Ambitious Nashville theatergoers seeking new horizons might want to venture over to the Vanderbilt University campus this weekend, where How to Build a Forest, a hybrid art installation/performance piece, will unfold in Neely Auditorium.
A concept developed by Obie Award-winning playwright Lisa D'Amour and director Katie Pearl, and featuring visual realization by artist Shawn Hall, How to Build a Forest begins on an empty stage at noon March 28 and 29. Over a six-hour period, "builders" will lay "ground cover," grow "trees" up to the sky and further embellish the environment utilizing fabric, steel, found objects and repurposed items. This "nature" project even comes with a field guide that traces the origins of the materials.
Along with the creators and four assistants, a diverse group of students and other interested locals will construct and manage the forest — then dismantle it all by 8 p.m.
"This seemed like a wonderful opportunity for us to present a piece that defies easy categorization and spills over into other art forms," says Leah Lowe, Vanderbilt theater department chair. "There's a lot of different kinds of theater being produced nationwide these days, and this is about exposing our students to a more experimental kind of performance."
The project was originally inspired by the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, D'Amour's hometown. Later, BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill further fueled the creators' desire to examine human links to the fragile natural world. Forest premiered in 2011 at The Kitchen, one of New York City's oldest nonprofit art spaces. Since then, the installation has been mounted at Brown, Duke and Appalachian State universities.
"Words would be on the periphery of this experience," says D'Amour, whose play Detroit was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Much of her theatrical work with collaborator Pearl involves site-specific performances, including an outdoor tribute to a Minneapolis bridge in 2005, LandMARK.
"We always knew that the real dramaturgy here, if you want to talk about this piece as theater, is somewhere between theater and visual arts," D'Amour says. "It involves watching the forest slowly appear and then very quickly disappear. That visual is the core of the story."
"I wanted the visual look to relate to my work as a painter, and to the ephemeral nature of the environment," says Hall, also a resident of New Orleans. "I had done installations before, but not previously on this scale." (Coincidentally, Hall will open a solo art exhibition, Emanator, on April 5 at Red Arrow Gallery in East Nashville.)
Hall stresses the meditative aspects of Forest. "One thing I strongly relate to the piece is that it is very real. We're not 'performing.' It's practical. We're really doing what we're doing in building this thing. We don't break our focus. We are the stewards of the forest."
Hall recommends maximizing the experience by visiting at different intervals during the day. "I personally would like to see it up for longer," she says, "and to tweak it as an installation. But the fact that it is built and taken down in front of people is really important. That's the simplistic message: It takes a long time to grow a forest and a very short time to destroy it."
Other key contributors to Forest include sound designer-composers Brendan Connelly and Christopher DeLaurenti and lighting designers Miranda Hardy and Peter Ksander.
Vanderbilt's Lowe says she's excited about the opportunity to make cross-campus connections with Forest. "That was irresistible to me," she says. "For example, Steven Baskauf from the Department of Biological Sciences has been doing a project cataloging the trees at Vanderbilt, and he'll be leading tree tours both days of the performances. That's just one way of tying the project to the immediate environment."
Admission to How to Build a Forest is free, and it's open to the general public. For more information, call 322-2404.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
