It Took Four Summer Storms for Her Love to Explode into a Thousand Fruiting Bodies




Dance film | Italy, 2023 | 8.5 minutes

Filmed in the mountain forests of Vigolo Vattaro in northern Italy, this short dance film unfolds as an eco-somatic invocation, a movement offering to the fungal kingdom and the porous, decomposing body of the earth.

The work invites an attunement to mycelial rhythms and more-than-human intelligence, tracing the soft boundaries between grief and renewal, body and forest, the seen and the secreted. Dancers move with and within the soil, shadows, and rotting wood, surrendering to the deep time of decay and the relational pulse of the land.

It Took Four Summer Storms… draws from principles of embodied listening, ritual gesture, and speculative ecology, letting movement become a form of sensing-with and thinking-through the living world. 

Gathering in the mountain forest

This film emerged in the wake of a Butoh gathering held in the mountain forests of Vigolo Vattaro. Over several days, twenty participants moved slowly into the forest floor, meeting soil, leaf litter, shadow, and rotting wood as teachers. The camera arrives after the session, as a continuation of what has already been touched, breathed, and listened to together.

Living transmission, somatic tasks

The practice was structured through simple somatic invitations that tuned perception to forest temporality: weight sinking, attention widening, breath finding the humidity of moss, hands learning the grain of decay. We listened for the rhythm of fungal life, for mycelial relation as an underground choreography shaping sensation, timing, and choice. What you see in the film carries the residue of that shared encounter, a public practice held in common, then passed onward through image and sound.


Camera: Serafina Parmelee

Edit/Direction: Anna Kushnerova

Music: Huhtamaki Wab

Dancers: Adam Koan, Eleonora Salvato, Sofia Kovarich, Giacomo AG, Monica, Celeste Combes, Luca Venditoru, Charlotte De Waegenaere