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 on 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, 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.
A performance, a dialogue and a dance with a forest that explores “roots”, from a literal and poetic perspective.
What do roots show us about the connection between our past and present and future? What emerges by rooting together?
Responding to a place
Forest Stages belongs to the exploration of the I-IR of the concept of ‘place’ by responding uniquely to specific environments, whether it’s a concrete theater building or a piece of land. They refer to this kind of work as “place-responsive”.
“The reason that we speak about place-responsive performances instead of site-specific work is that we approach the chosen location not only as a physical frame for the piece, but rather as a co-creator. We have spent a long time with this forest during the creative process. We believe in allowing a specific place to activate our imagination as creators and to mobilize our inner world through our bodies. And we work to create the conditions for the audience to experience that as well.”
The I–IR does not work with reproduction of fixed scores in their performances. For them, all the presences in a chosen place are part of shaping the final outcome every time – giving each presentation a sense of uniqueness.
“We strive to engage the audience’s sensitivity beyond the movement of the performers towards everything present in the moment, whether is generated by us, the audience, the non-human life or atmospheric conditions.Our pieces aim at creating the conditions for a heightened attention and engagement between all the participants (creators and receivers) through which we can create connections on multiple levels: sensory, intellectual and spiritual. In the end it’s all about listening.”
Glimpsing through the trees
The multiple layers of the piece include an immersive sound design through dozens of hidden small speakers that pour out a symphony of processed local sounds and fragments of stories and voices. Worlds appear in the spaces between the trees, sometimes real, sometimes as fiction, sometimes close and audible, sometimes distant and half heard.
“The text was composed in the forest. By watching and waiting, emptying the mind of preconceived images or dramatic intent, images would come and with them characters and stories: Often they would match the stories commonly associated with forests: stories of outsiders, of clandestine lovers, of study groups, mystics, madmen etc. The stories appeared first as conventional storytelling narratives but gradually became fragmented into direct speech, vocalisations which didn’t involve words, voices without words and songs. The aim is to create levels of intimacy that increasingly address and involve the audience”.
CREDITS
Concept and staging: Jonathan Bonnici, Ida-Elisabeth Larsen, Marie-Louise Stentebjerg
Performers: Jonathan Bonnici, Thorunn Gudmundsdottir, Kitt Johnson, Ida-Elisabeth Larsen, Marie-Louise Stentebjerg
Sound: SANTI RZR
Light: David Nicolás Abad
Costumes: Maria Folkmann Ipsen
Set and dramaturgical consultant: Balz Isler
Graphic design: Sam Moore
Photo and video documentation: Thomas Hyttel
Creative producer: Carlos Calvo
Supported by: Danish Arts Foundation, Skuespillerforbundet & William Demant Fonden.