Tree In The Desert
He... He came like The Wind.
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I wasn't expecting it,
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and He named me.
He said:
"Your name is Mighty Oak,
and you will be a Clay Man,
and you will dance with me"
He began to shape me
with big, wet hands,
all slippery,
big, wet hands,
all slippery,
like a beginning
He said:
"Walk!
Ancient Oak!"
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and my roots dragged all my hope with me
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and I walked
He said:
"One day, Clay Man, you're going to change.
I'm going to send you somewhere.
I'm going to call you to go somewhere you won't survive.
I'm going to call you to go to a place
with no water, no shelter,
and you'll be changed there."
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and so I walked.
I said:
"If I am the branches,
I want to know Wind."
​
and I walked, my hopes rooted footsteps,
and at the edge of the forest
all I saw was sand.
​
My trunk was collapsing,
pouring out sand,
and I drank in that silence
in all its dryness deep into my roots
and before long, all of me was sand.
I was a tree
made of sand
walking in the desert for a while -
​
until The Wind came
and reclaimed me.
Full Graduate Showcase performance at Trinity Laban 21/7/25 :
This performance results from research into memory, imagination and voice through butoh with a theological lens. It
explores the body as theophanic storyteller; vessel for the Word – or body as a site of divine revelation.
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The score is semi-improvised, emerging from a recent butoh workshop I ran, where we imagined walking into a tree.
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We became trees, moving together as a forest.
Then, as trees, we walked into the desert, slowly becoming sand,
before disappearing into the wind.
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Inspired by landscape and Kazuo Ohno’s visionary metamorphic dance journeys, often involving dying and being
born with cosmic and surreal imagery.
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It is also drawn from a study of Taliesin, a mythic Welsh shapeshifting bard rooted in Druidic lore and Christian mythos.
Taliesin traverses worlds and time, leaping and riddling out the mouths of anonymous poets between the 6th and
14th centuries. The 14th-century Llyvyr Taliesin manuscript, ‘The Book of Taliesin’, archives his strange, glimmering
poetry.
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The piece emerges after a long journey to re-inhabit my body after trauma through commercial exploitation in fashion and beauty industries; exploring somatic practices and butoh as healing arts and prayer through movement.
I am continually questioning what beauty truly is.
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At a time when beauty is hyper-industrialised, embracing beauty as powerful, dangerous and honest – involving
frailty and paradox, unbound by aesthetic rules, spanning from soft and sensuous to raging and grotesque,
joyful to deadly – feels a radical necessity.
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I view my practice as embodied participation in the symbolic reality of Christ’s life, and through this, a being 'changed'.
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Special thanks: to my musicians Maxwell Owain Reynish and Vincent Morris for their improvised soundscapes.