural highland rainforest of San Roque de Cumbaza in the Peruvian Amazon, artist Michela Filzi immersed herself in the vibrant ecological and cultural landscape of the region. The research centered on traditional plant medicine and shamanic rituals of the Chazutina and Lamas indigenous communities, focusing on their embodied ways of knowing, healing, and communicating with the forest.
Video by michela filzi ©2025
LE LANGAGE SECRET DES PLANTES SAUVAGES
2024© Mugwort - video by michela filzi - Photos by Melanie Melot ©2024
"Le langage secret des plantes sauvages" is a site-specific solo performance presented as a performative walk through the garden of the Moulin Scalagrand during “Un festival à Villeréal” 2024. This work invites the audience into an intimate, multi-sensory dialogue with the wild plants that inhabit the local landscape— dandelion, nettle, mugwort—through embodied choreography, spoken word, and shared culinary rituals.
Developed during a year-long research project titled Urban Plantarium (Berlin, 2022–2023), the performance reclaims a historically feminized knowledge: that of foraging, herbalism, and bodily attunement to nature. By drawing on practices often excluded from dominant (patriarchal and colonial) narratives of science and culture, the piece centers a feminist ecology that values care, attention, and interdependence. The act of gathering and preparing wild herbs, and offering them as nourishing gifts to the audience, becomes a ritual of resistance—against ecological destruction, but also against systems that render both certain bodies and ecosystems invisible.
In response to global ecological and social crises, this work proposes micro-acts of collective healing. It imagines a future rooted not in domination or extraction, but in solidarity with the more-than-human world. Feminist utopias are not abstract ideals here, but tangible gestures: a shared herb toast, a step in unison, a word spoken to a plant. This work is a call to remember what our bodies already know: that survival and joy are collective, that wildness is wisdom, and that even the smallest gestures—when made with care—can transform our relation to the world.
Quote from the performance’s text:
“Si on peut dire que on est ce qu'on mange, alors j'aimerais être enracinée et libre, spontanée et sage, comme les plantes sauvages.
translation:
“If it's true that we are what we eat, then I'd love to be rooted and free, spontaneous and wise, like wild plants.
Funded by the European Union' and the Goethe-Institut
‘This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union'
SUMMER SOLSTICE
SUMMER SOLSTICE is a reaccurring participatory performance, organised by michela filzi and her collaborators, a gathering to celebrate wild plants with dance, music and plant based foraged tastings. This public event aims at promoting environmental awareness, kinship with plants and the role of rituals and dance in ecology.
In 2024 the community garden Himmelbeet (Wedding) hosted and supported this event in the frame of their cultural program Fair.Wurzelt
"We propose that we take inspiration from old rituals and create new ones, that we learn practices that reconnect us with nature, so that we can embrace the grief we are carrying. We suggest that these practices be small gestures of daily life, because we can't face up to enormous fears all alone, all at once."
cit. from the performance - toast to wild plants
concept and Dance - michela filzi
food art - Florancia Konekamp Kusch (Ohne Berlin)
music - Sebastian Faust
performance and support - Beatrix Joyce
photos by Gustavo Trujillo ©2024
FORAY AND INTUITIONS
video by Evgenia Chetvertkova ©2023
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR, aid programm DIS-TANZEN by the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland
April - June 2023 - Berlin, GERMANY
Between April and June 2023, a series of “Somatic Foraging Walks” was offered to small groups of participants in various parks across Berlin. These guided walks, led by michela, invited participants into a meditative and embodied experience of urban nature. Drawing from her personal practice and experience with wild foraging, Michela introduced the concept of somatic foraging—a mindful engagement with green urban spaces, in which participants forage for wild plants for nourishment and healing.
In this context, foraging was understood not only in a literal sense but also as a metaphorical act: an encounter with the landscape that invites the harvesting of a sense of belonging, connection to plant life, and a form of healing from the disconnection fostered by contemporary urban living.
Equally important was the act of reciprocity. Participants were encouraged to offer something in return—be it a physical gesture, an intentional act, or simply their attentive presence and gratitude toward the more-than-human world they encountered.
video by Evgenia Chetvertkova ©2023
URBAN PLANTARIUM
2022 - 2023, GERMANY and ITALY
Eco-somatic research at the intersection between ecology and dance, combining foraging; the practice of collecting wild plants for culinary purposes, with somatic dance; focused on the attunement to the environment. This research is an exploration of the nomadic practice of foraging, which enables one to encounter any landscape and attune to it, in the ever-changing green areas, parks and gardens of the urban landscape. It resulted in a format for site-specific performances, inviting audiences to gather around encountering and celebration of plant life.
On the 20 and 21.06.2023, URBAN PLANTARIUM - performances and conviviality, took place in the yard of Uferstudios for the celebration of the summer solstice.
The choreographic research and the shaping of musical compositions, took place between Berlin's parks and the dance studio. michela filzi and sound artist Sebastian Faust, harvested field recordings and used them to compose sound scores through the use of a motion tracking camera. The inspiration taken from a specific plant is translated into a movement improvisation, which is translated into a sound score. The movement improvisation is guided by the association of the plant with a specific part of the body (energetic centres or chakras), a quality of movement and an energetic pattern.
“Our physical shapes are the results of energetic patterns giving rise to those forms over time. Roots, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, energetic gestures: ascending, descending, contracting, expanding. From a tiny roundish thing we stretch out sinking our root pole into the ground and reaching the leaf pole up towards the light. Expanding upon germination, contracting into flower buds, expanding into flowers, contracting into pollen, expanding into fruit, contracting into seed.”
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR, aid programm DIS-TANZEN by the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland
TIPPING POINT
2022 GERMANY and FRANCE - ResearchLabA dance research project by Michela Filzi developed as part of the #TAKEHEART residency funding program of the Fonds Darstellende kunste, in collaboration with Kampnagel (Hamburg).
The project investigates the changes and properties of a dynamic system in the immediate vicinity of a tipping point. In ecological and social terms, a tipping point is the point at which a series of small changes or events in a dynamic system become significant enough to cause a large, irreversible change. Based on the assumption that the body itself is a complex system and that a group of dancing bodies forms an even larger and more complex system, I have applied the phe- nomenon of the tipping point to movement research for a group of dancers and non-professional dancers.
METABOLIC ENCOUNTERS
(2020-2021) - MA research project on an object oriented movement practice - works created for the MA SODA at the HZT BerlinMĀYĀ
(2018 - 2019)
Māyā is the Sanskrit word for 'measure', and its prefix Mā is related to the Latin words 'mater' and 'matrix'. A 'matrix' is a tool of the human intellect for measuring reality and the natural world. In this site-specific performance, the performer's body is seen as the measure through which space is activated and revealed. The piece metaphorically addresses and questions western society's understanding of our universe.
YOU, ME & DATA
2017 - 2018, GERMANY and HOLLAND
a multimedia performance that reflects on the notion of screened reality and the absurdity of normality in the 21st century.
OLDER WORKS
2015 - 2018 Amsterdam, HOLLAND