Learning from a tree 

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I grew up among forests, hills, and constantly shifting landscapes, which became my first stages for movement. High in a cherry tree on a hill near my home, I would watch swaying branches, the rustling of leaves, and the slow spiral twists of trunks under wind and gravity. Long before I had any movement training, climbing and observing trees gave me an intuitive sense that the body could be responsive, an extension of the living landscape rather than a separate entity. 

In this research, I ask how a performer might become a tree - not by imitating its shape, but by internalizing its processes. Specifically, how can the embodied exploration of tree mechanics and conditions inform and generate new choreographic material? 

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I propose a distributed understanding of movement, where performer and environment form a continuous exchange. 

Through my work in biodesign and bio-art, I learned to work with non-human life forms as partners and sources of inspiration: cultivating cultures of micro-algae cells, for example. Such experiences fundamentally shifted my perspective on creativity and agency. I came to see artistic creation as a negotiation or dialogue with the agencies of other living materials. 

Translating this to choreographic research meant approaching the tree as a mentor or co-choreographer. 

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Attunement before action 

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The research process began not in the studio, but out among actual trees. Standing barefoot on grass and soil beneath a tree, eyes closed, I tuned in to the pressures under each part of my foot, imagining how roots might extend from those pressure points. This sensory flooding was a deliberate attempt to break from my human default mode, which is often visual and analytical. 

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Even though I was mostly still when observing, I noticed my body often responding subtly. After watching a tall tree oscillate gently in the wind for a long time, I found my spine swaying almost in sync; after tracing the roots with my hand, my fingers craved to make a similar twisting motion. 

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In one session, I spent a morning with an old oak tree. I began by lying on the ground under its canopy, looking up at the branches. The breeze moved the branches in different directions and at different rhythms, yet the whole remained cohesive. When I stood up, I opened my arms slightly to the sides and let them wander slowly through the air, dividing and curving like the oak’s limbs. 

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I wrote in my journal: 

“Slowness that is not stillness but a very gradual redirection. When I move my arms like that, I feel my attention settle. I feel like I could move this way for hours and not exhaust anything, because I’m not using force.” 

 

An important immersive experiment was burying my feet in the forest and trying to imagine I was a tree. This experience helped develop the qualities of what I later called the layered state. It also brought my human perception into sharp focus: the feeling of being stuck in one place, of being vulnerable. 

Attunement before action became a starting point. Before moving, spend time attuning to what is present. Only then, let movement arise as a necessity or response. I made it a rule for myself that any studio exercise to come must start from some kind of listening or observation, even if brief, rather than starting from an idea in my head alone. 

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The layered state

 

The notion of layering initially arose when I noticed that my most generative improvisations were those where I was attending to several things at once. In one early exercise, I found myself simultaneously aware of the pressure of the floor on my feet, the spiral stretch in my spine, and an emotional memory of gently swaying. Together they produced a movement quality that felt new. I was moving from the combination of all three. 

Describing this feeling in my journal, I wrote that it was like “listening to multiple channels” or “being many selves at once.” This was the seed of the layered state - a mode where the performer holds multiple directives and sensations at once, allowing their interplay to inhabit the movement. 

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The layered state is a mode of awareness or being. It is less about what specific movements are executed and more about how any movement is generated and experienced. A performer might spontaneously shift speed or texture because one of the layers of their attention, say a sound in the environment, suddenly changes, while another layer, an internal sensation, remains constant. 

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Practically, this meant training to attend to the periphery of vision, to subtle changes in air on the skin from any side, and to the relationship of all limbs in space without privileging one “front.” It’s a bit like having “ears” and “eyes” all over your body, listening and seeing in every direction. 

Several points of the body can initiate movement simultaneously, without any one point dominating the whole. The tip of a finger might initiate a spiral while a feeling in the gut begins a contraction. In training, I explicitly practiced responding to impulses in unexpected body parts: “move as if the shoulder blade is composed of a canopy of leaves all searching for light in different directions” or “let the back of your knee soften the movement, imagining it as a branch collar at the base of a branch.” 

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I also developed Rooting and Re-rooting exercises. One example was deliberate weight-shifting - stepping with exaggerated attention to the feet, visualizing roots growing from different parts of the foot with each press into the floor. Each transfer of weight became an act of planting and uprooting. The floor was imagined not as a flat surface but as a volume into which the force of the movement could sink and from which it could be released. 

To integrate these ideas, I set rules for sustaining the state - every movement must include both a branching and a rooting component. This produced a kind of internal counterpoint: one body part reaching while another grounded itself more deeply into the floor. 

 

Sharing the state

 

I guided colleagues and performers I was rehearsing with into the layered state. Some things translated quite naturally. Performers were able to find the idea of “branching pathways” in their arms with relative ease. The deeper state of awareness was trickier to convey. In early sessions, they would execute the tasks correctly but seemed to be focusing first on one aspect, then the next, rather than all at once. We would pause and discuss what slipped out of awareness. 

A breakthrough moment came when I introduced a partnered movement exercise to illustrate distributed attention. I asked them to mirror my movements, but with a delay. We stood facing each other, and I entered a state of slow, fluid, tree-inspired movement with my whole body. They followed just after, like an echo. The intention was not to learn a specific form, but to become more familiar with movement pathways that unfold without a single dominant point of initiation. 

Later, we practiced shifting our focus during movement exploration. We first kept attention close to the body, softly spread across the surface of the skin to intensify internal sensation. Then we allowed it to expand into all corners of the studio without losing those first sensations. The challenge was to take in visual information without becoming distracted or slipping into the habit of presenting movement to an audience. We used peripheral vision techniques to maintain awareness of both the body and its surroundings. 

As we devoted more time to group sessions, we noticed moments of spontaneous unison and moments when one person made a large movement while the others were quiet. It was as if a group layered state was forming. 

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Last Orbit 

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The premise of Last Orbit was four people floating into a space with unfamiliar gravity, their existence morphing through a flow of memories, projections, dreams, nightmares, and obsessions, and eventually finding release and seeing anew. This poetic scenario became a container for the ideas we had been developing. 

We used the layered state as a conditioning exercise. Rehearsals often began with a group tuning. These initial minutes re-established the heightened awareness and connectivity needed. 

For the initial floating section, we drew on the slow, multi-directional, gentle aspects of our movement vocabulary. The layered state helped us keep awareness of each other so the group looked like we were in the same fluid medium. As we moved out of this floating state, we gradually sped up certain movements, increasing the range and torsion. The unpredictability of distributed initiation gave a feeling of strange forces at work. 

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To develop the movement for this transition, I asked each performer to recall a vivid memory or dream, then let their body move spontaneously, while still keeping one layer of attention on the group or surrounding objects. We crafted those raw movement attempts into set pieces, leaving room for each performer to vary the timing or intensity. Part of their awareness remained with the stage space and their colleagues, helping them return from their inner imagery. It was like a safety net in the dark space. 

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Reflecting on performing Last Orbit, one performer described the experience: 

“I was conscious of so many things at once: my breath, the others, the space, my inner imagery... it was like time dilated.” 

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A condition for emergence 

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Rather than focusing strictly on the creation of choreographic “material” in the conventional sense, the research also developed a condition for emergence - a set of principles and states that allowed movement to grow from below, to spiral from within, to extend in response. This is not a step-by-step method. It is a sensibility. A way of composing with, not upon. 

The performers’ subjective experience shifted to feel less like “I am moving my body” and more like “movement is happening through a network that includes my body.” 

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I set out to become tree-like, and in doing so, I found myself entering a kind of orbit around an idea much larger than a single tree or performer: the idea that creativity and knowledge are not human privileges but are born from interaction and relationship. 

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The boundary between performer, viewer, and environment becomes a little less rigid. In that subtle shift lies the potential of this research.