There is a moment which appears familiar across cultures, climates, and centuries, when the air shifts before rainfall and releases a particular scent often described as earthy, aromatic, or nostalgic. This is petrichor, and its source is geosmin, a volatile compound produced by Streptomyces coelicolor, a gram-positive filamentous bacterium that lives in soil and produces one of the most widely recognised smells on earth. Human beings can detect geosmin at concentrations as low as five parts per trillion.
Dance is a form of ecological and socio-cultural knowledge, linking microbiological and macrobiological ecosystems. By considering bacteria as choreographers, we could discover how microbial processes can illuminate collective practices. War dances, often structured through circular formations, call-and-response rhythms, have usually a distributed leadership. Soil bacteria, on the other side, are selected for behaviours that model decentralised coordination.
Drawing on Lynn Margulis’ theory of evolutionary symbiosis (1991), this article understands life not as a linear process, but as one that attends to the coexistence of diverse life-forms and to the ways they sustain. I begin with geosmin because it is both the origin and the ongoing provocation of my PhD research. As a choreographer and pharmacist, my research asks: what happens when the behaviours, temporalities, and social forms of Streptomyces bacteria become the structural logic for a choreographic score?
During my pharmacy training at King's College London, I undertook microbiology research exchange at the Universidade de São Paulo, working on Actinomycetes bacteria — the taxonomic family to which Streptomyces belongs. Years later, as I began developing a choreographic practice grounded in Capoeira and Greek Pentozali, I found myself returning to those organisms with a different set of questions: not about their pharmaceutical properties or antibiotic potential, but about how they move, how they communicate and what those forms of movement might teach a human body.
1. The Social Study of Microbes and the Place of Art.
The social study of microbes has, over the past two decades, moved to challenge the dominant pathogenic framing of microbial life in both scientific and popular discourse. Drawing on science and technology studies, anthropology, philosophy of biology, and multispecies studies, SSM researchers have worked to displace the image of the microbe as primarily a threat — as agent of disease, contamination, and infection — in favour of accounts that recognise microbial life as constitutive of ecosystems, bodies, and social worlds. Microbes are not merely the background to social life but active participants in it: they ferment, they signal, they cooperate and compete, they shape the environments they inhabit and are shaped by them in turn.
