Staring up into a very old and tall Indian fig tree, we waited for the leaves to fall, trying to catch them in mid-air. I sewed together the leaves that we had captured.
The festival took place at the Oswald Andrade Cultural Center, which is housed in an historic building in the Bom Retiro area in the center of Sao Paulo, Brazil. My performance took place in a courtyard at the back of the main building, where there is a very tall Indian fig tree shading the benches around its base. It is lit at night by a floodlight.
If people asked, they were told that they could help me by bringing a leaf that they saw falling from the tree. The tree and the wind cooperated with me. Right at the beginning time of 5 pm, many, many leaves were falling. And many people had arrived to watch. I could barely keep up as people brought leaves for me to sew onto my dress. So many leaves were falling that I changed the rule so that the audience had to actually catch the leaf in the air.
People came and went, and the wind came less often. With each puff of wind people would call out as they saw a leaf falling through the light, and run to leap into the air to try to catch it. In the last 45 minutes there was less wind, and so I changed the rule back to collecting the leaves that they saw falling, even if they didn’t catch them.
There were some wonderful periods where all was still and we were just standing and looking up into the tree, a really beautiful old tree… One of the artists sang an old song, and did the dance that accompanied it, to make a tree grow. And later others began to whistle softly to bring the wind.
It was a simple action. And really, it was the tree who performed, not I. But I wanted to make the tree the center of the performance, to have people really look at it, to see its beauty. The longer people stayed, the more they became attuned to the presence of the tree and the movement of the air around us.
Some background:
The cultural center is in an area devoted to the textile industries, with fabric and notion shops at street level, and many small sewing factories in upper floors that employ recent immigrants. The pay is low and the hours of work are long.
April is Fall in Sao Paulo. The season in Portugese is ‘Outono,’ and the verb ‘to fall’ is ‘cair.’ So the word play only functions in English.
