From a tree to a landscape
Walk Notations I, © Inês Dantas (courtesy of the artist).
It was magnificent. High, it touched the sky and embraced the land. The trunk was wide, with dark veins and the first branches grew close to the ground, but quickly took over the sky and drew dizzying lines overhead. The empty space, the pure air, seemed to always move through its naked branches, even without wind. One day, Gordon decided to inhabit it, even for a moment, and created, not a house, which would certainly be too perennial - and he wouldn’t want to contradict the proper future of the tree, of growing endlessly, continually adding to the time small spaces shaped by its branches, increasing energy that flows from the earth to the sky, as in his drawings of trees - but a structure made with ropes, ladders and nets, which several dancers could easily embrace, the trunk, the branches, through the voids, only a feet away from the arms to the hands, to move the air and create swings to the wind or spaces, small pouches just to lay down. (Even when he used to draw a house in a tree, it was made of oscillating movements, lifting platforms, an intercalary movement through the unique rhythm created by the trunk, the branches, the foliage.) The movements would be slow, paused, in constant play with light and space and with the space between the light, passing through the branches and between branches and the air, the moving air, and between different bodies, between each of the dancers.