Acting for Climate presents
a performance of tree-dreaming
Alive
Alive is a contemporary circus performance, a living sculpture, an immersive experience, opening our
human imagination to the both mythic and scientific idea of the tree being alive.
Alive will premiere in 2025 in Denmark.
Waking up the tree to our human imagination
We gather around a large tree at sunset. In the twilight, the tree begins to emerge through patterns of light. Under the tree, mirrors are scattered like small forest lakes, reflecting the tree's branches and reminding us of the root structures beneath our feet. Surrounded by the tree's structure, we are invited to sit or lie on blankets among the patchwork of mirrors, looking up into the canopy of the tree.
As our imagination branches out in the treetop, the tree slowly begins to awaken. Light projections make the branches move, and
change appearance, as if sunlight or water reflections danced over the branches. A faint soundscape of deep tones immerses us. Gradually, we discover physical movement in the tree. With animated motions, human-like beings grow out of the tree...
The bond between
the tree and the human
Alive is a site-specific and multidisciplinary performance that investigates the entanglement between the tree and the human, while highlighting and investigating the tree’s own experience.
The performance draws on a range of artistic mediums to accomplish this. From vertical dance, relational costumes, video and light design, mirror scenography, and a soundscape, all mimicking the tree in different ways. Alive performs in big healthy trees, in parks or forests close to the city.
The importance of
tree-dreaming
The tree has an essential place in human evolutionary history. Trees breathed us into existence forming the “lungs of the planet”, and are thus an irreplaceable part of Earth’s life-support system. Maybe for this very reason, human societies worshipped the trees for millennia.
Today, we have lost our connection to the trees. In the last 50 years, more than half of the world's forests have been clear-cut, and trees are often reduced to a mere resource. The Tree of Life is diminishing. We are in a friction filled community with the tree, which we must understand to re-establish a more sustainable coexistence.
This performance invites the audience to explore and rethink their own relationship to trees.
Developing the site-specific
Alive develops the field of site-specific performances and sets the tree at the center of our imagination in 3 ways:
1
Relational Costumes
We are developing knitted branchlike stretch costumes, which will connect the vertical dancers to the tree, and open up possibilities for new movement qualities to emerge in the push and pull between the artist and the tree.
This opens up a bodily dialogue between the human and the tree.
2
Video and Light Scenography
Mimicking the tree’s internal processes and external habitat, we create video & light design and project them on the tree. From natural phenomena, like reflections of water or light on the tree trunk, to internal processes normally inaccessible to human perception - the tree sends chemicals to its leaves, or water up through its trunk. We can make the tree’s living being visible by giving the audience visual images of the tree's active internal processes!
3
Point of View
By having the audience sit in a mirror scenography, enclosed between crown and roots, we challenge the classical notion of the external observer looking at the stage.
Instead, the audience is placed amid the world they are observing.
Artistic Producer
Amund Bentsen
+45 60224824