Flower Face

FLOWER FACE is a new landscape theatre project by DAUR exploring transformation, identity and the shifting relationship between the human body and the natural world.

Through performance, music, installation, puppetry, film, projection and live intervention in the landscape, the project asks what happens when the boundaries between human and nature begin to dissolve.

What might we become if we stop asking nature to take our form, and allow ourselves to take its?

Our first research and development period took place in July 2026, bringing together performers, musicians, artists, designers, writers and makers for an intensive period of experimentation in the Cornish landscape.
At the centre of the week was a simple proposition:
Could we make a man from the woods?

We began constructing a four-metre human figure from timber, fallen branches, moss and materials gathered from the surrounding land.

We stitched sticks together. Wove branches through limbs. Covered a human skeleton with the things the trees had let fall.

As the days passed, we stopped trying to impose a predetermined form upon him and began allowing the materials themselves to dictate what he might become.

We tried to give him a name. He refused one.
Perhaps some things do not need our human names.

Around our made man, another world began to emerge.

Natural materials became puppets and strange creatures. Bodies became entangled with branches, leaves, earth and trees. Wooden instruments were played with the idea that their sounds might somehow return them to the trees they had once been.

There were songs.
There were owl love songs.
There were goblins devouring guitars.

Through movement, improvisation, music and play, we began exploring the body not as something separate from nature, but as something already deeply entangled within it.

The landscape wasn’t a backdrop to the work.
It was part of the company.

As daylight disappeared, the work changed.

We experimented with projection, lighting, film and live-feed cameras, allowing images from the landscape to be captured, transformed and projected back into it.

Bodies appeared and disappeared.

Figures emerged from trees.

Creatures surfaced from darkness and beams of light.

Our made man transformed.

And eventually, he came to life.

These experiments began revealing a visual language for FLOWER FACE in which transformation could happen before an audience’s eyes and the familiar landscape could become strange, animate and unpredictable.

Throughout the R&D, questions of making and unmaking kept returning.

What does it mean to take something from nature and make it human?

What happens when we attempt to possess, contain or control the wild?

Can something made from the landscape ever really belong to us?

Our four-metre figure became a way of exploring cycles of growth, animation, transformation, decay and return.

We watched a life cycle unfold.

Something was made.

This first stage of FLOWER FACE was made possible through funding from Arts Council England.

That support gave us something essential to the development of new work: time and permission to experiment.

Time to make. Time to play. Time to fail.

Time to follow an idea without knowing where it would lead.

Time to allow the landscape to change the work.

Our enormous thanks also go to Suzie Chaikin and family for so generously opening their home and land to us and making the whole team feel so welcome and cared for throughout the R&D.

And to every artist who entered into the process with curiosity, generosity and courage.