Of energy passing from source to source
Inaugural Australian Dance Biennial during RISING festival
The Forest
Lucy Guerin Inc.
Friday 5th June, 2026
Union Theatre, UMAC
The University of Melbourne
Choreography: Lucy Guerin with the dancers
Dancers: Amber McCartney, Geoffrey Watson, Michelle Heaven, Oliver Savariego, Sebastian Geilings, Tayla Gartner, and Tra Mi Dinh
Lighting Design: Paul Lim
Set & Costume Design: Eugyeene Teh
Composition and Sound Design: Matthias Schack-Arnott
Video Design: Eugyeene Teh & Simon Burgin
Dramaturg: Adena Jacobs
Production Manager: Nate Evers, Tom Brayshaw
Producer: Estelle Conley, Freya Dark McGrath
Executive Producer: Ally Harvey, Kylie McRae
In the forest, according to some literature and classic fairy tales, there are ghouls, gangs of Wild Wood weasels, witches by cauldrons, and all manner of creatures out to harm those that stray off the path. In the forest, depending upon your experience, and your imagination, there is a wonderland inhabited by a different kind of wildness. Of creatures, sans bumps on noses, foretelling of Shakespearian doom and gloom, eking out an existence in their wild and woody home. Of wildlife searching for hollows in ancient trees, new shoots to nibble, and dried leaves on the forest floor to roll up in their tails and carry back to their roost or den or dray to make warm bedding for their young.
Back to Nature, my response to Lucy Guerin’s The Forest presented at the Inaugural Australian Dance Biennial during RISING festival, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
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, UMAC, 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.
From the dark-lit onset, with all seven dancers clustered in the corner of the stage in what looked like flesh-coloured bodysuits, I saw, perhaps, the origins of how a scribbly gum tree (Eucalyptus haemastoma) gets a trunk of wriggly lines. In their collective movements, zigzagging up and down, back and forth, lines are drawn that echo the distinctive markings on the bark created by the larvae of the Scribbly gum moth. In Guerin’s “journey to the sentient heart of the forest”, this premiere work is a call to arms, for the forest as we know it is no longer “boundless”. Rather, the forest is now “increasingly under threat” as “contested ecosystems with an uncertain future” become the true “eco-horror”[i] of our age. In Australia, “since colonisation, we have lost more than one hundred known species of plants and animals and are at imminent risk of losing thousands more. The biodiversity crisis is as serious for life on Earth as the climate crisis”[ii].
Drawing on her own experience “as a child growing up in the mallee woodlands of Eyre Peninsula” the choreography is “informed by the dividing and branching design of trees”, with their “natural beauty and forms.”[iii] A timely reminder that what native forests remain, they need to be protected and restored, lest it just become a memory. As Watson, from behind the fabric screen on which grows a forest, lifts Heaven from the earth, it appears as if the forest is enfolding her slumbering form in an embrace. The effect of which is deeply moving, if fleeting. She rests, cradled in the forest, as the fabric pools around her. Heaven has become a part of the forest rather than operating independent from nature in a moment of profound remembering.
Elsewhere, evocative of a plant calling to the mycelium for phosphorus in exchange for sugar generated through photosynthesis, McCartney zings. A mesmerising and intense solo, held in a pink light, in a world teeming with life and the importance of it, it is impossible to look away.
In the understory, glistening with slug trails, my time in The Forest draws to a close.
[i] The Forest, Lucy Guerin Accessibility Resource Pack, https://lucyguerininc.com/content/works/0-the-forest/the-forest_rising-2026-access-pack.pdf, accessed 5th June, 2026.
[ii] Bob Brown, ‘Australia’s Native Forests’, https://bobbrown.org.au/campaigns/native-forests/, accessed 6th June, 2026.
[iii] Lucy Guerin quote, Lucy Guerin Inc Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/DYmKtw7GS_0, accessed 6th June, 2026.
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Image credit: Lucy Guerin’s The Forest (in rehearsal), by Gianna Rizzo
