Forest Frequencies - more faerie lights in the forest
2nd Installation of the North Forest Lights
Previously: What is the North Forest Lights?
—A 5 piece outdoor winter extravaganza of LED lights, music & nature at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, created by Moment Factory.1 It is my favorite art exhibit EVER.
…In time with the chiming tones of a crystalline harp, random lights or small clusters pulse and fade. A will-o-wisp calls me to come play. A trio or sextet says hello and then goodbye, only to pop up on the other side of the path. A whole flock of blue sweeps across the dell like a miniature Wild Hunt on electric wings.
They whisper to me that I am one of them, and I believe…
From the first installation:
December 22, 2021
While exploring the far edge of the Crystal Grove, you can make out vertical stabs of light flickering and zipping yonder through the fog-kissed trees: Forest Frequencies hammering its own magic into the night. Whenever the Grove’s faerie bell tones exhale and pause, the echoes of driving, bass-heavy music pound upon the breeze.
It’s a brief walk through darkness to get there, with a completely different sort of siren call as the sound grows louder. This music is deeper. Weightier. Brighter. Sharper.
In a clearing beneath a treetop galleria, they’ve erected a psychedelic eye-feast set to a trance-dancer’s dream. In contrast to the Grove’s Airy-Faerie prancing and its mystery-enshrouded suspension of time, the vertical light bars of the Frequencies are all Metal: stark and upright with a bold soundtrack, underlaid by its Earth foundations. The music goes through five distinct movements, each one with its own synchronized dance of color.
As we arrive, the orchestra is warming up. The cello hums, the woodblock pings, the thunder rolls, and the gui-tar sings. Here and there, light zings up and down like a conductor’s wand tapping on the podium, testing out hues, making sure everybody is accounted for.
Greens with white.
Purples and gold.
Maple reds a-flame.
’80s neon flicker.
“Here!” they say as their names are called, raising their hands and clearing their luminescent throats.
At last, when they feel that we’re ready to handle what they’re prepared to deliver, one random leafless tree is hit with a strobe. The woodblocks plink us into the earthy beat, and then we’re off!
I have danced to this rhythm innumerable times, out there in the woods with the stars and moon overhead as the firelight shoots sparks into the night. The beat is both modern and ancient. So are the instruments, and they demand that my feet drum the earth the way they were born to, all the way back to when somebody brilliant first strung a skin over a hollowed-out piece of wood and struck it.
My feet must stomp.
My hips must rock.
My spine must sway in this ageless ritual call.
But the audience is thick here and I haven’t put on my Freak Face tonight, so this all takes place beneath my long, bulky coat. (Riotously inside my bones.) I haven’t come here to steal thunder from these artistic lightning bolts jammed into the earth, or to even weave a quintet made from my body and their jiving foursome—the music, the light, the forest, the night.
I could. I ache to. But this crowd is not right and this moment is for them—for all who have come here to watch this show, and for Them, the ones who present it for this final season before the exhibit closes, never to return. The beat they’ve chosen is made to transform Me into We, so I let it.
Alas, We are not dancers.
We are viewers. We are listeners, so I tune in and delight in spite of my wistful longings to let it literally move me the way it moves my heart and mind.
Those flirty strings sing out over the hip-luring drops of the percussion. As the light bars paint the night with pink-red-gold, the music paints images upon my imagination: I lean back and draw infinities with my hair through the air, or with my nose upon the sky, or with my shoulders and my heart and my outstretched hands. I know what I’ll be doing later when I take this music home with me after capturing it on video.
To my dismay, I have not yet discovered any options to buy the soundtrack. I've been hoping we'll be able to once the exhibit closes.
So for now I slink over to the far side where the fewest light bars ripple. A speaker booms there, tacked onto a tree over my head. I let the sounds rain down upon me and my camera, gleefully anticipating the ecstatic homage to Dionysos I will be enacting in the privacy of my home with my own faerie lights around me. In spite of the siren call to dance NOW, the mere imagining is enough.
It's actually more than enough, especially when a trio of teenage girls start subtly grooving together. They break out into dismissive laughter and overblown antics to release the tension of what they instinctually know—that we all could be dancing together in this open space. It’s what this kind of music was built for. It’s what the instruments of our bodies were built for, and I’m thrilled to see these beautiful young girls offer that lesson to us all.
After they skip out the exit, a toddling boy whipping a glow-stick to the beat takes over as our instructor. Everyone smiles. We laugh. His mother pulls him back from getting too close to the nearest light bar, but she doesn’t halt his genius.
I sigh, enraptured by the hints of human community. The village in action. We’re all so scattered. More so, now with this pandemic, but it’s still there in our marrow and our blood.
It makes me ache for an age when there would be no fear, no self-conscious uncertainty, no eye-rolls or nose-wrinkled looks at those who move to the music. Or the awkward head-shaking that professes, "Oh, no. I could never do that. I'll leave that to you," while a heart secretly aches to join in and transform it from performance into connection. But there was that mean so-and-so who laughed when we were seven and that is potent and so—
So I dream of the transformation of my culture.
That we would think it more odd to not be letting the music move us. To not smile around that circle, creating spontaneous conversations with each other and with everything surrounding us, permeating us.
This music is like The Force. It would bind us, as harmoniously as the trees are interconnected with one another and their environment, if we would let it.
For now, any smiles passed between strangers remain fleeting. The shared excitement and wonder keeps hold of that thread—the marrow-deep certainty that it’s a lie assuring us we are separate, especially if we don't know each other's names.
This crowd watches the show as though it is something outside of themelves. Something to admire and perhaps applaud and then move on, but I think more of them truly do Know, deep in there like I Know. Like the girls and the little boy Know.
We all Know.
Why don’t we Dance together anymore?
“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: "When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?”
~ Gabrielle Roth
Here in the forest, the bows upon strings begin to wind down, scraping zhukka-zhukka-zhukka-zhukka-zhukka-zhukka into the final fade of this opening movement. The light bars cool into white backed by green, then fade toward black. People start to shift in preparation of an exit, but the Forest Frequencies aren’t remotely done with us.
That was just the warmup.
The low electric guitar introduces itself. Shades of frontman metal zing out in time with streaks of neon glam in a rainbow of hues.
A new beat demands even heavier feet on the pavement. It is driving and fierce—the rhythm I heard on the air from the Grove. The strings keep it plumped while the guitar sails on. The drumsticks crack out the command: “Listen up! Here it comes...”
A flurry of tinkling metallic percussion and strings of liquid silver give a whirl before sliding us back into the thumping bass beat. The fog machine kicks in. That lone tree gets a solo in the lights.
At last, whirring helicopter blades slow and slow...and…slow…us…...down into the pinging and ponging and binging and bonging pony-hop. The light bars cool back into white and pastels.
Over this, a chest-rumbling, belly-deep melody grinds out from Vulcan’s bow on fat, heavy strings. A banjo tosses in its two-cents worth as the light bars heat up the intensity. The percussion thumps and kicks out in a good ole “Badum…chick! Boom-boom…chick!” I sooooo yearn to fling and land, letting it puppet me like only ingenious musical maestros can. “Da-dummida-dum!” they thunder, and how can it not mold every heartbeat into its time signature?
As we slow once more into a plodding seesaw, the lights drip gold and purple rain from the ground up. This song reminds me of a drunken ship rocking happily on the sea beneath a starlit sky until we finally come to rest.
I exhale.
The clearing goes dark.
Bodies begin to move on and conversations swell back up. I don’t move a muscle. I just stand there, drinking it all in until the orchestra warms up for the next show. I experience it from the other side.
And from the middle.
And in front of the primary forest face where the majority of light bars dance.
Sometimes I like to stand in the center of it all and take a slow spin, watching the ripples and flurries pulse up the columns or swoop through the forest. I love to gaze up into the treetops overhead and watch the softer glow and the shadows play among the branches. Other times, I like to stand at the edge and focus on each distinctive light bar dancing in time with certain parts of the music.
Each one is a single instrument in a sprawling orchestra.
Each one is a single body in a 50-person choreography.
Out of these five North Forest installations, Forest Frequencies truly dances. Every one of them does, but this one allows us to see clearly the wonder of individual lights holding strong to their unique solo part to create a wondrous, intricate Whole.
Up Next: The Whispering Tree - Installment 3
© 2021 Hartebeast
Related Posts from my NSFW publication:
Or if you want to start at the beginning of this series:
What is Crystal Bridges? My home away from home.
Moment Factory - creators of the North Forest Lights