Forest Stages, Møn (DK) January–August 2024

Forest Stages was a performance, a dialogue, and a 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, the artists set out to listen with their bodies, spirit, and imagination — creating the conditions for an emergence rather than imposing 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, they developed a practice that allowed their bodies to channel what was already present there.

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

The piece gathered 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 that emerged from amongst the trees — disappearing after a while, just like a gust of wind.

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

A few months after several encounters across seasons between I-IR, participants, and the hosting forest, Dansehallerne in Copenhagen invited the company to revisit this experience in their large industrial space. Forest Stages — Revisited was both a documentation of that meeting and an event in itself, one in which the emotional, physical, and cultural landscapes of the audience's imagination were invoked.

By bringing Forest Stages into the curated environment of Dansehallerne, the artists asked what emerged when there were no trees, no soft forest floor, no insect bites — when the birds singing and the bees buzzing existed only as playback, when the roots had been disconnected from the soil and become scenography. What of the forest remained inscribed in the performing bodies? What did they carry with them?