Online & print: Photo: Thomas Lenden | DAS Graduate School
We're Trees
(in progress)
Beginning as a (unsolicited) response to a colleague’s curatorial-performance-invitation last year, We’re Trees proposes an (already failed) embodied relationship to the quietude of plant life. We build a forest out of ourselves by aggressively deploying the theatrical cliché of a child dressed as a tree (though admittedly I have never actually seen someone playing a tree onstage in earnest).
In conventional drama, human actors cannot sustain prolonged silence and stillness without significant justification; trees, to the contrary, never need to rationalize their condition—indeed such stillness is the tree’s “action” (one which will ironically become excruciating to maintain).
There is a considerable durational/endurance performance component.
Beginning as a (unsolicited) response to a colleague’s curatorial-performance-invitation last year, We’re Trees proposes an (already failed) embodied relationship to the quietude of plant life. We build a forest out of ourselves by aggressively deploying the theatrical cliché of a child dressed as a tree (though admittedly I have never actually seen someone playing a tree onstage in earnest).
In conventional drama, human actors cannot sustain prolonged silence and stillness without significant justification; trees, to the contrary, never need to rationalize their condition—indeed such stillness is the tree’s “action” (one which will ironically become excruciating to maintain).
There is a considerable durational/endurance performance component.
