Joan Jonas’s The Juniper Tree, recently restaged at Danspace Project fifty years after its first presentation there in 1976, is a work of stark contrasts and mystical transformations. Jonas’s performance is based on a Brothers Grimm story of the same name, and its newest rendition seizes on the tale’s combination of allegorical clarity and mysterious resurrection to create a gestural and highly symbolic work. The whole piece has a folkish feel, yet The Juniper Tree’s blend of media creates a sensory density that enlivens its relatively simple presentation. The dramatic plot appears dark and tragic until a son’s metamorphosis into a bird sparks reversals and restorations. A woman dies after her long-awaited son’s birth and she is buried under a juniper tree. A bitter stepmother later kills the son. Concealing her actions, the stepmother contrives ways to shift guilt and moral burden onto the family. Later, the slain boy becomes a bird and begins singing about his murder. Onlookers ask him to perform again and, in exchange for more singing, he haggles for special items. He gifts two to his sister and father, and kills his stepmother with the last. The boy is revived and the family reunites.

At Danspace, two performers—Jonas and Lucy Mullican—enacted various personae and cycled through characters who are often moral opposites. In the span of just a few minutes, Jonas played the father unwittingly eating his son, the personification of death, and the bones of the deceased son. The rangy score contained musical sources from funk to the recording of an Italian libretto sung by Simone Forti.

The Juniper Tree’s minimal cast and schematic approach to visual narrative let the performative force of the work lie with its transpositions and transmutations. Mullican and Jonas don masks as they shift from mother to daughter, father to son. Sometimes light transparent fabrics are used like veils over the performers’ heads or faces. These forms of masking/unmasking become illustrative transitions between scenes, carrying the plot forward. Quick changes from one character to the next and elegant reversals of costume—fabric turned inside-out to reveal blood red under angelic white shifting innocent mother into evil stepmother; a robe Mullican dons changing her into the bird —accentuate moral drama and undergird the dynamism of the piece. These visual doublings join the verbal repetitions in the lilting soundtrack to give an incantatory quality. Jonas occasionally carries whimsical gestures onto canvases as well, outlining an animalistic figure stroke by stroke in white paint on a red background. The stage is often bathed in washes of crimson light.

In this version of the work, movement and physical gesture are used somewhat sparingly, while music comes to the fore as the pulse of the performance. Keeping time and sculpting the affect of tableaux vivant–like interludes that predominate in it, Jonas plays live bells and handheld percussion instruments throughout, accompanying the recorded score. Unlike prior versions of The Juniper Tree—which is historically the only performance by the artist to eschew the use of moving images11Ana Janevski, Good Night, Good Morning (Museum of Modern Art, 2024), 17.—this Danspace presentation was dense with archival documentation from Jonas’s previous iterations, projected onto the back wall of the venue all throughout the piece. These photographs capture many sharp poses, swinging gestures, and what seems to be a deeply ambulatory choreography. The movement language of the present work, including that of the performer who plays the most physical parts, seems different in character from the prior instances of the piece.

In the fairy tale, justice prevails through the force of performative repetition. And just as the young boy’s singing becomes a method of acquisition and restoration, the piece’s restaging at Danspace hints at a kind of exchange with its historical form. Its archival assertiveness highlights the performance’s legacy, though perhaps less as an iteration than as a self-quotation. A song is sung again, but on the condition that the viewers must view it through a kind of canonical halo. Over the years, Jonas has become a patron saint of intermedia practice, moving seamlessly between video, performance, drawing, and installation. She is especially known for her tendency to iterate works over time. This new presentation raises an important question: How do we experience a storied performance in the critical contemporary present? What does this work mean now, live? It’s rare that we are able to ask such questions in performance, since restagings of pieces this far apart in time may not include original cast members. Giving us a presentation of The Juniper Tree at this point in the artist’s career is an unusual gift to the audience. Yet the presentation’s heavy layering of archives from previous performances perhaps betrays a certain anxiety about its contemporary transmission. In addition to seeming differences from prior choreographies, the sets and costumes in the earlier versions—a robe in one case, or numerous paintings in other—appear ornate or more expansive by comparison. Although the new work is charming, the constant projection of such a large amount of documentation sets it somewhat at a distance, forcing the new presentation to reconcile performative presentism with a more museological nostalgia.

Regardless, this restaging is a meaningful development in the performance’s legacy and impact. At the start of the March 27th program, Jonas introduced it as a reflection on narrative. This is indeed central to its significance. Yet in light of its progressions and shifts over time, this new version extends into broader questions of liveness, repetition, and restaging, all ongoing themes in Jonas’s celebrated work.