Created by Annie Blazejack, Geddes Levenson, and Laura Marsh
Produced by Bas Fisher Invitational (BFI) and co-presented by BFI and the Deering Estate as part of “Interlocking Dimensions: Eco-Art” curated by Lilliam Dominguez. On view Jan 21 - March 24, 2024.
Click here to read the full script.
Opening Reception: January 21, 2024, 12 to 5 p.m.
WEIRD MIAMI walking tour: On February 10, Annie Blazejack and Laura Marsh will lead a WEIRD MIAMI walking tour at the Deering Estate. More information TBD.
Dear Washington: March 10th, 2024, 11 a.m. Laura Marsh will activate the grove through a debt circle and embroidery workshop called Dear Washington and supported by Locust Projects WaveMaker Grants and the Warhol Foundation. Aimed at discovering how the impact of the accumulation of debts has impacted our American psyche, participants will explore wordsmithing, expressing phrases in a skilled manner that conveys personal narratives to share their own experiences about education and student debt as a contemporary subject. The tradition of textiles being produced in community circles will accentuate the grove and raise awareness about constraints on contemporary life and mobility, the ability to own assets, and to build multigenerational advocacy.
Lady Macbeth leads a tree-killing army into the forest. The three weird sisters (witches) and three talking trees conspire to stop her. Under their influence, she experiences a strangely-worded epiphany, and then decides she must become a tree in the forest herself.
Macbeth’s willful participation in his own undoing is a brutal and cautionary parallel for climate change. In Shakespeare’s play, the Weird Sisters prophecy a two-edged future for Macbeth: That he will become Thane of Cawdor, Thane of Glamis, and King of Scotland; and that his sons will inherit none of these titles. Similarly, Americans today are told that we all deserve lots of stuff - a single family suburban home, a fancy pick-up truck, the latest video game system. But if we pursue this lifestyle, our children inherit climate disaster.
The script was composed in collaboration with a machine learning algorithm (GPT-2) and our computer programmer friends Sergey Feldman and Alex Rubinsteyn. They ‘fed’ the Macbeth script along with books about Everglades ecosystems into their learning machine, and it generated paragraph-long blocks of text. Then we finessed the computer’s output, rearranging it into a nine-character play. The script takes about 15 minutes to perform.
Many viewers may already be familiar with ChatGPT, an AI generally capable of responding to prompts with comprehensible responses. GPT-2 was not as comprehensible, but we believe the GPT-2 moment in the refinement of AI was valuable because it forced us to use our imaginations to try to find meaning in the text. If we were communicating with an alien species - or a sentient tree - we would have to stretch our brains to find meaning in non-human communication.
The computer-generated script combines words and thoughts in ways that are unfamiliar and surprising. We don’t want our trees to just speak like people. We want their voices to be uncanny and only adjacent to our understanding.
Geddes Levenson and Annie Blazejack both grew up in Miami, FL. They have been creating and showing work together for over a decade. In their paintings and installations, they explore the relationship between humans and ecosystems as climate change becomes increasingly inevitable.
Blazejack received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine arts, Boston/ Tufts University, and Levenson received her MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Notably, Blazejack and Levenson have installed solo shows at Lump Projects, Raleigh NC; Anchorlight, Raleigh, NC; The Carrack, Durham, NC; The Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL; Placeholder Gallery, Miami, FL; and The White Page Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. They have also shown at The National Liberty Museum, Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; and Norte Maar Art Space, Brooklyn, NY.
Laura Marsh (b.1982 Binghamton, NY) lives and works in Miami, FL. She received her MFA from Yale University School of Art [Sculpture (2009)] and a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art [Painting (2006)]. Marsh is a textile artist who incorporates text about contemporary social and class issues. Her primary materials are fabric combined with that statements quoting well-known labor leaders, feminist icons, and her own poetic musings.
Selected solos include "Unsolicited Advice," HUB-Robeson Galleries, Penn State University, Pennsylvania (2023), "Knots Hold Intentionality," DotFiftyone Gallery (2022), "Entwined," Deering Estate (2020), “New Havens”, Locust Projects, Maimi, Florida (2018). Marsh has exhibited nationally at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art (2016), Printed Matter (2023), Jane Lombard Gallery (2021), Locust Projects (2018), and Bernice Steinbaum Gallery (2023). Marsh is in the collections of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, Victoria J. Rogers, Dennis and Debra Scholl, and Mindy and Michael Solomon. She has been an artist in residence at Oolite Arts, Miami Beach, Mana Contemporary, Miami and New Jersey, and Siena Art Institute, Siena, Italy. Marsh is represented by Dot Fiftyone Gallery in Miami.
Bas Fisher Invitational (BFI)
Contact:
Bas Fisher Invitational (BFI) is an W.A.G.E. certified 510(c)(3) not-for-profit artist-run presenting organization dedicated to creativity, experimentation, and discourse in contemporary art. BFI creates a bridge between Miami and the international art world by curating programs featuring both local and global artists at sites throughout Miami-Dade County, and in collaboration with national and international partnering organizations. BFI fosters community by offering support for artist projects, most recently through initiatives such as WATERPROOF MIAMI, a site-specific curatorial platform that presents exhibitions and public programming that directly address environmental issues facing South Florida; WEIRD MIAMI, a series of artist-led tours that show locals and visitors Miami through artists’ eyes; and NOMADIC MIAMI, an experimental model for presenting site-specific projects that let artists lead the way to determine the best locations and methods to present their work.
Cast
Witch 1 - Karen Throckmorton
Witch 2 - Annie Blazejack
Witch 3 - Geddes Levenson
Tree 1 - Tom Blazejack
Tree 2 - Suzanne Levinson
Tree 3 - Rustin Levenson
Lady Macbeth - Lindsay Arber
Messenger - Chuck Throckmorton
Banquo - Sergey Feldman
Multichannel Sound Installation Audio Consultant/Engineer
Recording
Chuck Throckmorton
Script Generation
Alex Rubinsteyn
Sergey Feldman
And Many-Faceted Support From
Naomi Fisher
Liliam Dominguez
Melissa Diaz
The Trees’ Macbeth
Characters:
Witch 1 - Karen Throckmorton
Witch 2 - Annie Blazejack
Witch 3 - Geddes Levenson
Tree 1 - Tom Blazejack
Tree 2 - Suzanne Levinson
Tree 3 - Rustin Levenson
Lady Macbeth - Lindsay Arber
Messenger - Chuck Throckmorton
Banquo - Sergey Feldman
Scene 1: Witches chat
001_Witch 1
The grasses of the Everglades are,
and have always been,
moving and speaking beings.
002_Witch 2
There is a certain fragility to the wilderness of the moment
003_Witch 3
The water level in the cypress domes is high
004_Witch 2
The Mangrove trees are so thickly packed
that they form a cathedral of sorts
005_Witch 1
Sanctum sanctorum
006_Witch 3
An altar, for my Sisters’ eyes to gaze upon.
007_Witch 2
Before Lady Macbeth arrived,
the upper Glade was so much muck and swamp
008_Witch 1
It was inconceivable that a people could have flourished here
009_Witch 3
The depth of swamp and the diversity of life
make this an expensive drain.
010_Witch 1
Wouldn't it be great fun to swing the pendulum,
to swing the world,
back and forth between water and land
011_Witch 3
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
012_Witch 2
Lady Macbeth!
Scene 2: A Messenger tells Lady Macbeth about the success of her tree killing project
013_Lady Macbeth
The world is a broken record.
Every moment, every inch of the world, is a trick.
The tree-like creatures are so numerous,
so richly green, you would think there were more seasons than there are in the world!
Now is a time for killing grass, for leveling sedges, flattening dales.
It is a time for cutting ribbons in the grass and feeding them to worms.
For spreading-mesh fences; it is a time for budding, budding fences.
014_Messenger:
Hail Macbeth!
015_Lady Macbeth:
Hail, brave friend!
By your looks you have been digging the canal.
What news of the dredging?
Share your knowledge of the broil
As thou didst leave it.
016_Messenger:
I was standing on a high berm overlooking the creek,
ten feet above the seabed.
The air above me smelled vaguely of coming rain and lichen.
017_Lady Macbeth:
What of the trees? Could we breach their snarled roots?
018_Messenger:
Doubtful it stood;
The mangrove hammock was only a foot from the edge of the berm
So thick were the boughs that my hand could not penetrate them
New trees began to creep upward, split, and multiply.
Their trunks were as new as the day I was created.
And they groaned with every beat of my heart.
As trees advanced,
The mud beneath my feet split, spread, and rippled.
Their roots engulfed us.
019_Lady Macbeth:
Awe, awe, disgust!
You have marvell'd me.
But you must go on.
020_Messenger:
The loam was so fresh it buffeted the lungs
and we could see our lives flash before our eyes.
A few minutes passed, and we made good progress.
Then, abruptly, something nudged against my boot, flopped over.
We did push the canal
Through to the sea, and salt water gushed.
Their soils were so full of liquid
that it were impractical for any plant to take
up residence, and remain standing.
A new sound filled the clearing,
a high, rasping sound like distant thunder but more urgent.
The forest was falling.
021_Lady Macbeth:
The sound of their fall is the sound of our triumph over death. The sound of our victory is the groaning of trees.
022_Messenger: (Slowly, in a daze)
I have done no harm.
And yet I feel as if I had done harm.
I was a tree in the forest, and my job was to fall.
The forest had to fall, one by one.
The wood, empty. Sleep snuffed. Gone.
023_Lady Macbeth (to the audience)
He is faint. So should he look
That seems to speak things strange.
Scene 3: A conversation among Trees, and then
A confrontation between Banquo and the Trees, and then
The Witches arrive and make a deal with the Trees, and then,
The Witches transform Banquo into a supernatural animal-human hybrid, and then,
An uneasy alliance between Witches and Trees
024_Tree 1:
Pale of the world, come to life;
Strange dreams, troubling dreams,
And shames yet beautiful morning-comings.
Come into the world, come into the world.
Within the volume of time I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange, but this sore night
Hath trifled former knowings.
The same neighborhoods where a bear lurks,
The same neighborhoods where panthers still prowl,
and where hundreds of bird species are endangered or near-extinct:
I have seen the lawns of estates like Rose and Ditchfield
Swarming humans:
Each new morn
A new batch comes.
025_Tree 2:
Where do they come from?
026_Tree 3:
Their region is as a forest without a tree.
027_Tree 2:
They are free bags full of the
most elaborate water-control projects.
028_Tree 3:
Aye, and how they do march us to the mulcher.
029_Tree 2:
'Tis said they eat each other.
Enter Banquo
030_Banquo:
What are these
So withered and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants of the earth,
And yet are on it? Live you? or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me,
031_Tree 2:
Is it a man?
032_Tree 1:
It has a long, thin body like a slug.
033_Banquo:
I am Banquo.
034_Tree 3:
His shiny, sugary eye looks like a gleam of candy.
035_Banquo:
My business is Lady Macbeth’s
My purpose is to discuss the propriety, or otherwise, of our
acquisition of the land.
036_Tree 3:
Young fry of treachery!
037_Tree 2:
Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath,
Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death.
038_Tree 1:
We will have blood
039_Tree 2:
They say, blood will have blood
040_Tree 3:
All birds, including the great kite,
Will stone thee to death. Out, out,
Thou hideous worm!
041_Banquo:
Difficult woods and thickets!
Though your bark cannot be lost,
Yet it would be tempest-tost.
It is moving, inexorably, down a landscape where the meanest blade of grass can turn to dust.
The question is not whether we should acquire it, but how to acquire it.
Let the destruction of the Everglades continue. Let the killing of the Everglades continue.
I will get thee dug, and I will put thee to sea.
042_Tree 1:
Thou art the best o' the cut-throats.
043_Tree 2:
That title is for Macbeth.
044_Tree 3:
The canal digger!
There is no end to her.
045_Tree 1:
Who would bear a grain of such seed
As this mankind
And sow it where none hath yet
Sow'd a man's seed?
046_Banquo:
Still, the land is ours.
It is also a vast, uninhabited slough, a dead-end street, a wasteland.
We will make it firm land for firm houses.
047_Tree 2:
I find my tears fall easy down my cheeks;
They have no water in them.
The canals that flood also drain.
Enter Witches
048_Witch 1:
We are twig budged with sympathy
049_Witch 2:
Yes, do ask us to help
050_Witch 3:
We could break the line of the battle.
051_Tree 1:
Who is this that appears before me?
052_Tree 3:
Strangers.
053_Tree 2:
More men?
054_Witch 1:
Stranger yet.
055_Witch 2:
There is nothing in space
That does not descend to the earth
056_Witch 3:
I'll show you a thing you never thought you'd see.
A light in time! A light in time!
Where you keep the stars
057_Witch 2:
The spaces where stars were wont to live.
058_Witch 3:
We keep the mystery of stars and the mystery of time.
059_Tree 3:
Art not these three sisters?
060_Witch 3
Ay, we are three of my self,
The three Strange Sisters.
061_Tree 2:
Let's not consort with them
062_Witch 2:
We’ll make of this Banquo a fresh beast,
His face lion mettled proud, but with revisions of lizards
063_Witch 1:
To the busy craft of magic we’ll make up
(chanting)
beginning, middle, and end,
descend, and stand again.
Hungry eye, let it in. Let it in.
Look like the innocent lamb,
But be the wolf of the other
World.
064_Tree 3:
Confound all spiritual things
That labour and desire power;
Strange sisters, craft your magic.
Magical witchy sound
065_Tree 3:
Though he drink and give in the poison of luxury,
Though he wear greedy gouts of sweat,
Though he swoon with his fancy's thrill,
Yet we’ll find him baulked in his estate.
066_Tree 2:
Detritus from a kind of molting:
a long trail of skin-like debris, husks, and sloughings.
067_Banquo:
How now?
Why do you dress me
In these strange skins?
068_Witch 2:
If you look like the serpent,
Then you are the serpent.
069_Witch 1:
If you look like the panther
Then you are the panther
070_Witch 3:
If you look like the man
Then you are the man
071_Witch 2:
And if you look like all of them and yet are none…
072_Witch 1:
Then you are made of water and of something alien
073_Tree 1:
Capital!
074_Banquo
(low moan)
075_Tree 2:
Ha! This moaning creature was, or had once been, human.
076_Banquo:
Breathless and refreshed as I have been…
It is that great House wherein all living things
Live together. What are living things?
All creatures that have feelings.
And feel they not?
Exit Banquo
077_Witch 3:
More can be done like this.
078_Tree 1
And vanquish Macbeth?
079_Witch 3:
We offer brightness in a formless change.
080_Witch 1:
Beacon and build another heart for our strangeness
In your garden.
081_Tree 2:
When I saw the star trails on the water I thought, This is it.
The treaty-making, the treaty-keeping...
But you would change the very air we breathe.
082_Tree 1:
The rainy season has come and gone. Summer is over.
We are hanging on by a thread.
083_Tree 2:
I fear a confused distress, a false happiness.
084_Witch 1:
Then stand with us.
The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day
085_Tree 3:
We cannot breathe without opening our lungs
And exhaling the grass and water and sky...
To breathe the witches is somber.
086_Tree 1:
We must learn to live with that something.
Scene 4: Lady Macbeth is a villain
087_Lady Macbeth:
Our deliberations have produced results. The natives of Florida are becoming
Extinct.
What, sir?
Your tongues shall speak what they think,
088_Messenger:
In deeds of power and in speech
I bring of good tidings and of bad.
089_Lady Macbeth:
Speak then to me.
090_Messenger:
Artificially the suburbs sequestered more wilderness.
091_Lady Macbeth:
And?
092_Messenger:
Our men
control the Everglades
093_Lady Macbeth:
Formidable foes. But how were they to know
Which was the other end of my sword? You see,
Whoever strikes first, wins.
(pause)
What bad then?
094_Messenger:
The woods are not gone, although they look so.
And they have taken our spangled Banquo.
095_Lady Macbeth:
Woe, alas! Banquo is murdered!
096_Messenger:
T’were better to be with the dead-
He grows worse and worse.
How will he look on his family when
He may only want to eat of them?
I have seen "things else",
but I mean things that are not things.
097_Lady Macbeth:
What is't you say?
098_Messenger:
What need we fear them, when death
Looks like a picnic?
He did depart from his body, change shape,
Crawl from his skin like a drowning man.
His spirit is an animal of the Everglades,
a shadow that rolls backwards and forwards over the marsh, writhing.
Out of his senses he ran for the wood, calling out:
“You shall spend the rest of your days
In wondering how long this place has existed.
And you too shall partake in the wonders of it.”
099_Lady Macbeth:
You have put me on edge.
You have stirred me with your prophetic words
The field is darkening.
The foundations are shifting.
The castle is shaken.
But the ghosts don’t scare me.
Let the killing of the Everglades be complete.
After all, why waste a river of grass?
Scene 5: Lady Macbeth’s transformation, and
A new state of the world
100_Lady Macbeth
The wood was alive.
It twisted and turned under my fingernails,
Arching its back and curling its tail;
It hung, limp and blind, like an unfed snake.
The roots roved all around me,
They joined in a tangled network
To the systems of other trees.
101_Tree 1: (pointing to the witches)
Lo! here come the charmed charmers,
That smile on both the worlds
102_Witch 1:
Wood and stone have known it;
Even the humble axe and pestle agree
103_Witch 3:
In nature is a tyranny; it hath been
The untimely emptying of the happy throne
And the fall of many regents.
104_Lady Macbeth:
What are you?
A friend? A Sister?
105_Witch 2:
We come to strike against your use of trees
106_Lady Macbeth:
Things without all remedy
Should be without regard.
What's done is done.
The world is a broken record.
Every moment, every inch of the world, is a trick.
107_Tree 2:
Do you not fear the witches?
108_Witch 3:
Once the rebel,
She will receive what she deserves
109_Witch 2:
And we will have what we want. Our voice is our sword.
110_Witch 1:
Come, sisters, cheer we up, give us a hand;
The mind is too full of the macrocosm,
And yet there it is, in the microcosm,
That shows you where to place
The subject of our song.
111_Witch 3:
Thrice the dolphin,
And thrice the rebel.
112_Witch 1:
Hurtful to the eye
Are the words of accuracy.
Let it in, Let it in!
113_Witch 2:
Peace! The charm's wound up.
114_Lady Macbeth:
A spell!
I smell the salt of the words
Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present,
And whisper things my brain can neither see
Nor understand.
O, ruin me, woo me,
And with a skein of fate
Bring me back to my senses!
Look how I sink!
(A thud. Lady Macbeth falls.)
115_Witch 1:
See to the lady.
116_Witch 3:
She fell down, and a part of her hair Is red.
She is better; but her blood Is shed.
117_Lady Macbeth:
Is this a grave, sir, at last?
118_Witch 1:
Nothing so grave as you were.
You will live...
Special Effects music.
119_Lady Macbeth:
This brightness is a formless rage,
a confused distress,
a false happiness.
a touch of the sublime,
a kind of innocence.
A tree? In the woods?
I’m on foot, my lord,
And so perhaps I’m bound to be.
Although -
Although the ground is polluted and the air heavy with smoke,
I dare not resist the lure of this place any longer.
This is so astounding, that in my imagination,
with all its parts combined, I could not tell any of it…
I saw every kind of living creature that had ever existed on Earth.
From marine species to reptilian and from invertebrate to arthropod.
From microscopic creatures to galactic invertebrates,
And everything in-between.
120_Tree 3:
Such bright
Sepia-tinted eyes!
Are they not the color of the sap
That gathers here?
Macbeth has leaves!
A fast-moving ripple of green-gold fuzziness.
121_Lady Macbeth:
The sisters have made us all fools.
My fingers are charged with the sun
I have no home but in the woods
122_Tree 2:
Then stand with us.
your feet are tired.
You have been out in the woods all day.
123_Lady Macbeth:
My feet? I have forgotten how to walk.
Let me enfold thee and hold thee to my heart.
There if I grow, the harvest is your own.
Glowing noise.
124_Witch 2:
Green leaves with reddish roots
creep across the fields; they obscure vision, obscure sight.
125_Witch 3:
The trees feel wet against your
face as you walk; they blind,
they crush your eardrums and tongue and
throat.
126_Witch 1:
The downpours wash the downpains away,
127_Witch 2:
The lungs swell and fail; your face and your body, stone and
nectar, will never be the same.
128_Lady Macbeth:
I owe my being to your strange mercy.
Here am I, Lady Macbeth, lost forever.
I went from shock to fascination to sustained blue-green light
129_Tree 2:
I think that there are probably hundreds of people
in the wide world who get a glimpse
of that which is beyond words.
But then again, maybe I am just dreaming all these restless nights.
130_Tree 1:
I can feel in my bones the breath of the world around me, and it is not my imagination.
131_Tree 2:
The stillness of the trees,
The stillness of the water,
The stillness of the bees,
And the stillness of the human face
In the middle of it all.
It is a living creature of some sort.
132_Tree 1:
It may be stationary, or it may be moving.
It may be in the process of creating itself, or it may not be.
It may be inert, or it may be active.
It may be in a hurry, or it may be slowing down.
133_Tree 3:
The world is cauldroning away. There is no turning back, not now, not ever.
END