Nashville Scene
June 18, 2015
OZ Arts Nashville explores human interaction using puppets and the world’s oldest tree
By Abby White
This weekend, OZ Arts Nashville will present the world premiere of Phantom Limb Company’s Memory Rings, a theatrical collage exploring 5,000 years of human and environmental change.
Founded in 2007 by Jessica Grindstaff (an a installation artist, painter and set designer) and her husband Erik Sanko (a composer and puppetmaker), Phantom Limb is known worldwide for its collaborative multimedia productions featuring marionette puppetry. Through original composition and choreography, Memory Rings aims to explore humans’ interaction with one another and the surrounding environment, the world’s oldest living tree serving as a constant watchful factor in the evolution of these relationships.
“For us, the tree was kind of the catalyst,” Grindstaff tells the Scene. “It’s a time-marker to look at the dawn of civilization — 5,000 years ago until now — and how our relationship to the environment has changed over time. We’re looking at that through mythology, fairy tales, the Bible and a new fable that we’re writing. That’s how we’re relating the tree to this bigger conversation, using it as a time-keeper for all of these things that have happened over the course of its life.”
As the second installment in a trilogy of original works about the environment, Memory Rings was developed during a two-week residency at OZ last year after the concept caught the attention of OZ artistic director Lauren Snelling.
“OZ has expressed an interest in not just presenting work, but also being a part of the developmental process,” Grindstaff explains. “We were there about a year ago building the piece in its earlier stages, and it seems only right to do our first presentation with the people who were a part of the birthing process.”
The piece, directed and designed by Grindstaff, features Sanko’s puppets and choreography by Ryan Heffington, known for his work with artists including Florence and the Machine, FKA Twigs and Arcade Fire (Heffington recently won an MTV Video Music Award for his collaboration with Sia on the video for “Chandelier,” which at press time has more than 770 million views on YouTube). Alternately meditative and playful, the piece uses the marionette puppets and dancers donning full-head masks to tell the stories of the many humans and animals found in the forest over several centuries. In order to tell these stories, Grindstaff and her team traveled to California to find the fabled Methuselah Tree, a bristlecone pine roughly 4,800 years old.
“We went on an expedition to find the tree; its exact location is undisclosed so people don’t vandalize it,” Jessica Grindstaff says. “We spent three days searching for it, based on kind of shady information, but we found it. We filmed along the bark of it and used that for our video projection. It’s incredibly beautiful. There will be a lot of visual information and a lot of mediums coming together, kind of like a tapestry.”
In addition to perhaps being the closest you’ll get to the Methuselah Tree, Memory Rings offers a meditation on how humans live now rather than a political statement about environmental change.
“Now we’re actually tipping the scale to a point where what happened to the environment is going to have an effect on this tree and what’s happening in the forest,” Grindstaff says. “That’s not really reflected in the piece, but those are the kinds of questions that I hope will come up around the piece.”