Becoming Tree Performance
On 13 February 2024 by Deej_Fabyc1
All Phos below of Becoming Tree at LAI by Mariya Hoyin
‘Together as One Woodland’ Imbolc
Celebration at Milford House, Sunday 4th February, 2024.
Be-coming Tree ‘Together as One Woodland’ Live Art Performers
Georgie Barnes, Maria Bitka, Alex Boyd, Paola Catizone, Deej Fabyc, Olivia Hassett, Claire Hurley, Lisa Lotte Giebel, Nina Püschel, Rachel Macmanus, Marianne Marcote, Ciara McMahon, Rocky Meaney, Frances Mezzetti, Silke Michels, Danièle Minns, Aishling Muller, O.Pen Be, Jatun Risba
‘Together as One Woodland’ was a Be-coming Tree collective performance with nineteen international live artists in celebration of Imbolc, or St. Brigid’s Day. This event was the very first Be-coming Tree in-person collective performance and was hosted by Live Art Ireland at Milford House, Borrisokane, Co. Tipperary.
Be-coming Tree is a grassroots showcase platform, a collective global live-streamed art event and community of artists who create, document, and share kin close entanglement with trees. The ethos of Be-coming Tree is nonviolence, multispecies kinship, a collective flourishing, celebration of the beauty and wisdom of nature, and of the natural beauty present in everyone at all times.
Be-coming Tree is the co-creation of three female/non-binary artists with ages ranging from 36 to 76, each with independent arts practices. Jatun Risba is a Slovenian transmedia artist; Danielle J Minns is a Scotland-based sound/movement/video artist; and O.Pen Be is a UK live artist and movement therapist.
At Be-coming Tree Live Art events, artists engage with a local tree or woodland. Audiences experience live art, stillness, dance, ritual, meditation and more to create a sense of kinship and shared well-being. Tickets include an option donation to plant rainforest trees which engages audiences in a restorative ecological action creating awareness of the mutuality of all life.
A Writer’s Response to Be-coming Tree event ‘Together as One Woodland’
We are led into the orchard of Lismore House on a blustery, overcast day. The audience is expectant, moves forward eagerly. The performers are in place, in varied and colourful costumes. They circle an old wych elm tree, in a grove of ivy-clad trees that includes beech, oak, hazel, sycamore and pine. Elms were once seen as protectors of souls on their way to the underworld.
Today, the old elm with its bare branches yet to bud, is guardian of this performance to mark Imbolc, the start of spring. Imbolc (in the belly) marks the Festival of Lambing, and the feast of Brigit, goddess of inspiration, healing, smithcraft, fire, fertility, and new life. We are here to honour the cycle of nature and life, death and rebirth, an eternal be-coming.
This gathering of performers – women, men, non-binary – feels pagan, elemental. We are here to witness, and, if we are brave enough, to be a part of a new ritual with ancient roots – the worship of trees. Our kinship with trees survives modern alienation. Knock on wood. Christmas trees. Yule logs. Wishing trees hung with rags, hair ties, bracelets. ‘Save Our Trees’ campaigns in cities hell-bent on sacrificing nature to the devouring god, Profit.
The performers circle the elm, some clinging to the tree, or to each other. Slowly they spread out to inhabit the clearing around the elm. Some stand, some lie down, some dance or walk around. Sing or croon or cry out. Elemental movement, beyond language.
Some are masked, swathed in bright cloth or in black plastic. Others are dressed in bright green, all in black, all in white, or in a long white dress with gold threads. Ivy garlands, brown paper, white paper, branches, cloth are worn as adornments, or wrapped around bodies like cocoons. Emerging, be-coming, flowing towards each other, and away again.
I think of mummers, like the Biddy Boys, dressed in costumes who went (some still do) from house to house on the feast of St. Brigid, singing or performing for gifts. An act of kinship within a community. Communal performance as an act of rebellion, an over-turning of the seemingly natural order of things. Freedom in disguise, in performance and play. Turning the everyday upside down and inside out.
Today we are witness to a modern performance of community and kinship with each other and with nature. The performers might act alone but inexorably they move towards each other, or towards the great elm. Parts within a whole, assembling and disassembling like organelles in a human cell.
A body nestles against a tree stump, a dryad, disguised, still as death. A loner draws on white paper, joined by another who cocoons him in the long white scroll. Then a long battle of wills to be reborn, to emerge.
Huge cobwebs of purple string are laced across branches and shrubs. An embrace of souls at the edges. Reconfigurations in the centre. Bodies prone. Bodies in movement.
Weaving emotions and lamentations. Howls. Song. Laughter. (Wind soughs through the orchard). Caressings, blessings, bindings, and partings. A dionysian celebration.
At a certain moment in time, nearly all the bodies are simultaneously bowed towards the earth, scratching patterns in the dirt. Connected to each other even while absorbed or lost in the performance. Digging into the earth, seeking redemption. Below, hidden from us is the true underworld, not hell but a mycorrhizal network. Trees communicate with each other through this lattice of fungal threads, to share water and nutrients. Saplings often rely on this secret underworld web of mycelium for survival.
(A fierce gust of wind blows in from the west, rattles branches in the clearing, chills our bones. Huffs around us as if curious, then dies down).
A sapling, a young plum tree, is planted in the grove. Bodies gather around this sapling of hope, bowed in homage. A promise.
The audience are invited to join in, to help create a new community of hope. Shyly we move forward. Some bow down in homage to the sapling. Others dance. Some pile sticks over a prone body, a makeshift tomb that is shrugged off later in a rebirth.
As the performance comes to an end, children run around, weaving between trees, laughing and playing, as if energised by the live art. The sound of hope, of beginnings.
Leona Lee Cully is a writer. She has had four short stories published in The Stinging Fly magazine, and a story collected in Stinging Fly Stories, An anthology of 40 stories by 40 authors, celebrating 20 years: 1998-2018; stories in New Planet Cabaret, The Wild Word Magazine, Penduline Press (U.S), and Carve Magazine (U.S). She has previously written in response to live art performances, as part of Livestock: Influence 2015, which was published by In:action Irish Live Art Review; and in response to Livestock Live Art Festival, Spaces of Transformation, 2014.