Itinerant performers, storytellers, sage interpreters of nature lore, puppeteers, community gatherers, forest planters, artists. These descriptors still do not fully capture The Unreliable Bestiary. The project is led by Bernheim’s 2026 Environmental Artists in Residence, Deke Weaver and Jennifer Allen, who recently completed their first research stint at Bernheim this spring.
The work is inspired by the idea of the unreliable narrator, the medieval bestiary, and the sobering prediction that half of Earth’s species may face extinction by 2050. The Unreliable Bestiary is a long-term creative project that aims to create a performance for every letter of the alphabet, with each letter representing an endangered animal or habitat.
Deke explains,
We’ve been steadily (or sometimes sporadically, depending on how you look at it) developing this series for 17 years. The work ranges from circus spectacle to intimate candle-lit storytelling. Each performance blends monologues, dance, walking tours, music, and video, all set within environments that reflect our relationship to a specific animal or habitat.
With a core group of performers, directors, designers, technicians, producers, academic partners, and rotating collaborators, The Unreliable Bestiary has become a gathering point for communities through performances, workshops, and lectures.
To date, the project has produced six works: MONKEY, ELEPHANT, WOLF, BEAR, TIGER, and CETACEAN (Whale). Their current residency supports the development of FOREST, the seventh performance and the first in the series focused on a habitat rather than a single species.
This spring, The Bestiary hosted two FOREST-related events. One included planting a 2,800-tree pocket forest at the University of Illinois Arboretum in Champaign-Urbana, where the artists live and where Deke teaches. The forest was planted using the Miyawaki method developed by Akira Miyawaki. The event began at 5:30 a.m., when community members gathered to create masks from natural materials before parading to the planting site with music. For the artists, these ceremonies and participatory experiences are as important as the final performance itself.
During their three-week residency at Bernheim, they collected stories, data, and local ecological lore. They also encountered blue ghost fireflies and other forest wonders. They hope these experiences will shape future versions of FOREST at Bernheim and beyond.
Our time at Bernheim has been amazing. We are still in research mode for FOREST, so we spent a lot of time walking the trails, writing, reading, and visiting sites that drew us in. We kept returning at night, such a special place. One night we saw three beavers, heard an intricate symphony of frogs, and watched the soft glow of blue ghost fireflies. It felt like magic. We are deeply grateful for our time here.
We look forward to seeing what grows from their residency and hope to welcome them back for a future performance of FOREST.
About the Artists-in-Residence
The Unreliable Bestiary’s work has been presented and broadcast widely, with venues and platforms including PBS, the Sundance Film Festival, New York Video Festival, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Berlin Video Festival, The Moth, and 21c Museum Hotels. They are Guggenheim Fellows, Creative Capital grantees, and have held residencies at esteemed institutions such as Yaddo, Isle Royale National Park, the Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center, Ucross and MacDowell.
