THE UPSIDE-DOWN TREE
We are the Upside-Down Tree. Everything we do begins with a breath and ends in a dance party.
Sometimes we are an interactive performance; other times, a potluck, a party, a mixtape, a medicine, a tool for community organizing and social change. Always, we are a container for exploring embodied belonging.
We are interactive, ever-changing, and we don’t exist without you.
THE EVENT
Dreaming The Upside-Down Tree is an interactive performance that shifts each night, capturing sounds and stories from audience members and transforming them in real time into music, dance, and narrative. It’s a theatrical experience that reflects and responds to those present in the moment, exploring what it takes to create community and experience belonging in our bodies.
Participants enter the event space through a sensory environment designed to ignite curiosity. They are invited to record sounds, words, and stories that will become the musical score. Audiences are invited to participate as much or as little as they choose. Using digital music mixing tools, Tyler Leif Catanella transforms the recorded samples in real time into music— coughs become drum beats, yawns become melodies, heartfelt messages bloom into lyrics. The performance itself begins with a heartbeat and a breath. A cast of performers use create character and movement in response to these sounds and turn the recordings into images and stories. The event ends in a dance party, followed by a meal and conversation.
Through recording sounds and turning them into music, audiences hear their voices in community with others, their isolated sounds turned into collective music.
“BEAUTIFUL TO HEAR THE CHORUS OF DIFFERENT VOICES”
“I’M DEEPLY MOVED.”
THE WHY
The Upside-Down Tree was developed to explore three questions:
Can a performance create a space where we experience a belonging that is grounded in our bodies?
How do we free the human body and create more sensory awareness within audiences?
What happens when people hear the sounds they have never expressed woven into a collective, and how does that affect individuals and a community?
THE RESULT
Dreaming The Upside-Down Tree achieves an increase in awareness, presence, and freedom in the body, the generation of joy, the processing of grief, and an increase in one’s sense of connection.
By recording people’s stories and having those stories physicalized in the performers bodies, audience members are seeing their stories put into relationship with other’s, and processed through the performers to become dance, character, and narrative.
“THANK YOU FOR BEING A LIVING BREATHING VESSEL FOR A GHOST OF MINE”
“I’M LIGHTER AND FREER NOW”
“IT TRANSFORMED THE EMBARRASSED INTO A DANCE PARTY”
WE ARE
Lyra Butler-Denman and Tyler Leif Catanella, devised theatre makers bringing our backgrounds in movement, music composition, choreography, theatre education, sculpture, somatic education, community organizing, and justice work to this new big experiment of a project, The Upside-Down Tree. Together with three collaborators, we lean heavily on curiosity, play, and wild, loving, no-holds barred improvisation.
THANK YOUS
Many thanks to our advisors: Sonali Sangeeta-Balajee our mentor in belonging and liberatory practice, founder of SSoMA and Our Bodhi Project; and Giselle Genillard our mentor in trauma and the nervous system, SE Practitioner, Founder and director of SOSI
Dreaming the Upside-Down Tree has been supported by: residencies at Building Five in Portland, OR and by Cannonball Festival’s Visions programming at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival; FLOCK Dance Center; Trey Lyford and Gimmick; the many people who have provided housing, transportation, and other support; and our work-in-process audiences (this doesn’t exist without you).
Many artists have contributed to the project so far: Z Infante, Jonah Godfrey, Michael Amendola, Graham Cook, Taylor Burgess, Tenara Calem, Karen Orrick, and Sarah Sanford. Whatever this tree turns out to be, will be partially because of you. Thank you.