Embracing the Un/scene of Hope at the NTNG’s 6th International Forest Festival
Maria Ristani* and Marissia Fragkou**
Abstract
This piece aims to capture some of the ways in which the 6th International Forest Festival in Thessaloniki titled Embracing the un-scene addressed questions around how performance might articulate hope, what it allows us to see and to embrace, how personal stories can be interwoven in the creases and performed against the backdrop of monolithic understandings of history and the human. Featuring an impressive line-up of global performances (including works from England, France, Belgium, Lebanon, South Africa and Uruguay), we show how the festival shifted attention away from dominant scenes and tonalities, and closer to the unknown and the uncertain, the un-seen, the under-heard, the personal and the local, or the everyday and the low-vibe.
Keywords: National Theatre of Northern Greece (NTNG), International Forest Festival, hope, uncertainty, power structures
Entering the theatre for Jaha Koo’s The History of Korean Western Theatre, part of the 6th International Forest Festival in Thessaloniki, we find him already on stage making a small toad out of origami paper. We linger for a moment in the image: paper carefully folded and refolded, bent, creased and re-creased to birth figure and form, finally resting in shape neat and clear, yet still malleable and fluid. The same image repeats later in the performance with Koo (un)folding pieces of long white fabric, tying knots or untangling ties to find new shapes in alternate routes. We think of pregnant folds and knots, of hidden layers of possibility, of shape as always tentatively resting on molded potential.
Tracing the folds, attending to the creases, returning to what is bent or folded away was the thread line running though the 6th International Forest Festival held in Thessaloniki from 31 May to 13 June 2025, and hosted by the National Theatre of Northern Greece (hereafter NTNG). Titled Embracing the un-Scene, and featuring an impressive line-up of global performances (including works from England, France, Belgium, Lebanon, South Africa and Uruguay), the festival shifted attention away from dominant scenes and tonalities, and closer to the unknown and the uncertain, the un-seen, the under-heard, the personal and the local, or the everyday and the low-vibe.
Acknowledging the present as an era of extreme uncertainty and spiraling precarity, festival curators Tine Milz (artistic director of Theater Neumarkt in Zurich), Savas Patsalidis (Professor Emeritus, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and Prodromos Tsinikoris (director, dramaturg and actor), attested to the need of embracing uncertainty through performance by placing emphasis on language which “does not smooth over complexity but lets contradictions breathe; a language that cracks open spaces for listening, trembling, and beginning again.” Taking their cue from Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark, they also argue that “even amid fracture, seeds of connection and imagination can be sown” (6th International Forest Festival). Solnit claims that “hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty there is room to act…Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists” (xii).
In the spirit of Solnit’s interweaving of hope and uncertainty, this piece aims to capture some of the ways in which the festival addressed questions around how performance might articulate hope, what it allows us to see and to embrace, how personal stories can be interwoven in the creases and performed against the backdrop of monolithic understandings of history and the human. In all (un)scenes featured in the festival, embracing emerges as a labor of care, but, also, and perhaps most importantly, as a generative practice – an enabling of the yet hesitant, unknown or unseen/heard to find a stage. We will explore some of the ways in which those performances addressed the act of “embracing” as an active gesture signifying affection but also involving elements of risk and the need to prepare for a difficult situation (as in “brace yourself”).
Negotiating Uncertainty
In their performance lecture Daemons of Love, Nigerian performance poet Logan February re-visit the symbol of the daemon in Yoruba culture and contemplate the forest as a precarious space of encountering fluidity, the outcast but also a place where danger and war are lurking. In the forest, the affects of love and anger have the power of bringing justice which yet remains uncertain and yet-to-arrive.
February’s piece is word-bound – a poetic lecture resting on oral delivery – yet dismantling our age-old confidence in the verbal from its very first lines: “It is also a kind of terror,” we hear them say, “not quite the fear of speech but that of what will yet remain unsaid, for I come to you in words, which are dwarfed by daily magnitudes of data in the loud collapse of the world we share.” Embracing failing words, they use English to address the first Yoruba-language novel which they also read in translation – Wole Soyinka’s The Forest of a Thousand Daemons – stitching into the “colonizer’s lexicon”, as they name it, the indigenous and the ancestral. Such stitching and displacing of binaries become a driving force in their piece which unfolds in fluidity and refuses to rest. As they move into their forest of words, they dismantle dichotomies and embrace mutually-fed prosthesis: English and Yoruba, the myth and its translation, the Forest of Yoruba tradition and myth, and the forest-like Western world, exile and home, tenderness and terror, revengeful daemons and creatures of love. A fitting opening to a festival embracing uncertainty, February’s monologue invited us to enter a forest of possibility, of myths, legends and Western buzzing, of lurking terror, hope, love, and violence, without promising an anchor or a matrix of certainty and safe belonging.
Following February’s performance lecture, Tamara Cubas’s Offering for a Monster created a liminal space which embraced the unknown future as a monster drawing on the perspectives and energies of the young generation. For over a week, the Uruguayan choreographer held intensive workshops with 13 young volunteer performers between 18-27 years old, which determined the key direction of the final work-in-progress shared with the audience.[1] Often considered as the beacons of hope and change, the young generation’s hopes are tainted by a deep sense of anxiety about their personal and collective futures.
On stage, the physical struggle of the actors’ bodies to perform according to the demands of success dictated by consumer capitalism, was emphasized by the long routine of the group running in a (never perfect) circle and being gradually loaded with more material than what they can carry. In their brief exchanges, we witness the energy, the anger, the falls and failures, the love and care in assisting one another as “the show must go on.” As a final gesture, the audience is directly invited to join the performers at a vibrant disco party which transforms the repetitive running circle into a community ritual that celebrates a new beginning and marks the official opening of the festival.
Uncertainty and risk further define our present relationship with nonhuman environments. El Conde de Torrefiel’s I Have No Name (Yo No Tengo Nombre)[2] was staged in an outdoor space next to Vassiliko Theatre, one of the theatre buildings of the NTNG. Wedded to the existential uncertainty that the piece feeds, is, interestingly, another layer of risk inherent in its formal logics per se; as outdoor performance, El Conde de Torrefiel’s work invests in precarious spectatorship, exchanging the safety of indoor spectacle for the unpredictability of open, public space performance.
Set at Thessaloniki’s pedestrian seafront, its sharp-shaped performance screen intersects with the sprawling “screen” of the city itself, embracing its ambient noises, shifting lights, (unruly) human presence, urban surprises and polyvalent rhythms, against or through which it negotiates its presence. Seated comfortably in our deckchairs as we watch the performance, we also feel uncomfortably part of a liminal stage, detuned from the urban, unanchored in either the strictly performative or the everyday, exposed and uncertain, embracing a double role as both urban spectators and theatrical performers.
This precarious spectatorship is further pronounced by the words on screen which ask us to contemplate the possibility that the unseen powers of nature were talking back to us using man-made tools such as artificial sound and voice and human writing. This encounter with the “alien voice” challenges human sovereignty, taking an entirely different approach to popular narratives of a vulnerable planet that needs to be saved as well as sharpening our perception in relation to the nonhuman. The voice reminds us how we are entangled with the nonhuman in everyday life even when we try to protect ourselves from the weather or major catastrophes. Although the performance’s attempt to offer a non-anthropocentric view is somewhat compromised by the fact that this view is articulated in an anthropocentric form, the performance manages to momentarily at least, shift our perception to invisible landscapes and temporalities.
We tread the same uncertain path when entering the playful world of L’ Addition, conceived and directed by Forced Entertainment artistic director Tim Etchells and performed by the duo Bert (Bertrand Lesca) and Nasi (Nasi Voutsas).[3] The piece feeds off from a trivial event (a diner calling for wine at a restaurant) which it twists, turns and amplifies in origami-like logics, having it insistently repeated, refolded and refracted in new unfolding replays; we watch the same scene (a subtle choreography of folds: customer calling for wine, waiter offering, wine pouring, table flooding, set clearing and action beginning again) with role reversals and minor or major variations in tone, rhythm, mood or atmosphere.
Played on loop, the scene turns into a freeze-frame for the ordinary, decelerating time, zooming in on and celebrating the simple, the minimal and the mundane. At the same time, spinning off to different directions and scenarios, reveling in all but embracing none, L’Addition returns us to the deliciously unpredictable, imaginative game that lies at the core of theatricality – what is often folded away in service of purposeful storytelling.
Echoing Beckett’s Gogo and Didi routine of “just . . . play” (Collected Shorter Plays 155), the piece resists mastery, favoring instead ongoing exploration and playful discovery to “give us the impression we exist” (Waiting for Godot 40). In an interview he gave on the making of the piece (2023) for Avignon Festival, Etchells noted that “[r]ather than telling a single story . . . [t]he idea is to heighten and amplify the scene to turn it into something at once funny and tragic. This trivial starting point can lead to thousands of sketches.” As the scene turns plural, we fidget along in playful darkness, we lose count and are left wo(a)ndering: Who is the waiter? Who is the customer? Who serves and who is being served?
Unsettling Power Structures
Another thread we identified in the performances at hand was the necessity to revisit and disrupt established representations and power structures in order to open up spaces of hope that stir trouble in established hierarchies of power. Mamela Nyamza’s Hatched Ensemble staged the struggle between European colonialism and African identity using the artistic forms of classical ballet and African dance. As a queer Black female artist-activist, Nyamza stands up against the patriarchal politics of art institutions in South Africa, carving her own space so that othered experiences are seen on stage.
An extension of her 2007 autobiographical solo work Hatched, Hatched Ensemble features 10 dancers from different ethnicities, genders and body types who are part of Nyamza’s newly formed theatre company Mamelas Artistic Movement. Tackling issues of race, gender and colonialism, the piece pushes “against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become solid as walls” (Ahmed 1) by rehearsing a mode of decolonizing the body, following Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s concept of “decolonizing the mind” (Thiong’o).
In embracing bodily difference on stage, Hatched Ensemble resists the rules of uniformity put forward by classical ballet where certain bodies do not belong due to their shape or weight. The piece begins with a repetitive, almost compulsively restrained movement routine to the music of the Dying Swan from Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, exposing the colonization of Black dancer’s body by the authority of the white classical canon. As the piece develops, rhythms and songs from the African continent – either performed on tape or live by musician Given “Azah” Mphago – gradually offer an opportunity to the bodies on stage to free themselves by taking off their ballet costume and wearing a red dress – a colour which is also reminiscent of the African landscape. Together with soprano Litho Nqai, they begin to sing in their own different languages as well as humming shared songs common in African rituals. This process however is not an easy task but the outcome of a deep struggle and identity frustration for the classically-trained Black dancer: the red dresses are first hanged one after the other on a washing line resembling “dirty laundry,” as Nyamza notes in the post-show talk, to then be worn by the dancers who are fighting to release them from their pegs. This embodied gesture brings to mind images of colonial violence and its disciplinary mechanisms, however, what remains hanging on the line in the end are the white instruments of oppression: the dancers’ white tutus and pointes.
Whitewashing by French performance makers Rébecca Chaillon and Aurore Déon (members of Dans le Ventre theatre company) also evoked the power of the internalized white male gaze – as an allusion to Martiniquan thinker Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks – which marks Black women’s bodies as sexually available or designates them as exclusive carriers of invisible domestic and caring work.[4] By doing so, the performance created a dynamic connection with the audience similar to bell hooks’s “oppositional gaze” (hooks 119), drawing attention to and seeking to disrupt the construction of stereotypical images of Black women.
In the first half of the performance, the Chaillon and Déon make their appearance as cleaners who carry out the Sisyphean task of bleaching the theatre floor from the stains produced by seven ice cream lollies precariously suspended above the stage and melting throughout the duration of the piece. Chaillon’s body is covered in white paint, and she literally bathes her body in the dirty, bleachy water used to mop the floor, showing signs of physical discomfort through her continuous cough.
During this time, both performers directly engage with the audience by fixing their gaze at us for a few seconds before continuing their work; they mop the floor under our feet disrupting the comfort of the bodies who have settled in the first rows of the theatre space. In the second half, the clinical white space transforms into an African beauty salon, a space where Blackness is celebrated and cared for. Déon takes on the task to clean and apply cream on Chaillon’s skin before beginning the arduous task of braiding her hair, while Chaillon entertains the audience by reading magazine adverts of white males seeking Black female sexual partners in Greek. The audience is asked to come on stage and hang images of Black women taken from magazines on Chaillon’s long braids which are attached to the space’s four corners like washing lines that display Black beauty. This is an act of mutual service but also a resistant act of embracing or “loving blackness” (hooks 9).[5]
In Ali Chahrour’s dance performance Told by My Mother, a piece also featuring live music, the resistance to power structures is rehearsed by the persistent figure of the willful mother who stands against the walls of power. The performance revolves around two interweaving stories from Chahrour’s family in Lebanon. The first concerns the disappearance of his cousin Hassan in Syria and the response of his mother Fatmeh who received his personal belongings from the Syrian embassy in Beirut with the message of his death in a Syrian prison. Refusing to believe this news, Fatmeh dedicated her life looking for him until she died of cancer in 2018. Hassan’s story interlaces with that of their other cousin Abbas who left his home to become a martyr. When Abbas returned home one day, his mother, Leila Chahrour, refused to allow that he is taken away again. Both Leila and Abbas perform on stage (with Chahrour), doubling as both themselves and Fatmeh and Hassan; this haunting rehearses the fragile hope that Hassan will appear one day in the audience as singer and performer Hala Omran mentions in the beginning. In the piece’s final moments, all performers sing the oldest lullaby discovered in Sumerian language while Leila is caressing Omran’s hair; this moment of tenderness haunted by ineffable pain is underscored by Leila’s act of pulling Omran’s hair followed by the recording of two ghostly voices: Fatmeh and Hassan singing together a few days before his disappearance.
The interplay between presence and absence is key here to understand the politics of hope articulated in the piece. The performance evokes the genealogy of the appearance of mothers in grief as social symbols of willfulness who insist on assembling together in public and making visible the stories of the absent bodies of the dispossessed.[6] The presence of Leila on stage also offers the perspective of the mother who refused to grieve her son, thus opening up a potent space of hope that Hassan’s body will someday return to Lebanon.
In a similar vein, The History of Korean Western Theatre, conceived, directed and performed by South Korean Jaha Koo, addresses folds and erasures in Korean theatre history shaped by the long shadow of Western cultural and theatrical influence. As the title of the piece ironically suggests, Korean theatre history has been overwritten by the history of its Westernization – beginning in the early 20th century, a period marked by insistent theatre reform movements in Japan that aimed to “modernize” performance under the influence of Western aesthetic paradigms. Koo recalls attending a ceremony celebrating a hundred years of Korean theatre when he painfully minds the gap: what is ceremonially commemorated excludes and erases a rich array of indigenous dance and performance traditions, long active and meaningful for Korean people. In this light, his performance sets to unsettle the all-dominant power of master memory narratives to which he juxtaposes private remembering (drawn from the performer’s life with his grandmother), au(o)ral memory (intergenerationally transmitted tales and legends), as well as the silenced cultural past of traditional practices, some of which we see bodily re-enacted (through Koo’s own fabric dance) or visually re-called as images of old funeral rites and traditions flash by the huge projection screen at the backdrop of Koo’s otherwise minimal stage.
Such re-articulation of memory creates a counter-knowledge and memory archive interrogating dominant cultural history; its intent is not, to quote Athena Athanasiou, to achieve some new “‘mastering’ [of] the past” but to “address and politically reactivate the master narratives of remembering in ways that account for their ellipses, stratifications and dismemberments” (71). This re-membering of the past is also deemed necessary for a re-imagining of a possible future. As the rice-cooker (which Koo tellingly cast as his co-performer on stage) sings: “I need to understand the past to be able to survive. I need to reverse the past to be able to live now”. Re-membering becomes a gesture of hope, which as Solnit reminds us, “looks forward, but [also] draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections” (“Protest and Persist”).
Future is insistently indexed in Koo’s performance, as evident by the show’s insistent dependence on technological means, digital sounding and projections, or its stage dialogue with animated, robot-like characters (such as an origami toad) and 21st century consumer culture products (rice cooker), but its power and promise is revealed as only unfolding through meaningful interaction with the past.
Afterword
The performances presented as part of the 6th International Forest Festival engaged with the uncertain and the hidden, revealing and sharing new archives of knowledge. In doing so, they propose different ways of re-writing, voicing and re-inventing the self by mobilizing an interplay between what Diana Taylor names the archive and the repertoire, that is, “the archive of supposedly enduring materials,” the recorded stories and embedded ideologies disseminated by figures of power and the “so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge” (Taylor, The Archive 19); it is at the interstices of the written and the unwritten, the voices and the silences that this new knowledge emerges and is shared with an audience. Notably, such knowledge features no capital K; it emerges less as certainty and more as question and origami-like exploration, echoing what Carl Lavery describes as “weak performance” aiming “not so much to do as to ‘undo’ . . . to trouble notions of mastery and intentionality, to remain hypothetical and suspensive” (230). In this light, the festival created open spaces for encountering other(ed) bodies on stage, inviting the audience of Thessaloniki to grapple with the different textual and aesthetic idioms of contemporary performance making, as well as to ponder on significant questions regarding care, grief and mourning, decolonization, memory, power and play.
Endnotes
[1] The performers were sourced from local drama schools and from the School of Drama at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
[2] The piece was part of the project Paysages Partagés which consisted of seven outdoor performances curated by Caroline Barneaud (ThéâtreVidy-Lausanne) and Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll).
[3] The festival hosted the English version of the French production originally commissioned by Festival d’ Avignon in 2023.
[4] The work formed part of the company’s longer performance titled Carte Noir, nommée Désir which dealt with the stereotypes of Black women in the Western world.
[5] In the post-show talk, both performers mentioned the importance of their Martiniquan heritage, with Chaillon confessing that she has only recently been able to embrace this as part of her own identity.
[6] The mother in grief has been a mobilizing figure in social movements particularly in Latin America, Turkey and the Balkans since the 1970s. See, Taylor, ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence and Athanasiou.
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*Maria Ristani is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) where she teaches contemporary British theatre and performance. She shares an active interest in the ways modern Anglophone theatre draws on and interacts with listening, sound art and acoustics, researching the fields of audio-based theatre, podcast drama and sound walk performances. She is currently co-editing a Contemporary Theatre Review special issue on headphone-mediated theatre and working on her monograph on Samuel Beckett’s Rhythm-driven Dramaturgy (Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies forthcoming, 2026).
**Marissia Fragkou is Assistant Professor in theatre studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her teaching and research mainly focus on feminism, precarity and affect in contemporary theatre and performance. She is the author of Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Politics, Affect, Responsibility (Methuen Drama, 2018) and the co-editor of The Methuen Drama Handbook of Women in Contemporary British Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Copyright © 2025 Maria Ristani and Marissia Fragkou
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
