Red Willow

What rites of spring can prepare us for the coming onslaught? How do we prepare ourselves and our communities to stand and resist? Red Willow is a ritual preparation for resistance, shared over a 2½ mile journey with audiences through the woods at dusk. Through live performance and participatory rituals, we work to galvanize ourselves into responsibility and action confronting surging fascism, climate catastrophe, and escalating brutality against people and land. Featuring an all-white male ensemble, Red Willow explores the role embodied masculinity and inherited power play within movements of resistance. Together we reckon with land, legacy, masculinity, and power, asking: How do we prepare for resistance from where we stand? In dialogue with a wide-ranging collection of Resistance movements, mythologies, and the Land itself, Red Willow invites us to bring ourselves to the question of what world we believe in and how we engage in a fight for it without losing ourselves. Red Willow continues Control Group’s exploration of Land and Seasons within our treeline works series, following After The Flood (June 2021); Canopy (October 2022); and Bitter Moon (December 2023). Red Willow meets the Land not as deified Nature but as a partner in the struggle, and a victim of violence. The work calls in the voices of Bruno LaTour, Martin Shaw, Nick Estes, and Timothy Snyder, the myth of Parzival and the Fisher King, and the infamous riot-inducing 1913 world premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps by the Ballet Russes, as we consider what it means and what it requires to stand up and confront evil without acquiescing to its tactics.