We are the Upside-Down Tree. Everything we do begins with a breath and ends in a dance party.
Sometimes we are a devised 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.
This devised interactive performance 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 embodied belonging.
Participants enter the event space through a sensory environment designed to regulate the nervous system and ignite curiosity. They are invited to record sounds, words, and stories that will become the score. The performance begins in collective ritual, heartbeat and breath, reminding us we are alive: we breathe, make sound, and move. Using Ableton software, Tyler transforms the recorded samples in real time into music—coughs become drumbeats, yawns become melodies, heartfelt messages bloom into lyrics. A cast of performers embody these sounds and turn the soundscape into movement and story. The event ends in a dance party, bringing joy and celebration into our moving bodies, followed by a meal and conversation.
EMBODIMENT . BELONGING . GENEROSITY . COMMUNITY
This project emerged at the intersection of wild artistic desires, personal and global grief, and the need to create work that not only addresses pain but transforms it into joy, creativity, and connection. Dreaming the Upside-Down Tree is rooted in generosity at every step—for ourselves, our collaborators, our community and our audiences. Our North star is radical belonging: a sense of connection that ripples beyond any single event, embraces all aspects of being human—body, spirit, society, land, and the non-human—and fosters lasting, systemic, embodied change.
Space - We begin in a space designed to regulate the nervous system, ignite curiosity and support embodied belonging. Each time we do this project the space is created specifically for the site and the community. Our advisors Sonali Sangeeta Balajee (mentor in belonging and liberatory practices) and Giselle Genillard (mentor in trauma and the nervous system) are always deeply involved in this stage of the process.
Gathering - Once participants are in the space, they are given the opportunity to record sounds. The prompts for these recordings range from using an object to make sound into a microphone to answering the question “What is something you wish you long to say to someone, or what is something you long for someone to say to you”. We gather these recordings which become the building blocks for the performance’s soundscape.
Offering - One participant described our offering as “translating words into movement and dissolving those movements into something powerful and no longer recognizable”. Having gathered sounds from the audience, we offer them back as a musical score. We also offer the audience an embodied reflection perfoemers act as vessels to absorb the sounds and reflect them in physical form by creating movement, character, and story. We had a participant thank us “for being a living breathing vessel for a ghost of mine”.
REDUCING ISOLATION
This process gives voice to what has been silenced within us and turns isolated sounds into collective music. Participants hear their own voices, and those of the individuals in the room with them, become a shared soundscape. Audiences reflect that it’s "beautiful to hear the chorus of different voices”. It reminds us of our interconnection and the joy of co-liberation.
CONNECTING COMMUNITY
This project transforms everyday sounds into music, everyday people into artists, and strangers into collaborators. Shared projects, working side by side, and making art together are some of the easiest conditions for connection. This process gives participants a chance to literally hear themselves and their neighbors as part of something larger—a collective composition. Humans have always come together in dance and to share food, so we always end with those simple and powerful practices, a dance party and shared meal
INCREASING EMBODIMENT
In addition to feel the sound vibration of their own voices in their bodies, audiences see their sounds and stories turned into movement and reflected back to them in the bodies of the performers. Our mirror neurons lead us to move when we see another body moving, to breathe when we observe someone else breathing. Experiencing the process leads audiences into their own embodies aliveness. They’ve told us “I feel less restricted”, “it transformed the embarrassed into a dance party”, and it was “amazing to see the visceral movements that came out of each voice”. It also brings joy into participants' bodies. I’m “Deeply moved.” write one audience member “I’m lighter and freer now”.
Dreaming the Upside-Down tree is co-led by Lyra Butler-Denman (she/her) Tyler Leif Catanella (he/they) and me (she/her), with Sonali Sangeeta Balajee (she/her), our mentor in belonging and liberation, Giselle Genillard (she/her), our advisor in trauma and the nervous system, our production manager Rachel Hunsinger, and a fabulous, brilliant, and diverse cast of collaborators.
