“breathtaking”
–Dance Enthusiast
Arbor (2023)
Premiere November 17, 2023
6 dancers, 22 minutes
Choreography: Jody Sperling
Music: Matthew Burtner
Dramaturge: Andrea Trager
Dancers: Frances Barker, Anika Hunter, Maki Kitahara, Nicole Lemelin, Sarah Tracy, Rathi Varma
MET Orchestra musicians: Kari Jane Docter (cello), Bruno Eicher (violin), Mary Hammann (viola), Sarah Crocker Vonsattel (violin)
Arbor was created in part with the generous support of the Peck Stacpoole Foundation, with a finalist award from the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project, and with an eco-artist residency at The New York Society for Ethical Culture.
Arbor is the latest outgrowth of the climate-engaged collaboration between choreographer Jody Sperling and composer Matthew Burtner. Previous works focused on such themes as melting sea ice, changing wind patterns, and plastic proliferation. Expanding on Sperling’s solo American Elm (2022), Arbor dwells on the nature of trees. Ecologists now understand that trees communicate with one another, forests are like societies, and root systems constitute a “wood wide web”—a collaborative entanglement of myriad fungal, plant and animal species.The dance embodies with human movement the intimate entanglement of tree life.
The work is grounded in parallel practices of ecoacoustics (music) and ecokinetics (dance), pioneered by Burtner and Sperling respectively, that relate human sounds and movement to natural systems. Sperling and Burtner model the work’s choreographic and musical structures on tree rhythms. At its premiere, Burtner’s score was performed live by a string quartet of musicians from the MET Orchestra.
“The same fine grade of parachute silk that has evocatively made the wind visible in such works as “Wind Rose” and “Turbulence” (2011), for “Arbor,” quivered like branches of leaves rustling with a breeze. When lit by David Ferri, the white surface background glowed like sunlight beaming through limbs. . . . When they opened and closed their arms, the effect was of beating insect wings—or the pulse of a growing tree.”