welcome to the tree museum
Associate Director + Dramaturge
Image taken by Will Innes
welcome to the tree museum was a multimedia performance, featuring a lumberjack choir, set in a world (much like our own) that is racing towards ecological disaster. The always-exceptional Brash children – Hazy, Queenie, Thunder and Toot - grew up knowing they were the generation that would save the world. Years later, when the siblings are brought together by a wedding and illness, they are forced to confront the impending death of the woodland where they spent their childhood. How do we mend the severed connection to family and the environment? The development of this performance as a complex musical complimenting two different realms—the realm of lumberjack fairytale and the one of our dying planet—was co-directed between Dr. Andy Houston and me. This performance was the final chapter of my time at the University of Waterloo, and a wonderfully challenging capstone that evocatively presented creatives on the project and audience members alike the direction our world is going in and how we could revert the damage.
Read more about welcome to the tree museum.
“A performance can activate a diversity of responses, but it is the audience which finally ascribes meaning and usefulness to any cultural product.”
— Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences
I’ll let you in on a secret…
This theatrical fable is an immersive experience for audience members to take in and reflect on the ways in which they live. It explores human relationships and, by extension, our relationship to nature. Regardless if you never witness this performance, these words still apply, and they apply to you. They apply to you because you inhabit this earth and play a role in how it is being treated.