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 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”[1] 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.”[2]