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
Figure 18 (above) Stills from animated video created for scene 2 based on visual representations created in workshops in cycle 1
3.4.h The Palm Tree Plantation
The initial plan for the story was for the palm trees to revolt and cooperate with the trees on the edge of the Rainforest, allowing for a spread of the Rainforest across the Palm Tree Plantation. When we expressed this narrative to Prof. Newton he asked that we might reconsider. To him it was important that we do not give the palm trees any credence, or allow them to be any kind of hero in the story. He told us that to him the most obvious issue is that it was wrong to plant these palm trees in Borneo at all as it is only the Dipterocarp trees which can successfully integrate with the fungal network. He explicitly stated that ‘the only way to get the forest back would be to destroy the plantation’ (Newton, 2021: personal communication) After considering this with Oliver we decided that we could indeed change the trajectory of the story. I also added references to the foreign nature of the trees in the libretto. In scene 4 the narrator asks us (p. 10, lines 231-232): ‘Are they happy to be here? In a foreign soil, flown so fast and so far from their home.’
We also learned from Dr Eichhorn that in tree plantations the ground is overplanted and two thirds of the trees are expected to be removed before reaching maturity, and it is likely only 10% of trees planted in plantations will reach adult height. A common practice in forestry and the creation of plantations is to deliberately overplant to produce trees which grow tall and straight. In addition, the palm trees themselves are removed and replanted once they are 25-30 years old, even though they can live for over 100 years (Quezada et al., 2019). We therefore explored characterisations of the palm trees which would be more youthful and naïve than that of the Rainforest. In a workshop on scene 2 we created the word list below to describe the palm trees in the plantation:
Mirror, Isolation, Vanity, Slave, Repetition, Fragile, Brittle, Regular, Decontextualised, Domesticated, Prisoner, Immigrant, OCD, Traumatised, Stockholm Syndrome, Constructed Reality, Hypnotic, Factory.
Many of these qualities made themselves into the scene’s libretto and music. The information about the overplanting can be seen reflected in their song lyrics from scene 2 (p. 5, lines 104-110):
Each one of us is born to be
Bred, watered, fed, for quality
We live out the same histories
Cloned life bred through equality
If one becomes a casualty
They won’t affect our unity
Lost life not our priority
Lyrically, scene 2 involves many rhymes and a very structured verse and chorus, with 8-syllable lines. The music is reminiscent of a dance music track with a typical four-on-the-floor rhythm. The vocal quality makes use of close mic singing and pop-influenced vocal techniques. The palm trees all sing the same text (even if sometimes in close harmony) and the music moves in and out of each of their pods of existence as we have sung and non-sung moments, reflecting travelling through the soil between, and through the tree roots. The land between the roots is not filled with echoes of the sound of their voices, as it is in the Rainforest music. The original libretto had the Latin name of the plant – elaeis guineensis – to reference the Western influence on this species. This element was lost during various workshops; however, the pervasive use of the plant’s oil is now reflected in the genre and construction of the music which involves an organised 4/4 at 120bpm, something commonly used in popular music globally. Our workshops also led us to decide to end scene 2 by restarting the song, to signify the rotational cropping of the palm trees. All of these choices were made in conversations between librettist and composer, to reflect the qualities of the lives of the plantation palm trees.
The palm trees have some main lyrical content which they repeat often. First they sing the phrases (p 5, lines 96-102):
All propagation representatives
Chorus:
Grow fast, make oil.
Have fun, sing soil.
Don’t rot, don’t spoil.
In tune, our toil.
Be fed, be picked.
Nitrogen addict.
This was inspired by my recent work on Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing, which focused on the experience of workers in an Amazon fulfilment centre (see appendix AP 3.3).Through this I discovered that the internal slogan of Amazon is Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History. The workers in the fulfilment centres are monitored and controlled intensely by machines, which is comparable to how the palm trees are monitored and decided upon by the farmers (Delfanti, 2021: 30). A palm oil plantation is another type of factory and has also been organised in a deeply homogeneous way. This influenced me to begin the text of the palm trees with these two-word slogan-like phrases. You can see that I have directly referenced this slogan with the phrase 'Have fun'. These phrases also refer to the cyclical process of the palm trees' work to grow and produce fruit. Finally they name themselves as “Nitrogen Addict”, referencing the use of fertiliser to maintain and replenish the soil, and the fact that they would not be able to exist in this type of “forest” and be grown if it were not for the use of extra fertiliser (Quezada, 2019). The soils in palm oil plantations have found to be lower in nitrogen and phosphate pools, making the trees in plantations far more dependent on implementation of fertilisers (Sahner et al., 2015). The Palm Trees reference this directly in scene 2 when they say (p.5, lines 122-125): ‘Trusted victual providers / Who feed us with dogmatic drip / Trickling through the earth we grip / Without whom we could not exist’.
We decided to perform scene 2 to a fully recorded soundtrack, with the singers only dancing on stage to pre-recorded voices. This depersonalised the palm trees and removed their agency. It puts them into a more factory-like setting where we might not be sure if the voices heard are theirs, or what they are told to sing and feel, over some kind of tannoy. It makes a very clear distinction between the world of the Rainforest experienced in Scene 1, and the plantation. During the third cycle Jingya choreographed a sequence for us to perform to the recorded track which would help to show the palm trees as uniform workers, uncommunicative, childlike and addicted to artificially fertilised soils. We also made use of the video I had created in cycle 1 as a projection during this scene. For the palm trees I decided not to work with my body as I had discovered that I was using my body to represent the messages/materials being carried through the root and fungal network during the storm. The palm trees, however, lack this ability in comparison, and therefore I focused on animated computer-generated images for this initial stage. See timecode 00:11:13 for a performance of scene 2 (see figure 18 for example stills and Appendix AP 2.1.d for animated film).
In scene 4 the Lipote tree unsuccessfully attempts to connect with the palm tree. The staging uses frames with material covering it, to show the edges of the soil that each palm tree can inhabit (see Fig. 19). They are attached by a kind of umbilical cord to the frame, which is passing the nutrients from the fertilisers above ground. The staging for this whole scene is designed to show an inability to communicate despite being adjacent in space. In the first case Lipote only confuses the palm tree 1, sending it into a short-circuited tailspin where it begins to rearrange all of the words in the two-word phrases so that they become destructive rather than productive (p. 12, line 269-270): ‘Rot fast. / Make toil. / Don’t tune. / Our spoil. / Rot fast. /Don’t oil.’ . (Please see timecode 00:34:45). In the conversation with palm tree 2 this palm tree repeats lines from its song whilst closing its roots in on Lipote as it sees it just as a source of food or potential competition. Ultimately Lipote realises that these trees are not able to communicate in the way the Rainforest needs and moves on.