Yet Tree does all this without dissolving the distinct cultural traditions into the metalanguage of modern Western multidisciplinary performance which too often creates a disjointed stylistic mish-mash in its attempt to branch out of the little black box of avant garde performance.
Tree is a work based on spirituality and pan-Asian artistic practice.
It addresses the speed of globalization in our ever-shrinking world and the profound effect exposure to new cultures has on people's lives. A directorial and cast experiment with represented traditions' refinement of order and my modernity's operation to disrupt harmony and then to reconstruct it. Lemon set out to create a piece addressing spirituality, especially pan-Asiatic Buddhism. What he ended up with is a vastly fragmented concept of aesthetics and human experience stuck up on a big old stage. The sheer humanness of the interactions of the performers on stage as they wandered in and out of the scenes was an apt abstraction and crystallization of human interaction on not just the global plane but the local everyday one.