Arborlogues: A Botanical Recital Performed for One Tree
Waterfront Series
A one-person play where you are the performer and a single tree is your audience. This 15-minute play is performed within a specially built red curtain theatre that straps to the chosen tree. After receiving the bound script from the stage manager, you are left alone with your audience within this theatre. The script leads you through a series of stories, prompts, and actions related to this tree, this land, and yourself.
This unique theatrical experience that, while superficially about a tree, is a way to create peace-from-within for the ticketholder through reflective practice, using this tree as a mirror for the self. This theatre piece flips the normal audience/performer relationship where the ticketholder transforms into the performer and the theatre space becomes the audience. This flip opens new ways of reflecting on what performance, ecology, architecture, and the self are. Originally designed with Covid protocols in mind, the performance is outdoors and highly socially distant while still creating an intimate event.
The ARBORLOGUES script is re-written for each production to center the qualities and history of the specific tree chosen. To date, ARBORLOGUES has been performed for a cedar tree in Brooklyn, New York, a black walnut in New Hampshire, a tree of heaven in Larchmont, New York, and both a white pine and an eastern cottonwood in Saratoga Springs, New York. This is the first production of ARBORLOGUES outside of North America.
Lee Lebreton
Dan Daly
New York, USA
New York, USA
Other Forms Of (OFO) Theatre creates performances that do not fit neatly into the definition of “theatre” and exist below what is deemed commercially viable. We experiment with the theatrical form and rethink what performance is, both artistically and structurally. We test new form of artistic creation, financing structures, and organizational layouts. OFO Theater is committed to exceptionally small, experimental, works that cannot scale, performances that eschew historical theatrical space, and shows that only tangentially relate to what we are taught theatre is.
Dan Daly is a scenic designer, visual artist, and educator specializing in site-specific and immersive work. Dan creates installation works that invite the viewer to face the design failures of classic theatrical forms. Dan is a member of the National Queer Theater’s artistic Collective and teaches theater design at SUNY New Paltz.
Lee Lebreton is a queer, trans theatre-maker and performance artist raised in the American South creating experimental and interactive live art. Lee’s artistic home is with the New York Neo-Futurists, where he writes and performs year-round in the Neos’ long-running variety show “The Infinite Wrench” and teaches writing to youth and adults at MFA Brown/Trinity Rep, BS University of Evansville.