Another Tree Dance began as a specific return: to publish in performance form Karinne Keithley Syers‘s dissertation on Emerson and first-person strangeness, a study that grew out of the last six years spent reading in an effort to sound a trans-disciplinary genealogy of the philosophical, ethical, and compositional commitments of the experimenting communities within dance and theater. It was to function as a means of ceremonially transitioning from scholarship back to making, a kind of homecoming. What it became is not so much a report as a private recuperation that bears an occult relation to that dissertation. In text, sound, and movement, Keithley Syers follows Emerson’s strange assignments into undersea, aerial, and nocturnal landscapes that resonate with a sense of both the continual return and ongoing loss occasioned by ordinary experience. Culled and assembled from a natural history of her own work, materialized within a visual environment of slides found in her grandparents basements and attics, Another Tree Dance is a poet’s essay, an essay for a room, for the mouth, the hand, the ear, a philosophy housed not in concepts but in sentences, gestures, slides, songs, visible and invisible things.

Created and performed by Karinne Keithley Syers in conversation with Sara Smith. Set design by Luke Hegel-Cantarella. Lighting design by Kathy Couch.

Developed with support from Mount Tremper Arts and the Yellow House Fund.

“On Emerson, Process, and the Room within a Room: A Conversation with Karinne Keithley Syers” – Christine Shan Shan Hou, Hyperallergic