Photo c/o Rebekah Lazaridis
Rebekah Lazaridis has transformed Studio@620 in St. Petersburg, Florida into a forest.
At “Bloom and Residue” four years ago, Lazaridis transformed St. Petersburg’s The Studio@620 into a set for projectAlchemy to perform Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, “The Rite of Spring.” In the ground-breaking ballet, so disruptive it caused a riot at its 1913 premiere in Paris, pagans sacrifice a young woman to the gods of spring.
“I didn’t want to sacrifice a woman, so I created this movement based off cycle,” Jones told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “It was very literal to the words bloom and residue, like ‘What’s blooming for you?’ and ‘What do you leave behind?’”
For projectAlchemy’s 2019 performance, visitors walked through a maze of fabric panels to reach the studio’s center, where a 20-minute dance ensued. Beyond celebrating life cycles, the 2019 performance touched on the idea of small mortalities or losses.
“Not like you live and die, but like you get a job and then you get fired; things like that,” Jones added.
In a post-pandemic world, these small mortalities rest alongside much larger ones. Few of us are the same person we were in 2019. So when Rebecca Lazaridis came across what looked like a dead ball of brown moss in a witchy coven shop in Salem earlier this year, she knew she’d found her inspiration for Bloom and Residue Version 2.0.
That vegetation was a desert plant called the Rose of Jericho or Resurrection Plant. The tumbleweed-like mass doesn’t look like anything special, but submerge it in water and it magically rises from the dead, unfurling into a green, fern-like plant.
Lazaridis bought three of the tiny plants and brought them home to show Jones, who transformed the plant’s life and resurrection into a dance.
“When the Rose of Jericho is in its resting state, it’s all embraced or wrapped in itself, protecting its insides,” Jones told CL. “That’s the first section of movement, and the last section of movement, that you see as I think about what it’s like to rest and what it’s like to be embraced, to protect. Those are the verbs that I’m using.”
Words play heavily in Jones's process. He wrote four pages of prose inspired by the plant’s resurrection before arriving on a short list of verbs and adjectives to base his choreography on.
The opening of the Resurrection Plant made Jones think about the women in his life.
“If you watch a time-lapse of a Rose of Jericho, it’s birthing,” says Jones, “and birthing is not some smooth thing that just pops out or slides out—there’s tears, there’s rips. I wanted to capture that using those verbs and adjectives, and I created a solo for one of our dancers.”
This birthing dance is the center of this year’s “Bloom and Residue.”
Then there’s life and movement and then rest as the plant returns to its dormant state.
Jones worked on his choreography upstairs while Lazaridis set the scene downstairs. Throughout the process, he went downstairs to see what she was working on and made changes based on what he saw.
“This time, it feels like Rebecca and I are embraced in this concept of the Rose of Jericho, and the movement dances with the movement that’s on the walls, and the wall illustrates the movement that you see in real time.”
This time, Lazaris has transformed the space into a forest.
“The Studio@620 can become anything,” Jones told CL. “The last ‘Bloom and Residue’ was all blacked out with four panels in the room. This one is a full mural that wraps around with branches that hang from the ceiling—a forest of trees panels that you have to walk through to get to the space [where the dancing happens.]”
“In a way, Rebecca is a choreographer too,” Jones continues. “She’s choreographing how your body moves through the space.”
After living through their own pandemic-forced transitions, 2024’s “Bloom and Residue” feels more personal to the artists, and perhaps to viewers as well.
“It’s been five years,” Lazaridis told CL. “We’re different people. We’ve all been through a pandemic, and so we wanted to examine this piece again, because we felt that it still had so much to say, it still had so much to offer.”
Jones and Lazaridis invite you to linger afterward, consider your personal transformations, and share how their work resonated with you.
“We call it an event, not a performance,” Jones told CL. “You come into the space, and you experience this thing, and then we hope you stay and have some rosé with us and talk about what happened or what came up for you.”
Like the first blossoms of spring, “Bloom and Residue” won’t be here forever. The event is here this weekend, and then it’s gone, a brief marking of time to celebrate the beginning of spring.
Tickets to “Bloom and Residue” 2024 happening inside Studio@620 in St. Petersburg from Thursday-Saturday, March 21-23 are still available and start at $15.
