Chapter 3: "Librettising" ecology to create Lipote: An Interconnected Journey
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Context of the Research and Influences
3.3 Synopsis
3.4 Developing the Script
3.4.a Communication: Influence from the Science
3.4.b Exploring Different Worlds: Panarchy and Adaptive
3.4.c Soil
3.4.d The Fungal Network
3.4.e The Narrator
3.4.f The Humans
3.4.g The Rainforest
i. A Framework for the Rainforest
iii. Exploring the Rainforest through Cycles of Collaboration
3.4.h The Palm Tree Plantation
3.4.i Lipote as the Loner Tree and the "Fiery Edge"
3.4.j The Strangler Fig
3.4.k The Forest Garden (or Taungya) and the Marriage
3.6 Future Steps and Conclusion
3.4.g The Rainforest
3.4.g.i A Framework for the Rainforest
There are many ways in which trees and forests have been studied and understood by cultures throughout human history so it was important to approach this topic with an exploration of an understanding of forests and soil which goes beyond the scientific approach. Dr Eichhorn in particular, whose work is involved with the large-scale agricultural and forestry industry, had given me a very technocratic view of the ways in which trees exist and interact in forest systems (see appendix 2.1.f.iii). He himself acknowledged this and suggested that I might look to other cultures who engage with forests more spiritually to find a way into my story, such as the Cheq Wong, people indigenous to Peninsular Malaysia25. This was already an approach I had begun to take, and is also a key part of the methodology of the work, looking for ways in which non-scientific, TEK focused or historical interpretations of the natural world, such as mythologies or psychological models, can reflect the information gathered in scientific studies of natural phenomena. In order to achieve this, I looked into anthropological texts about cultures living in forests. A few key texts I looked at were Stuart A. Schlegel’s The Wisdom from a Rainforest (1998), Managing the Wild (2018) by Charles M. Peters, Society and cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia (2009) by Signe Howell, and Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes (2008) by Daniel L. Everett. These books provide detailed anthropological accounts of living with forest dwelling communities in rainforests around the world. They are told from the perspective of the academics encountering them, who often have eye opening and mind changing experiences, as their world views and structures are confronted with a very different approach.
It was out of the research into anthropology and science around forests that I structured the Rainforest society’s rules/commandments which would guide the actions of the characters in my piece. In particular, I was drawn to using the codes and conducts of the Teduray society (from the Philippines) as described by Stuart A. Schlegel in his text Wisdom from the Rainforest: A Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist (1998). The commandments I created from this and the other texts are below:
1. You should never purposely make the world out of balance.
The state of the Rainforest is either in balance or out of balance. All parts of the network should be working towards maintaining this balance.
Schlegel described the Teduray’s system of balanced as being based on a healthy or unhealthy gallbladder:
The Teduray . . . put great emphasis on repairing gallbladders as quickly as possible, without violence through the legal system, and they put even more stress on never giving anyone a bad gallbladder in the first place. (1998: 171)
I also found that soil, and our coexistence with it, is of huge importance in Cree law. For this culture whatever is taken from the soil must also be returned. Joe Cardinal, a member of the Cree community, notes in his essay for the United Nations:
If we continue to abuse the land by taking without giving back, the situation will become chronic and irreversible. The consequences associated with this neglect and disrespect of the land has culminated inclimate change. What Cree people have to offer to the world is shared with many other indigenous people--that interaction with the land must occur with deep respect and with recognition that what is taken, must be given back. (2010: online)
This idea of reciprocation with the soil was something that I found to be discussed over and over by environmentalists and anthropologists. I included the notion of balance within the commandments for the Rainforest so that the reciprocation of taking and giving (and the need for restoration) might be a strong part of the libretto. I made direct use of this concept in scene 3, where the Rainforest is struggling to maintain a balance after the storm. When we enter the scene we meet two types of trees in response to the ensuing crisis: the giving and taking trees. In the opening narration Lipote tells the audience ‘The forest is out of balance’ (p. 7, line 141) and the trees continue to express this imbalance throughout the panic. The giving trees offer help: ‘Supplies here to repair / The charred bark, blitzed threads / darkened voices, broken cords / Take all we can give' (p. 7-8, lines 164-167) while the taking trees waste it: ‘The more we take the more we leak. / Drained from tubes and tunnels to soil’ (p. 8, lines 168-169).
This theme of balance is repeated throughout the opera in various different guises as the opera explores the different forest systems. For example, the growing imbalance is mentioned by the narrator at the start of the interlude (p. 17, lines 397-401): ‘Lipote is lost / The Plantation cannot listen / The Strangler Fig wants to take too much / Resources from home are running out / Time trickles away’.
2. Memory is built into, and written upon, the soil. I took this from the many repeated descriptions I found of soil as memory. This idea that soil can hold memory ranged from indigenous belief systems to pedology (the Western scientific study of soil) and discussed above.
3. Cooperation over competition. Everyone in the same neighbourhood works together, sharing resources that would otherwise not be used.
Schlegel talks a lot about this quality in the Teduray tribe, but also this is a key element of a well-functioning ecosystem. The decomposers break down the waste and pass on nutrients to organisms in the soil, water is filtered and cleaned by the trees and soils before collected in the water table, plants efficiently convert the sun’s energy and the gases in the air to glucose etc. Everything is exploited and made use of.
4. Each individual has a duty of care to the whole.
5. Time is measured only by how useful/resourceful the individual still is. One is only considered “old” when one cannot give to the whole more than it needs to take. These elders must still be supported by the whole. Even though they no longer provide support in the form of water and nutrition, their knowledge and wisdom are valuable to the community.
This was inspired by the various studies which have shown that older trees can actually grow faster and sequester more carbon than younger trees in tropical forests (Köhl et al., 2017). It can be seen in the libretto in scene 3 (p. 7, lines 142-144): ‘Many mother trees are almost lost. / Made old by the storm they need more than they can give.’ Later in the song of knowledge the Rainforest tell us: ‘We felt the branches taken / Trees trimmed and used for tools / We learned it makes us young again / A rebalance of old and new’ (p. 23, lines 565-568). This references silvicultural practices which trim and prune trees in order to promote more resilient regrowth (Ortega-Vargas et al., 2019).
6. Every member of the community has one or more specialisms which are respected and important to the whole.
As a complex and diverse ecosystem, everything has developed its own place within the natural rhythms and cycles of the Rainforest.
7. Gender and sexuality is irrelevant – such labels are never applied or even considered. These aspects are personal choices which only impact the individual. They do not affect the community.
Again this aspect of gender was drawn from Schlegel:
Not only were the genders unranked in forest Teduray society, but they were held to identical values as well (1998: 113)
3.4.g.ii Drama from the Rainforest
After reading a 2020 New Scientist article on the possibility of extreme damage being done to rainforests by the increased frequency of high energy storms in which lightning strikes are most likely to affect the oldest and largest trees (or “mother trees”), I found I had a good place to start the drama for the Rainforest (Irwin, 2020) (Gora et al., 2020). Dr Eichhorn also confirmed that this has been postulated as a potential future harm.
In this work the Rainforest itself has been musically and lyrically characterised as a polyphonic world of many voices, passing important messages, and at times speaking together as a whole. During the first cycle of workshops between myself and Oliver we had found that we wanted to use three levels to characterise the Rainforest. First the individual voice, second the cacophony of voices and third the Rainforest as a whole (for further discussion of the workshop see section 3.4.g.iii). This way of characterising the Rainforest from the individual to the greater whole worked well with the theories around panarchic systems, as well as indigenous science approaches to forests where individual trees are cared for as part of the greater system (Nair et al., 2021: Boakye et al., 2012: Björklund et al., 2019). As the Lipote journeys away from the Rainforest into other systems it remains connected and we frequently hear the voice of the whole forest reflecting Lipote’s thoughts throughout its journey. This occurs less as Lipote travels further away but the connection back to the Rainforest is frequently referred to by Lipote in the journey. They often state that they do not travel alone and that they are part of a larger whole. In the final edit we removed many of these “whole forest” sections so as to allow the narrative to feel less stunted and flow more smoothly from world to world.
In order to create the text for the first set of messages sent out by the trees in scene 1 I used words sourced from my reading on tree root and fungal networks. I rearranged these words into sentences which would work as alert messages to other local trees. The phrases generated through this process indicate an urgent passing of information and messaging, both asking for help from surrounding trees, and warning them of environmental factors above ground. The tone is more informative than emotional, in order to reflect the various conversations I had with scientists about their visions of how they see trees as acting largely out of competition, as well as working together to retain the ecosystem balance of the whole. As each message is sent out the sung melodic material is then repeated and filtered through the instrumental ensemble. The text in this scene was originally designed to build up and increase in a polyphonic density in line with the Fibonacci sequence so as to replicate a natural, rather than man-made, system. This structure was later changed in the workshops to understand the dramaturgy and the performativity of the work. See timecode 00:00:00 to see the musical, lyrical and visual representation of the Rainforest from the final cycle of the work.
The musical nature of the Rainforest develops across the piece as its knowledge of different soils and lands increases. Once we have reached scene 7, and returned to the Rainforest, the music is very different to scene 1. Having experienced and learnt from various different types of forest cultures and systems, absorbing and conserving the knowledge and resources it could grasp from them, the music is more blended with other genres, and the form of the text is much more traditional and verse-like with areas of clear recitative. The worlds and music of the Rainforest and Forest Garden also begin to collide in the second half of this scene. This is all reflective of how the Rainforest has now become more integrated with humans, becoming home to the displaced people of the forest garden. The music and text become more managed and structured within human cultural, rather than natural, forms. (See timecode 01:16:53 for an example of the Rainforest music and text at the end of the opera). In this final chorus the voices are singing together in harmony (not polyphony) as they address the world beyond them. This signifies how the Rainforest has learnt the language of the surrounding systems, and is also now more integrated with the human world of the Forest Garden.
3.4.g.iii Exploring the Rainforest through cycles of collaboration and performativity
As composer and librettist, Oliver and I respectively felt it was important to generate a joint understanding of the topic in order to create a unified work. We both knew that we had started the process of creating and even recording the work too early, before really allowing the topic to sit with us, and so we were both open to reworking the material we already had in place. We worked from the initial piece of music and text (which we had recorded) and then carried out a series of creative tasks in relation to the drama, science and concept of the scene. These involved free drawing depictions of the underground root and fungal networks, dramatizing the experience of being a tree struck by lightning through performative tasks, and writing lists of emotions and sensations related to both of these things. From these tasks we found a clearer dramaturgical structure for the scene, which involved zooming in and out of hearing individual voices, a cacophony of voices and the whole forest, as well as redefining the moment of the lightning strike and the sensation and recovery from it. A more detailed account of this work can be found in appendix AP 2.1 on the work generated in cycle 1 of Lipote: An interconnected journey.
The design for the Rainforest also underwent several stages. We had collectively decided through audience and participant feedback from the third cycle that the design developed for the showcase was not reflecting the Rainforest’s network (see appendix AP 2.3for further details). Many of the performers during our post-show discussion felt that the use of balloons was unsuccessful, and myself, Oliver and Jingya all decided that the costumes themselves were making good use of Wanshu’s material but not clearly representing a network to the audience. Wanshu was not able to participate in the final cycle so we developed a new design concept without her guidance. In the second cycle we had carried out several performative workshops with Wanshu, where we focused on the use of hanging ribbons to represent the underground network. For the final cycle we decided to go back to these ideas and create costumes which would reflect the various aspects of a communicative network (see appendix AP 2.2 for details of second cycle workshops). The costumes themselves (Fig. 16) show many voices overlapping and the main prop for the scene (one UV reflective ribbon) represents one thread in the network, passing messages between the various voices in the Rainforest.
During COVID restrictins I created some videos in the first cycle to explore ways of representing the underground world of the Rainforest and the plantation. As you can see from these videos (see Fig. 17 and appendix AP 2.1.e) one key element that emerged was the use of the body as a bright object in a dark space to mimic the imaging process of roots and plants in soil. I used a white morph suit and recorded myself in a black box environment so that I would then be able to explore manipulating the image with video software more easily. These initial explorations into movement provided a score which myself, Wanshu (designer), Jingya (choreographer) and the performers would be able to refer back to during the rehearsal and development process. After re-recording scene 1 and generating these videos I also created a series of animations to help explore further ways of expressing the context and drama of the subject of this scene. We used this film as a projection alongside the performance in scene 1 (this film can be seen in appendix AP 2.1.g).
