Tree Dances: becoming epiphyte

Let’s become epiphyte. Let’s invite the outside in. Let’s collaborate amongst our non- and more-than-human companions. Let’s experiment with new modes of being, scaling to the tune of arboreal liveness. Epiphytes (air-plants who live in trees) offer a choreo-poetic figure who co-mingles with/in forest collectivity, and a mode of addressing one’s relationship to site distinct from parasitical properties of interruption, extraction, and noise. Where does this dance land? And, how does this dance land where? If, dancing in a forest and there is no one around, does it make a sound? 

Becoming epiphyte is a performance project led by the desire to re-frame theatrical conventions focused on the dancer to include a more-than-human forest scene, to excavate the charged nature of site, which, not unlike the body, enacts social projects of remembering and forgetting, of cultivation and wildness, of access and resistance. Calling upon a history of tree and forest defenders, tree-sitters, activists, and artists, we dance to remember their teachings.

With Biba Bell, Shannon White, and Christopher Woolfolk at The Dance Palace, Pt. Reyes Station, CA, on Saturday, November 11th.