Online & print: Photo: Thomas Lenden | DAS Graduate School

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We're Trees

We’re Trees is a participatory workshop/performance where we will become trees together. We appropriate the theatrical cliché of a child dressed as a tree in the background of a play, in order to attempt inhabiting the time signature and quietude of more-than-human plant life. We will build a forest of such trees out of ourselves and craft supplies, drawing inspiration from our surroundings before indulging in an excruciating stillness together. This workshop will take place outdoors as weather allows.

There is a considerable durational/endurance performance component.

Images taken by Saul Kemack
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We’re Trees is an outdoor participatory workshop-style performance where the audience is guided to make their own tree costumes in the style of a children’s play, where an unlucky child might be selected to dress as a tree and stand in the background. Although the image is silly—a forest of audience members made out of paper and cheerleading pompoms—we commit seriously to the attempt of thinking and standing like a tree. Part craft workshop (everyone makes their own custom tree costumes) and part meditation workshop (we undergo several exercises exploring how to think and move like trees), the audience works in pairs to help each other build the costumes and complete the exercises, often referencing the literal trees in the vicinity for inspiration and imagery. We’re Trees is an arch response to environmental-themed artworks that use an implied anthropomorphism and ascribe a very limited (i.e. human) concept of agency onto nature and wildlife. On the contrary, through the strenuous and absurd exercises, the audience feels the impossibility of communing with trees or relating to their time signature—albeit in a playful, hopeful way: A renewed appreciation for trees’ way of thinking and being, wholly alien to our everyday lives and systems.