You walk into a darkened room and watch a kitchy video presentation featuring the crew and performers of the show. You wonder if these people are serious.
The introduction is over. The video is now of a stark anonymous tree, and the performers, totally inconspicuous, dressed in black and scantily lit in sepia tones, start. You continue wondering. You ask yourself questions.
What is my place in the universe? Is this a concert? Is this a play? Is what I'm seeing a tree, or is it all trees? I wonder about representational vs. abstract art. What am I? What am I compared to a tree? You watch and listen.
You see the shadowy performers, the video, you hear the tonal contours and you sink more deeply into the soporific, balanced state that allows you to perceive what is really going on in here...
Tree. Tree-ness. The performers are not playing to a tree or about a tree or for a tree. You are awash in auditory and visual stimuli in concert, allowing your own tree-ness to become personally manifest. You become not a tree, not tree-like. You become "tree."
You are tree. You ask yourself questions. You wonder if the other audience members are tree, too. The ones who came to hear a concert are disturbed and querulous. But this is art. Art happens to the individual percipient only. Every qualitative and quantitative argument to the contrary is jejune. Some audience members are contemplative. Others are fretful, fractious. You settle back and let the experience have you again. You continue wondering. The tree featured in the video is winter-mode dormant. Somebody is taunting the tree. The tree behaves with stoic equanimity. You wonder: What if trees believed in Jesus? You catch a glimmer of truth given you by this tree. You sense, as the scene begins to shift toward the next act...you sense this: You sense "dicotyledonous verisimilitude."
SKY:
You know there is a context to overcome. You sit in an enclosed darkened room with a sufficiently high ceiling but you must get to the sky. You do this through transcendental meditation. The performers perform. The sky on the screen becomes sky-like. You are awash. The musicians play guitar, mallet percussion, keyboards. The instruments are electronically enhanced---they make uncharacteristic sounds.
You float. You allow yourself to overcome the malaise and ennui of modern life and be willing to participate nakedly in a pan-sensory subliminal conscience-raising event. Or is it conscience "razing?"
You wonder. You look around. You are an actual part of the performance. Without you to perceive it there is nothing. You help. Unlike listening to Mozart. While listening to Mozart, you discover that the composer has done all the work and all you have to do is sit there and listen because it is whole, complete, and perfect. It will be perfect with or without you. Sky. You help. You perceive. You are open. You are blue and white. You float above and around a tree.
FIRE:
In spite of fire's insubstantiality in our real world, the metaphor of 'fire' is older than literature and its use in art is ubiquitous to the point of being cliché. After the show is over, during the next day's cooling off period, the critic asks Todd Campbell about this choice. He says "we needed to give the people something." The critic, who is a musician, sees himself on a bandstand during a Friday night gig, bending to the will of the people and playing "Mustang Sally," watching in amused disbelief as every living soul in the place, some of whom are barely ambulatory due to advanced inebriation - dance and gyrate and sing with gayest abandon to this time-worn and silly song. Nevertheless...
Fire. It exists because of sky, and can feed on tree. You feed on the fire. It feeds you. The music climaxes, then retreats. It climaxes again, then retreats. It climaxes yet again, then retreats, and the lights go up. You stand up, you applaud, you are asked questions by the other participants, but you cannot answer. Questions want answers, and this implies a concreteness and representational clarity that died when Mozart died.
This piece offers questions, not answers. Answers are for the dull of spirit. Answers are for the gloopy. Questions are for the living. You get in your car and wished you still smoked cigarettes. You go home. You sleep. Tim McCasland, April 2004