Courtesy of LC Theatre Department
The Lewis & Clark Dance Department has, up until now, been surprisingly distant from the LC Theatre Department. “When We Slept in Trees,” Fir Acres’ first foray into dance theater, attempts to bridge that gap. By casting both dancers and actors, director Rebecca Lingafelter and movement director Tiffany Mills teamed up to highlight both disciplines. This piece, concerning grief, companionship, our relationship to movement, social expectations and severe weather, was a great example of devised theatre: in most ways, it came together wonderfully.
For some actors, the marriage of dance and acting was a simple one. The talk-back hosted after the March 7 evening show featured several cast members echoing the sentiment that acting is always accompanied by movement, and dancing is always accompanied by a performance of self. Iman Agic ’26, as the role of Benito the cat, was an excellent example of this. Convincing an audience that you are an animal is a difficult task, however, Agic showed a sense of comfort, nonchalance and languidity onstage so unique to the cat she played that I was fully immersed. Jamie Kushnick ’26, in the role of Jack, also brought together movement and acting with grace, an [adjective] conclusion to his experience in both theater and dance. Kushnick’s sense of physical humor was able to shine in this role: the drawn-out squeaking of him tumbling off, over and around an inflatable couch still echoes in my mind.
Alongside the individual dancers in this show, a large part of the whimsy was provided by coordinated group movement. At one point, Jack overcomes his mistrust of his neighbors and goes to meet Victor, who was played delightfully by Gianvito Cassanelli ’26. Instead of joining him on a physical bench, Victor asks Jack to sit on a bench made of the ensemble. Throughout the scene, both characters are readjusted and hoisted into the air by these dancers. Victor never addresses this, but Jack, clearly uncomfortable, eyes the “bench” and the audience warily, continuing a pattern of breaking the fourth wall, which helped include the audience.
The more abstracted or expressive pieces of this show were often grounded by elements familiar to the audience of college students. For example, Maya, played by Naledi Tshehla ’26, spends much of the play collecting dead birds, which seem to constantly appear around her, before asking Victor to bury them with her. At the same time, her friendship with Jack is in tension after she tells him she will be moving to Baltimore, Maryland for an internship. As a senior worrying about not only my future, but how that future will include friends made in college, this plot point hit close to home.
Here I admit that, as a theatre student myself, I was present during the process of focusing the lights for this show and have a bit of a backstage knowledge of the production. I am therefore rather biased, but even without knowledge of technical theatre, the beauty and necessary role played by this show’s production design are evident.
The set, designed by instructor Miranda Hardy, presents an immediate divide to the audience: two abstracted, domestic vignettes, one green and one pink. The slow conjoinment of these separate worlds mirrors the coming together of the show’s characters. While this minimal set asks much of our imagination, so too does the show itself. The lighting design, also by Hardy, worked to merge the worlds of dance and theatre as much as any other aspect of the show. The element of weather — at first extreme heat, followed by thunderstorms — lays a foundational tension for the show, which is in large part created by Hardy’s bold, colorful lighting schemes. The sound design by Delaney Jones ’26 worked cleanly in tandem with the lighting. With endless birdsong, news-show weather reports and the occasional jarring phone-notification sounds, Jones creates a world alongside Hardy in which these people live, play, move and tell their story.
Fir Acres’ production of “When We Slept in Trees” brings together all of these elements to paint a picture of companionship, intentional movement, and, most potently, grief. The impact of the cast creating this piece alongside Lingafelter and Mills is what breathes life into the moments of thick emotion. One scene in particular exemplifies this, as it grasped the audience by the ears and pulled us onstage. Kushnick’s Jack and Chinn’s Juniper meet for the first time and, upon seeing their own grief in each other, transition from conversation fluidly into dance. A connection is forged both between the characters and with the audience that flows deeper and stronger than what would have been possible solely through words.
With this production, LC’s dance and theatre programs take a tentative step into the unknown, asking the audience to trust them in a way entirely new to this campus. If we are able to take their outstretched hand, we may be transported into a world where theater and dance work in tandem, and when the curtains close, we are brought back to our seats, seeing things a little differently than we would have otherwise.
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