New York’s Phantom Limb Company mixes dance, puppetry, tech and experimental theater to create visionary spectacles. They’ve described their latest show, “Memory Rings,” as tracing the “evolving relationship between people and the environment from the perspective of the world’s oldest known living tree. Initially inspired by the ‘Methuselah Tree,’ a California bristlecone pine estimated to be more than 4800 years old, ‘Memory Rings’ takes the long view of humanity’s relationship to the natural world, specifically, our forests, which we have loved and feared in equal measure, paying homage to their powers of enchantment and transformation in our folk and fairy tales, and routinely destroying or domesticating them in the service of ‘civilization.’ But ‘Memory Rings’ is neither a 21st century ‘Into the Woods’ nor a chronicle of deforestation, though it has elements of both; it is a ruminative, poignant, often mysterious theatrical poem about loss: the loss of our forests, of course, but also the loss of our identification with the non-human world around us.”
Charles McNulty writes in The Los Angeles Times of the company’s recent performance of “Memory Rings” at the UCLA Center for the Art of Performance’s Freud Playhouse: “Art and nature were so completely interwoven that it became impossible to tell them apart. Their fates, it is presumed, are similarly tied. It was through the majesty of the design and Ryan Heffington’s dream-like choreography that the production spoke so eloquently and ardently to the current crisis. … The web of life is under assault.”