MESSENGERS DIVINOS: mycelium, flesh & earthly entanglements
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
June 28, 2025 - June 29, 2025
Performance Saturday, June 28 at 8 PM
with Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks and Iván-Daniel Espinosa
Matinee Sunday, June 29 at 3 PM
with Cristal Sabbagh, Helen Lee, and Keiko Johnson
Messengers Divinos is a dance/movement-based installation that engages sonically and sensorially with the vibrant materiality of mycelium fungi and fungal ecosystems. Situated at the intersection of mycology and performance, this installation integrates amplified bio-data sonification and mycelial bioacoustics from mushroom colonies of diverse species with live Butoh dance to immerse audiences into the shapeshifting world of fungi, while offering insight into the complex relationships between humans, nature, and technology.
When most people think of fungi, they think of mushrooms. However, like the apples that fall off of an apple tree, mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the much larger, expansive fungal root systems called mycelium. Scattered throughout the forests of the earth, fungal mycelium forms what scientists call the wood wide web: vast, underground symbiotic networks of fungi that connect the roots of thousands of plants and trees and play a key role in maintaining the health and wellness of our planet. In the words of mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, “mycelium is ecological connective tissue, it’s the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation.”1
Ecological connection and relation are also fundamental to the practice of Butoh dance. According to Butoh scholar Rosemary Candelario, “Butoh acts as a kind of ecological methodology, reminding participants and witnesses that they are not isolated from their surroundings.”2 She further emphasizes that there is something deeply ecological about Butoh practices that cultivates “a radically reordered corporeality, a bodily sensitivity to connections constituted by the ecology itself, and an embodied and practiced ecological consciousness fundamentally attuned to interdependence.”3 With physical movements that move towards the earth and the subconscious, Butoh dancers crawl close to the ground like the mushrooms on the forest floor that are colorful indicators and emissaries of the mysterious mycelial world that lies just out of sight, and is dancing just under our feet.
Messengers Divinos is an interspecies performance that engages with themes that are fundamental to both the fungal realm and to Butoh: interconnectedness, embodiment, bioelectricity, decomposition, the body as a landscape and the landscape as a body. Through the integration of mycology and dance with musical soundscapes that are created by fungal bioacoustics and bio-data sonification, this artwork aims to create a MULTI-SENSORY experience that demonstrates a deeply intimate relationship to the earth, where the distinctions between human and non-human worlds disintegrate in slow and attentive bodily practice.
Messengers Divinos first premiered in 2018 as a 3-hour durational performance with live music at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York City. It was then performed as a four-hour gallery-style durational performance at the Seattle International Butoh Festival in July 2018. Later that same year, the project was modified for a proscenium theater format at the 2018 Houston Fringe Festival, with added video projections of the mushroom colonies on stage. In 2020, an article-length review of Messengers Divinos titled “Embodying Climate Change” was published in the journal Performance Research. In 2024, a chapter-length discussion of the project featuring an interview with Iván-Daniel and his dance ensemble was featured in the book Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene published by Routledge.
ROMAN SUSAN Art Foundation is the first organization to bring Messengers Divinos to the Midwest. This performance is its Chicago premiere. Iván-Daniel is thankful to all of his dance ensemble and collaborators for bringing this iteration to life, and deeply thankful to ROMAN SUSAN Executive Director Kristin Abhalter Smith and Managing Director Nathan Smith for their generous support.
Iván-Daniel Espinosa is a choreographer working in the fields of performance, installation and Japanese Butoh (舞踏, Butō). For the past decade, he has been creating both stage performance and durational time-based media that engage with ecology, climate change, interspecies performance, and fungi. Iván-Daniel’s multimedia installations incorporating live mycelium bioacoustics and mycelium fungi networks have been commissioned for live exhibition by venues such Goddard College’s Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence program, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) and the Dairy Arts Center in Colorado. In 2024, a chapter-length discussion about his artwork with fungi was featured in the Routledge publication titled “Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene.”
Iván-Daniel’s artwork and choreographies are highly influenced by his extensive studies of Japanese Butoh. Since 2013, he has trained with many renowned Japanese Butoh master teachers from the lineage of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata including the late Natsu Nakajima, Saga Kobayashi, Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, Semimaru and Dai Matsuoka of Sankai Juku, and Moe Yamamoto of Kanazawa Butoh-Kan. Iván-Daniel began his formative Butoh training with Seattle Butoh pioneer Joan Laage, who continues to serve as his foremost teacher and artistic collaborator to this day. He is the founder and executive producer of the SALISH SEA BUTOH Festival, an annual dance festival that takes place on the Olympic Peninsula to deepen the study of Butoh with artists from all over the world.
Iván-Daniel is a PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and he also holds a Master of Arts in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His PhD dissertation examines the interspecies relationships between human bodies and mycelium fungi through the lens of choreography to consider how fungi is choreographed on the stage, as well as how fungi in turn choreographs the movement of others in and across biological, geographical, and cultural spaces.
References/citations:
- Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures. Penguin Random House, 12 May 2020.
- Candelario, Rosemary. “Introduction: Dance experience, dance of darkness, global butoh: the evolution of a new dance form.” The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, Routledge, June 2020.
- Ibid.