Forest Stages – Revisited is an installation and durational performance by Institute of Interconnected Realities (I—IR) that reflects upon a meeting with a forest that took place on the Island of Møn in Southern Denmark between January and August 2024. Forest Stages – Revisited is 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.
Over the duration of the original artistic process, all materials including text, sound, choreography, and the performer’s practice were composed on-site. By bringing Forest Stages into the curated environment of Dansehallerne the I—IR asks themselves 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 they carry with them?
The audience is invited to lie back and compose the context of the uncanny denizens of the invisible forest; to encounter the beauty, the horror, to practice directionlessness, to get thoroughly lost.
What happens to us in the depths of the wood? Civilization and its discontents give way to the irrational and half-seen. Back in the village, with our soured relationships, we are neurotic, but the wood releases our full-blown madness. Birds and animals talk to us, departed souls speak. The tiny rush light of the cottages is only a fading memory. Lost in the extinguishing darkness, we cannot see our hand before our face. We lose all sense of our body’s boundaries. We melt into the trees, into the bark and the sap. From this green blood, we draw new life and are healed. – Hillary Mantell
Forest Stages – Revisited is interested in the role the theater plays as an archive of human experience and how it can form a resistance to the depletion of imagination.
