April 19, slam poetry duo Climbing PoeTree gave a stellar performance in the Northwoods room of Union South. Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman, who make up the group, integrated spoken word, hip-hop played on traditional instruments and multimedia presentations throughout their show. The pieces centered around environmental, racial, class-based and gender-based oppressions.
Everything about the show was very deliberate, from the setting to the sequence of pieces they performed. The room was covered in a stitched rainbow chain of cloth squares, each of which featured a dedication from someone who had seen them perform.
The poems were performed in a very particular order as well. The first poem, “Being Human,” was dedicated to “all of the human beings in the room,” an announcement that garnered chuckles and applause. “Being Human” focused on humanizing the earth and our environment with lines such as “I wonder if the sun debates dawn some mornings, not wanting to rise out of bed from a down-feather horizon.”
The show then progressed into more dramatic pieces highlighting various injustices in the world today. Climbing PoeTree interspersed their performance with a variety of video presentations featuring images of environments, protests, and people from around the world, with clips from speeches by people such as alternative health guru Deepak Chopra and author/activist Arundhati Roy.
After delving more deeply into some of the problems facing us, Climbing PoeTree went on to perform pieces focused on a hopeful vision of the future. This gave the audience the feeling of coming full circle on a journey exploring both questions and answers about the state of the world.
The duo were terrific performers—one audience member commented to me after the show that they had some of the best chemistry of any performance group she had ever seen. Overall the show, which was sponsored by the Campus Women’s Center and the Multicultural Student Association, was quite a success.
