To Root, To Rise, brought to you by Coke + Mentos Dance Co, is an experimental dance duet about the experience of diaspora — about what it means to leave a country and discover that you have brought it with you, imperfectly preserved, inside your muscles and your memory. About the unlived self, the frozen homeland, and the slow construction of a person who is no longer from one place and not yet entirely from another.
Two dancers bring two philosophies of belonging onto the same stage: the tree, whose freedom is earned downward through decades of commitment to one patch of earth; and the bird, whose freedom is the labor of constant negotiation with departure. They are not opposites. They are the same question, asked at different speeds.
This is a performance about diaspora in the body: the foods, the light, the language that travel with you imprecisely across water and time. The frozen version of a home that kept changing without you. The self you might have been if you had taken the other door. The strange grammar of belonging to a place you are no longer fully from.
To Root, To Rise does not resolve the question of where home is. It inhabits the question — with enough roots that the not-knowing no longer frightens, and enough wings that the ground no longer traps.