How to Build a Forest

Two man-made disasters inspired How to Build a Forest: the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and the failure of the levee system during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Each of these calamities revealed the intimate, intricate connection humans have to nature – and our society’s systemic and pervasive denial of that connection. On a more personal level, the piece was inspired by the loss of 100 trees at a Louisiana family home following the storm. On the scale of Katrina-related tragedies, the loss doesn’t seem significant. But to this family, it was profound. The trees were snapped and uprooted during the night. When the family opened their front door in the morning after the storm cleared, it was as though a giant had played pick-up sticks: trees lying everywhere around them, toppled and leaning. Their once-familiar landscape was now unrecognizable and, seemingly, unnavigable. After living and growing with those trees for generations, they felt lost without them, unmoored and at sea.

I began to think about how long it takes for things to come into being and how quickly they can disappear. Mountains and forest systems evolve over hundreds or thousands of years and are routinely leveled in a workday. An entire city is destroyed by a storm in just hours. A theater production that takes months (or years) to prepare may be seen for only a few performances before being struck and thrown out. I wondered: what can we learn by giving our full attention to the length of a process?  By inviting an audience into both the long duration of growth and the relative speed of demise?  

What can we learn if we rebuild those trees on a stage?

“An extraordinary world-making performance…”

Una Chaudhuri, CLIMATE LENS: The Human Story in a More-Than-Human Frame

Creative Team

Created by PearlDamour + Shawn Hall

Director Katie Pearl
Writer Lisa D’Amour
Visual Artist Shawn Hall
Sound Composition + Design Brendan Connolly and Christopher DeLaurenti
Lighting Design Peter Ksander and Miranda Hardy
Performers Katie Pearl, Lisa D’Amour, Shawn Hall, Bear Hebert, Patch Somerville, Barbara Haymon, Phil Cramer, Joanna Russo, Moose Jackson

Performance Description

How to Build a Forest is an interdisciplinary hybrid of a performance. Part visual art installation and part theater, it unfolds over eight hours. Beginning on an empty stage, a 7-member build team works meticulously to construct an elaborate, petroleum-based fabricated forest by hand. For 7 hours, the forest comes together in ways that are both surprisingly intimate and large-scale and spectacular: builders whisper quietly to their trees as they magically grow them up towards the sky; a huge structure is hauled up by many lines of rope to become a giant tree reminiscent of a live oak; many balance balls are pumped with plastic pumps and create a chorus of strange frog-like sounds. For the 30 minutes the forest is complete, we make an inevitably futile effort to animate it. At hour 7, the forest is dismantled and removed. Audiences can visit the forest at any time during its 8-hour life cycle and stay as long as they like, viewing it from afar or from within, side by side with the builders. How to Build a Forest is structured to rely on this interplay between observation and participation, between intellect and embodiment. For however long someone is there (and there was always a handful of folks making up an “8 hour Club”), their presence becomes part of the ongoing ecosystem, one thread in a complex narrative weave.

Video Links

PERFORMANCE ARTIFACTS

Field Guide: As the forest grows around them, audiences use specially designed Field Guides to identify different “species” and track their material parts to where they started in the earth.  Separate pdf here.

Forest Slips: While audiences are in the forest, a builder might hand them tiny slips of paper, like a fortune from a fortune cookie. The slips of paper might say one of these things:

There is a special pocket in the field guide to keep your forest slips and any other scraps audiences might be given in the forest.

Build Team Breathing Composition: Twice during the 8 hours, the build team spent 10 minutes each raising one tree while performing a composition composed only of different shapes and textures of breath. This is an example of one kind of subtle spectacle moment that would take place as the forest was built.

Seen here, cycle 1 of the build.

Seen here, vocal part 1 of the composition. Composer: Brendan Connelly

PROCESS DOCUMENTs

Build Team Flow Charts: The piece functions without a text-based script and can progress only as fast as each job in the build completes. As director, without the possibility of staging via word-based cues or exact timings, I developed a system of color-coded, hand-drawn flowcharts to keep the build team on track over the duration of the piece.

Separate pdf of all cycles here.

Community Engagement

Because this show is impossible to rehearse without doing the whole thing (i.e. in order to practice disassembly, we must first assemble; assembly actually takes the 6.5 hours of the build to complete), touring became an essential part of the continuing development of the piece. As a strategy for entering the local ecosystem of each city we visited, the piece functioned only with deep involvement of local communities. At each tour stop, I welcomed and trained in 25-40 local participants to serve different roles and activate different spaces in the theater and different aspects of the build: 

  • 6-8 Rangers orient the audience (hours 1-8)

  • 6-8 Gate Keepers bring audience into the forest (hours 2-8)

  • Flash Mob joins the build team in creating moments of visual and aural spectacle, such as branch raising (hour 5) and “poofing” (hour 6)

  • 5-10 Audience Storytellers strike up conversations with other viewers (hours 2, 5)

  • 6 “Text Bubblers” move through the house, quietly speaking text fragments around the audience (hours 3-4)

 Please see separate pdfs: Ranger Text, Gatekeeper Text, Text Bubbles

Core Values for Local Participants: In order for these local participants to welcome audiences into our world, they first had to feel part of it. They had to understand and buy into not just the how of it working (their individual roles) but the why (our intent and foundation). I shared with them this set of Core Values developed with the build team. These values invited them into a common vocabulary and lay the foundational ethic and aesthetic for the project.

Local Collaborations: Community engagement was vital to our process of making the objects that comprised our forest. We built How to Build a Forest in an old warehouse in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, where the show cultivated a local economy of sewers, embroiderers, artisans, and welders. This community became integral to the show’s ethos and identity.

Once in performance, we collaborated with local environmental organizations, artists, and universities in each of our touring locations on programming that extended the performance into the community. This ranged from performative events occurring during the build (sometimes within the forest itself), self-guided tours that take you from our forest into “real” nature and back again, tree walks with experts, and interdisciplinary panels and talks. 

Two examples: A walk by Elastic City in our NYC forest and a series of talks in the New Orleans Forest.

Sewing the big tree (New Orleans).

Support

Support for How to Build a Forest includes major grants from the Creative Capital Foundation and the MAP Fund. Our premiere was a Performance Commission from The Kitchen, NYC.

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