2023 - Minnesota Fringe Festival - Five Fifths - Back to the Future - Pine Trees

Pine Trees explores the prompt of 'Breeding Pine Trees' as a creative exercise on expression through various performance styles and media. Combining spoken word, physical action, pure clown, and science, the audience is taken on an emotional roller coaster ranging from 'Is this for real?' to 'I'm not sure what to think.' In an attempt to remind the audience that live performance is nothing but an illusion, an excuse to get together, Benjamin takes the premise of the Minnesota Fringe's fundraiser and tries to turn it on its head. Fringe Festival performance is an art form that allows the artist to explore theater from an anti-capitalist point of view. Where the risks taken on stage are vulnerable to criticism and attempt to catch a comfortable audience off guard.
In this piece, we find a scientist welcoming peers to a conference on Pine Tree Breeding. The metaphor is exploring the welcoming of an audience to a situation where they expect entertainment and artistic freedom, but find themselves challenged as they shift in their seats. Moments of comedic timing and acting help give them a familiar situation to grasp onto.
As we continue, a video of lumberjacks begins to play, lulling the audience into another familiar situation: observing motion pictures. As they question the connection to the lecture they were listening to we cut to a beaver who cuts the serious tension.
Then, as the lights return, we find a real life carpenter standing in front of us preparing to cut a 2x4 in half. 2x4's are typically made from pine trees. Perhaps the pine trees outlined in the lecture from 1946. The audience cheers the manual labor as the carpenter completes the cut in a clownish but aptly typical way of the carpenter.
Another video begins to play before they have time to process the metaphor as we learn the history of the Little Pine Tree air fresheners. This is all a precursor to a gimmick to help the Fringe Fund raise through a buffon-ish style performance. The idea being capitalism is thrown into question again: As the quantity goes down, the price goes up!
Finally we arrive at a video depicting an old growth Minnesota White Pine. As this performance took place in Minneapolis, an attempt to make the audience consider life outside the metro is undertaken. Our performer returns and recites a poem titled 'I met a woman who could talk with trees.' Written by Benjamin Domask-Ruh in 2015. In this poem we learn the uniqueness of trees and the ability to speak with them by understanding them. The metaphor is strengthened as the performance ends with a basket of pine cones being handed out to the audience.