An outdoor dance performance takes aim at the complicated legacy of Bartram’s Garden this weekend

Bartram’s Garden will look a little different this weekend.

The lush oasis along the Schuylkill in Southwest Philadelphia has welcomed new flora of sorts with Venus Flytrap, a dance performance series that interrogates the thorny legacy of John Bartram, founder of the oldest surviving botanical garden in North America.

The four-day series takes place in a clearing next to the river, where Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Joiri Minaya — in collaboration with BlackStar Projects and the Fabric Workshop and Museum — has installed four large canopies with abstract, vibrant patterns inspired by plants. The dance performance examines the history of labor and colonialism at Bartram’s, while the canopies encourage guests to find rest and relaxation.

While the artwork is visually stunning, it holds a deeper meaning. Much like the installation’s name, it’s meant to lure viewers in with beauty before making its sharp, biting social critique.

It’s no coincidence that this particular spot in Bartram’s Garden is near the Harvey Memorial Garden, the grave site that commemorates an enslaved Black man who lived and labored on the estate. Though historical records are scant, Bartram reportedly freed Harvey, but he remained Bartram’s gardener until the end of his life.

“John Bartram is an interesting figure because he is very praised for his naturalist kind of philosophies, and he’s acknowledged as being almost like a proto-naturalist…and, like all humans, he’s quite contradicting,” said Minaya. “Because at the same time he was very racist towards Indigenous people, and that’s documented…he was praised as a supposedly proto-abolitionist, but then he had this enslaved man called Harvey, who he freed. Then Harvey lived ‘happily ever after’ in his estate, working for him.”

Historians at Bartram’s are conducting ongoing research on who was really planting the seeds in this famed botanical garden, whether that included free Black Philadelphians, indentured servants, or enslaved people.

Developed over the past three years with funding from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the William Penn Foundation, Venus Flytrap represents an artistic response aimed at excavating these lost histories, and linking them to the present-day experiences of people of color.

The performance centers on a group of six contemporary dancers wearing colorful, skintight bodysuits that hide their faces and hold their limbs in uncomfortable, disturbing poses. Minaya designed the outfits to constrain the performers in positions of manual labor: holding a basket above one’s head or crouching to use a farm tool.

Led by Philadelphia choreographer Jonathan González, each dancer takes on characteristics of certain plants in their movements. Minaya focused on flora both native to the United States and imported from Africa that hold significance for Black, brown, and Indigenous communities today, including snake plants, hibiscus, plantains, castor plants.

For example, sweet grass is often used for smudging ceremonies as a tool for cleansing and shedding bad energy. Minaya compares it to the spiritual practice of despojo, akin to an exorcism, in Caribbean and Latin American traditions. With these histories in mind, a dancer embodying sweet grass repeatedly wipes their face and arms, seeking release.

Altogether, the movements create a chilling effect, heightened by the fact that the performers’ faces remain shrouded. The group moves slowly, intertwining their bodies and contorting themselves to evoke stifling and suffocating — until they begin squeezing out of their constraints to reveal more bodysuits that allow them to separate and improvise. (Similarly, Minaya’s previous work Containers used bodysuits of tropical prints to hold performers in positions stereotypically associated with Caribbean women as a critique of the “imperial male gaze.”)

The silent plant performers become more human throughout the piece, no longer held back by the restrictive poses of forced labor, and begin talking to each other, squealing, laughing, crawling among the audience, and twerking on a tree. It’s a profound metaphor about breaking free from oppressive histories and persistent stereotypes. The dancers conclude on tree branches, splaying out and resting, reaching a form of liberation.

That was also part of the idea behind the canopy installation — to create a place for respite.

“I was thinking specifically of relating to the space as Black and brown people,” said Minaya. “We’re usually the people who are laboring the land. So having an experience of leisure and rest in the land is something that should be alright, but maybe isn’t for a lot of people.”

Though the performances conclude on Sunday, the canopies will remain on view all summer long, with related events running throughout June. Minaya also designed blankets and bandannas with similar plant-inspired abstract patterns with the brand ITA Leisure Goods that will be available to purchase.

She hopes that as visitors embrace leisure, they can learn more about her message of decolonization and see how, according to the program, “Bartram’s Garden can be understood as a microcosm for the ongoing colonial experiment.”

‘Venus Flytrap’ performances run through Sunday, June 1, at Bartram’s Garden, 5400 Lindbergh Blvd., Phila., 215-729-5281 or bartramsgarden.org.