Forest Stages

Forest Stages, Møn (DK) January-August 2024

Forest Stages is a performance, a dialogue and dance with a piece of land. A site-responsive piece, it was created in a deep-listening process with a small forest in the island of Møn in 2024. For months, we set out to listen with our bodies, spirit and imagination, to create the conditions for an emergence, rather than to impose anything upon that living environment. Through this process, in conversation with the soil and the wind, the cold and the heat, the leaves and the birds, we developed a practice which allowed our bodies to channel what was already present there.

The forest invited our imagination to wander unbound, bringing into life scenes from former and future lives. Worlds appeared in the spaces between the trees, sometimes real, sometimes as fiction, sometimes close and audible, sometimes distant and half heard. What manifested was a reflection of our inner and outer universes, characters and stories that occupy the vast field of our collective subconscious. This little forest lends itself as a host for ghost figures, the ancient, the shadowed, the half-formed and unknown.

The piece proposed a gathering for reduced groups of participants. After a guided walk through the terrain and an increasingly poetic immersion in the fields and natural elements, they encountered the forest, an immersive soundscape and, eventually a group of anthropomorphic figures which emerged from amongst the trees to disappear after a while, just like a gust of wind.

Forest Stages - Revisited, Dansehallerne (DK), November 2024

A few months after several encounters over seasons between the I-IR, participants and the hosting forest, we were invited by Dansehallerne in Copenhagen to revisited this experience in their large industrial space. Forest Stages - Revisited will be a documentation of this meeting as well as an event in itself where emotional, physical, and cultural landscapes of the audience’s imagination are invoked.

By bringing Forest Stages into the curated environment of Dansehallerne we ask ourelves what emerges when there are no trees, no soft forest floor, no insect bites, when the birds singing and the bees buzzing is only playback, when the roots have been disconnected from the soil and become scenography? What of the forest remains inscribed in the performing bodies? What do we carry with them?

info for Dansehallerne performances here