Studies of a Figure in Green - Chapter 1 takes aim at humanity’s most passionately confused fantasies about the natural world. Told through a chorus of three voices trapped between ecstatic communion and brutal self-examination, this is a performance about the beauty of nature, and whether or not it’s all a total lie. We journey into a world of pastoral gorgeousness, symbolised by the colour green – a colour that is the promise of life & abundance, but also of toxicity & despair. Along the way we meet druids, mushroom farmers, psychics, polygraph specialists and plant shop owners. Each of them, alone together, search like the delicate tendril of a plant, blindly in the darkness, for something they can call connection.

The piece finds its starting point in the experiments of 1960s CIA agent Cleve Backster, who connected a lie detector to his office plant, claiming to unlock its “inner life”. This curious moment, in between science and mysticism, inspired us to develop a performative language that dreams of a utopian moment when all living matter can communicate. But this act - interrogating a pot plant - also revealed to us how every desire to commune with nature can be haunted by an instinct to dominate.    

Studies of a Figure in Green - chapter 1 is a performative installation that blends documentary footage with fictional elements to immerse us in a landscape that asks: is love for the natural world a deep truth—or a dangerous lie? 
Combining physical performance, text and video, LiLi Re presents a multi-disciplinary piece that both reckons with and celebrates the troubled intimacy between humans and non-humans, desire and delusion. 

Premier May 14th at Rosendal Teater, Trondheim. 

Artistic team:
Idea and concept: LiLi Re 
Director: Petra Casale
Devised and performed by: Christine Ryndak, Silje Lindberg and Oda Kirkeboe Nyfløtt
Scenography: Nikolai Lieblein Røsæg 
Researcher and writer: Freddie Mason 
Videoartist and sounddesigner: Jazbo Gross
Lightdesigner and technician: Tobias Leira 
Video-recording: Ingrid Liavaag
Producer: Live Strugstad