“I have been thinking about making a tree show for about five years,” says Bonnie Cullum, the producing artistic director of the VORTEX, and the creator of the new show MotherTree. “And a few years back, I started working with trees and science and the premise of the trees actually being part of the solution to climate crisis. They are the lungs of the planet. What I've always felt about the trees was they were interconnected and that they were connected with me and that they were connected with all of us.”
Inspired to create a theatrical show about trees and our relationship with the natural world, Cullum sought out some collaborators. “I teamed up with Sarah Saltwick, who's a local playwright, and she came to all of our workshops for the last two years and created the story,” Cullum says. “And then Toni Bravo, the choreographer, created the whole movement vocabulary. So we started from movement and trees, and we moved to stories and music.”
MotherTree is a devised work, meaning it was created in a collaborative process involving all the members of the artistic team. “When you're devising, you're taking so many different people's abilities and thoughts and creative ideas and figuring out the best way to mash them [together],” Cullum explains. “In this world, we hear the voices of several different trees. We hear the stories of several different trees, but we are taking the journey through the world of the faeries. The faeries are really guiding us through these tree stories and, you know, the humans are not the central part of the story. The humans sort of stumble into it to try to figure out what the MotherTree is and where the weeping is coming from, where is the crying coming from. So that's really the journey of the piece.”
Nicole Boyd, a part of the MotherTree ensemble, plays a faery and contributed to the music featured in the piece. “One day we were talking [and Bonnie] asked me about workshopping a show called MotherTree and I was like I love trees,” Boyd says. “I do. I really do. I love trees. And so from then on we've been in the workshop. And I was actually writing a song and it had trees in it. It was it was a little different, but then I changed that song and it grew into a song for the MotherTree.”
“I don't even know how to what to compare it to,” says MotherTree ensemble member Logan Lasiter (who plays the human Amber), “because it's so unique and original and it's such a collaborative effort between so many different people and so many different minds. It's like hard to say, is this a musical? Not exactly. Is it a dance? It's not exactly just dance and it's not exactly just narrative. It's very much this unique blend of art forms that has come together to be MotherTree.”
“I think one of the really important things [in MotherTree] is the mending that happens between the trees and the humans and the faeries,” Cullum says. “That the fae are able to look at [Amber] in a new way and the trees are able to say, you know, it's not just about you. We're all in this together. So, you know, humanity doesn't really get the blame. But there is this sense of us needing to step into the whole. We need to get in the right relationship with these trees and these fae beings and the spirits of the land, the things that that we don't even see. So that's, I think, a really important learning that comes about in the play and I'd like to think that at the end, we have some hope about our ability to connect with one another and connect with nature, connect with the trees, kind of find a pathway forward that is less destructive.”
