Dreaming the Upside-down Tree
Dreaming the Upside-Down Tree is a collectively built symphony of body, sound, and story. Enter through a sensory maze, let your bones be vibrated, watch performers move to the rhythm of your breath, and hear the echo of your own voice in music designed to make you groove. Each evening a different performance emerges as performers and audience toss and catch movement, sound, and snippets of stories, building a poignant, dark, funny, beautiful, moving human symphony. It begins with a breath and ends in a dance party.
Residencies + showings
We’re learning about this piece, building it bit by bit. We’re encountering the possibilities and limits of the tree we’re growing. Because the work includes live samples of sounds from an audience, we need people! Part of the piece will be asking participants to make sounds (in a private sound booth, with clear prompts) which will be turned into music. Your presence and offerings of sound are critical to the experiment. Whatever this tree turns out to be, will be partially because of you. Thank you! We're excited to share what we've been working on.
UPCOMING
Saturday September 21st, 12:30 PM, Icebox Performance Space
As part of Philly Fringe and Cannonball’s Visions program
Pay what you can
PAST
We were in residence July 8th - 21st at Building Five in Portland, OR. We're deeply grateful to Building Five for hosting us and to all who showed up and helped us at this moment in our process.
who we are
Lyra Butler-Denman and Tyler Leif Catanella are devised theatre makers bringing their backgrounds in movement, music composition, choreography, theatre education, sculpture, somatic education, community organizing, and justice work to this new big experiment of a project, Dreaming the Upside-Down Tree. Together with three collaborators they lean heavily on curiosity, play, and wild, loving, no-holds barred improvisation.
Tyler - I create art that makes people feel first and think later. I harness this power of vibration as “The Science of Sexy Squiggles” traveling through the air to create music that makes people fucking MOVE. Big, terrifying, colorful music that sings to listeners now the things that I wish someone had sung to me then. It moves in bleeps and bloops that make people want to booty-shake their trauma out on the floor. It makes people dance to the deep cosmological horror of being a human body in space. And it’s awful. Awe-ful. My art does not have answers but rather asks questions. What is the sound of queerness, of courage, of listening, of being enough? At the same time, my art gives you a handshake, a hug and a seat at the table. And most importantly, it cultivates compassion by reminding us: “An electron is to a human what a human is to the Milky Way.” So don’t be an asshole.
Lyra - I make work about death, grief, trauma, sensuality, the impact of our world on our bodies, belonging, the damage we do to each other and the planet, and excruciating beauty, noticed and unnoticed. I make work to offer the pleasure of being touched, the joy of our magnificent bodies, the discomfort of change, and the pain of being human in this world. My work depends on the intimacy, immediacy, and physicality of being ina room with other people, able to hear each other breathe. My work agitates, delights, and disturbs in order to reconnect us to our bodies, each other, and the ecosystems we are inextricably a part of. I believe living fully in our bodies is anti-oppressive practice and that art making, especially with our bodies, is radical cultural and political work. I am obsessed with mycelium, anatomy as metaphor, cellular memory, how dams affect rivers over time, and what happens when we remove them.