A poetic performance weaving dance, music, text, puppetry, and video work around a single question: what if a tree could speak, and what if we already knew it?
The piece centers on a Banyan tree in Indonesia — called Noni by Lisa's family, a name that also carries the memory of two deceased relatives — a living archive of love, violence, and migration spanning centuries. Drawing from the Indonesian belief that trees house ancestral spirits, and that each child is bound to a tree as protector and soul mate, the performance builds a meditation on grief, rootlessness, and the longing for home.
Created and performed collaboratively with musicians and dancers Ali Choupani, Gaia op de Weegh, Huichi Li, Adi Semali, and Lisa, the work moves between the personal and the ecological — mourning a motherland, mourning people, and searching for ground in the places we only pass through.
My role was as video artist and collaborator — shooting original footage, weaving in archival material, and designing the projection mapping. This extended into the live performance itself, operating the visual cuing system and managing simultaneous live video capture and real-time projection, folding the present moment of the performance back into its own imagery.
The piece was presented as part of Het Puppetbuskersfestival in Ghent — a festival with 36 editions behind it, returning in 2025 to its original mission of platforming young and emerging makers, performed at De Wolk in July 2025.
Live Excerpt: