Tree Duet is a meditative performance about our continuing entanglement with trees. Accompanied by pianist Shane Thio, performers Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan combine an intricately interwoven set of stories and reportage with simple actions and gestures to create a delicate theatrical ecology of sounds, words and images.
Eco-performance minus the moralizing, Tree Duet encompasses everything from the history of the Malayan rubber industry to carbon offsetting, the music of Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu to the 100 year-old Bodhi tree at the Jin Long Si Temple in Singapore.
In exploring how some of the slow mysteries of tree-time persist amongst the fast-paced life of a global city. Paul and Kaylene invent some tree-lore for the 21st century, and apply it to the vexed relationship between our all too human obsessions with nature, power and death.
