BACK TO NATURE

DANCE

17 June

Recently landed: Back to Nature

Gracia’s written response to Lucy Guerin’s The Forest, presented at RISING festival, especially for Fjord Review.

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In the forest, it is never silent. Everything is in transmission with something else, be it tree roots to soil, plants to animals and insects, or warning cries that ripple through the forest when predators approach. In the forest Lucy Guerin has summoned, upon first glance, there are blood-sucking vampires and hallucinatory masked ravers, but this surface impression is but a red herring to catch the novice hiker. The forest of Guerin’s The Forest, presented at the Union Theatre, as part of the 2026 RISING festival, is under the surface. Deep, deep under. It is akin to burrowing under the earth and seeing the structure of mycelial highways illuminated as messages are relayed at impossible speed. It is like seeing tree rings grow from within the tree herself. Or seeing not just the animal tracks left on the forest floor, but the memory of the animal who created them, step by step. Seeing every quiver of an individual leaf as it falls. And in the layering upon layering, a world is drawn that is rich, varied, loud, entangled, and interdependent. Guerin’s The Forest is the influence of microclimates, of energy passing from source to source. Or, at least, that’s how the cluster of ravers read to me. Not people ‘in the landscape’ but the embodiment of how rhizomorphs transport oxygen through moist soil.

With video design by Eugyeene Teh and Simon Burgin to grow a tall forest in the theatre, and composition and sound design by Matthias Schack-Arnott, Guerin has created a sense of slowing and expanding time. Spanning 70-minutes, time proves elastic, and decidedly not linear. Projected on a large swathe of fabric, hung on a diagonal, and reflected in a facing wall of mirrors, also on the diagonal, the forest makes the theatre seats diminutive in both scale and purpose. Seated in the audience, before the solemnity of the forest, I am a shiny-bodied earth beetle, looking on in awe, with dancers Amber McCartney, Geoffrey Watson, Michelle Heaven, Oliver Savariego, Sebastian Geilings, Tayla Gartner, and Tra Mi Dinh as my interchangeable guides.