HOW TO BUILD A FOREST

source: pearldamour

PearlDamour: Katie Pearl and Lisa D’Amour

We are an Obie-Award winning collaborative team who create performance both inside and outside traditional theater spaces. We are known for large-scale performances that mix theater and installation — such as How to Build a Forest, an 8-hour performance in which we assemble and disassemble a simulated forest on an empty stage over 8 hours – and intimate performances designed for small audiences — such as Bird Eye Blue Print, created for a set of small vacant offices in the World Financial Center in Manhattan. Over our 15-year history of making work together, we have devised a body of work that is attentive to the performer / audience relationship, and searches for new approaches to narrative through the accumulation of text, image, physicality and architectural elements. We want our audiences to feel like they are inside of an experience, rather than watching something happen “over there.” When we make a show we create room for the audience to feel like they have slipped into the private headspace of a performer they are watching: an intimate, associative, surprising place.

Our work is intensely interdisciplinary – crafted by extensive collaborations with artists of other fields, including visual artists Krista Kelley Walsh, Charles Goldman, Kurt Mueller and Shawn Hall, choreographer Emily Johnson, set designer Mimi Lien and composers Sxip Shirey, Joel Pickard and Tom McDermott. Other past collaborators include ArtSpot Productions’ Artistic Director Kathy Randels who co-created and co-performed in our OBIE-winning Nita & Zita in 2003.

In the past we have been commissioned by organizations like PS122, The Kitchen and the Whitney Museum of Art to create new pieces. Our work as a team has been funded by MAP Fund, Creative Capital, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, the Irving Linn Charitable Trust, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and The Moore Family Fund for the Arts of the Minneapolis Foundation, among others. We have developed our work at The Playwrights Center , New Dramatists, Voice and Vision, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Mitchell Center for the Arts in Houston and Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. We’ve published writing about our work in Theater Magazine (“Imperfectly Harmful Theater,” with Melissa Kievman and Melissa James Gibson) and Play: Journal of Plays (Always/Never Her Trilogy). Local Critical Acclaim includes “Best Site Specific Performance of 2007” (for Bird Eye Blue Print, Gothmaist, NYC, 2007), “Best Public Art” (for LandMARK, City Pages, Minneapolis, 2005), “Best Touring Show” (for SLABBER and Nita & Zita, The Austin Chroncle, 2000 and 2001), and the David Mark Cohen New Play Award (for Anna Bella Eema, from the Austin Critics Table, 2001).

Currently, Katie lives in Providence, RI as she pursues her MFA in writing for performance at Brown University. Lisa splits her time between New York and New Orleans. We consider New Orleans, Austin, Minneapolis and New York our artistic homes – much of our work grew up and premiered in those (awesome) cities.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: pearldamour

Created in collaboration with visual artist Shawn Hall.

Premiered at The Kitchen in NYC in June 2011.

Coming to Brown University’s Granoff Center, Feb 27/28 2013.

8 hours, an empty stage, an entire forest. GO.

Part visual art installation and part theater performance, How to Build a Forest unfolds over 8 hours. Beginning on an empty stage each performance day, the forest comes together in ways that range from surprisingly intimate to large-scale and spectacular; in the premiere production it ultimately filled the Kitchen’s black box from wall to wall and floor to ceiling (30’x 40’ x 22’). After the 6 hour build, the forest is “complete” for a mere 30 minutes before disassembly begins. Audiences are invited to come at any point during the build and stay for as long as they like (watching from seats or watching from inside the installation itself) until the end of the 8 hours, when the forest has disappeared once more. The work features sound design by composers and sound artists Brendan Connelly and Christopher DeLaurenti and lighting design by Miranda Hardy and Peter Ksander.

all photos of the NYC premiere by Paula Court, copyright 2011
How to Build a Forest was funded by Creative Capital, MAP, the Irving Linn Fund, the Moore Family Fund for Minneapolis, hundreds of individual donors, and the support of friends, family, and fans throughout the U.S. For our Ogden show, we work in cooperation with Tulane University, and we will be touring to Duke and Brown universities in 2012/13.

More description? Sure:
How to Build a Forest is a hybrid project: part visual art installation, part theater performance that unfolds over an extended interval. Beginning on an empty stage, the forest comes together in ways that range from surprisingly intimate to 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.

Hall’s intricate installation emphasizes weightlessness, translucence and transformation; the environment will feel like an old growth forest at one moment and a deep-sea landscape the next. Her primary materials are fabric, wire, small-gauge steel, and repurposed found objects. To be sure, sheer grandeur is a considerable part of the work’s appeal, but there is also striking beauty in its small details, such as a grove of delicate fabric trees featuring exquisite hand-sewn detail that can only be seen from inside the installation.

The construction process demands constant activity and unrelenting focus from the artists and workers. For the mere 30 minutes the forest is complete, they make an inevitably futile effort to animate it. When they fail, they take the installation down.

While the choreography of the build is the core of the performance, other events punctuate and expand it. In our NYC premiere, the audience could choose to take a self-guided tour that led them through the installation and out on to the High Line, or join Todd Shalom of the conceptual walks organization Elastic City on a small guided walk through the forest. In every city, short texts by Lisa D’Amour and compositions by Brendan Connelly weave through each hour of the build. An extensive “field guide” tracks the lineage of every material used to build the forest: where it came from in the earth, where it will go once the artists are finished using it. Finally, the audience themselves become performers, as they move through and make themselves at home inside the installation. Together, these elements invite contemplation about the audience’s relationship with the natural world: How they live in it, rely on it, use it, and use it up.

How to Build a Forest was conceived, developed, and built in New Orleans, where PearlDamour, Hall and the build team live and work. How to Build a Forest was initially inspired by the loss of 100 old pine trees on a piece of property shared by Lisa’s extended family during Hurricane Katrina. Soon after, larger environmental issues brought to light by the storm began shaping the piece; the team was in the thick of developing the installation when the BP Oil Spill occurred in the summer of 2010. The artists became acutely aware of the often-invisible human-driven processes that make New Orleans more vulnerable to hurricanes and extreme environmental crisis. In How to Build a Forest, the artists make their creative and destructive processes visible and accessible, in order to examine how our lives are intimately tied to the fragile natural world.

Build Team: yoga teacher and artist Bear Hebert, painter Patch Somerville, theater artists Joanna Russo and Phil Cramer, writer/activist Moose, dancer/choreographer and head of Tulane dance department Barbara Hayley.