Silent Forest is a sculptural performance work developed for The Breath We Share: Embodied and Creative Practices for a Living and Dying World, an art.earth publication concerned with embodied ecological awareness, interdependence and the widening separation between human experience and the more-than-human world.
Silent Forest was made to be documented as visual piece shaped through Butoh scores and poetic instructions. The process began with writing, short phrases held like incantations, a mechanical chrysalis, loss of bones, stitched skin craving time, a desire to touch what is behind the surface, the cold heat of fire, the barely smelled hope of the woods. These sentences became choreographic tasks, guiding the performers through states of infolding, claustrophobia, determination, and a slow return toward sensation.
Custom-made sculptural forms extend the body into cacoon-like silhouettes. They restrict habitual movement while enlarging the body’s surface for contact, pressure and sensing. Gesture emerges through friction, breath, weight and resistance. The costumes are membranes: shelter, obstruction, second skin and perceptual instrument.
Within the forest, forms echo and stretch across one another. Human presence is unstable, caught somewhere between organism, apparition and object. The body reaches towards its surroundings while remaining partially estranged from them; proximity and distance coexist.
Created in response to The Breath We Share, the work considers how embodied artistic practice might enter the space produced by narratives of separation. Rather than seeking immediate resolution, Silent Forest stays inside this interval: sensing its density, its uncertainty and its potential for transformation.
Breath, movement, costume and image become ways of approaching another order of relation — one that remains porous, unfinished and continually becoming.
Credits: Direction, choreography and costume: Anna Kushnerova. Performance: Justas Mazoika, Orijana Rudeloff, Isaac Paul Harris. Photography: Raúl Bartolomé.
Scores For Silent Forest
As you walk towards the mirror if yourself, you turn around to see the abyss in your past
You carry a secrete, many forces want to take it away
Inside a cacoon is a soft caterpillar dreaming, turn away to protect your shadow
As you walk, you gradually become a baby , while your legs become more determined
Inside you is a small being growing, inch by inch he eats your inner terrain
You barely smell the hope of the woods, You want to touch what is behind but you dont know how
Your skin was stitched and is craving time , it begins to pull towards the skin of another
You see them, you sence them, you barely smell the hope of the woods but you want to remain in your own dream
You walk towards the cold heat of the fire, you want to touch but you dont know how