{"id":875,"date":"2025-06-24T12:49:27","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T12:49:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/31\/?p=875"},"modified":"2025-07-11T17:47:53","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T17:47:53","slug":"embracing-the-un-scene-of-hope-at-the-stngs-6th-international-forest-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/31\/embracing-the-un-scene-of-hope-at-the-stngs-6th-international-forest-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Embracing the Un\/scene of Hope at the NTNG\u2019s 6th International Forest Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Maria Ristani<\/strong>*<\/a> and Marissia Fragkou<\/strong>**<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This piece aims to capture some of the ways in which the 6th<\/sup> International Forest Festival in Thessaloniki titled Embracing the un-scene<\/font> 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<\/strong>: National Theatre of Northern Greece (NTNG), International Forest Festival, hope, uncertainty, power structures<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Entering the theatre for Jaha Koo\u2019s The History of Korean Western Theatre<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Jaha Koo with his long white fabric on stage. Photo: Leontien Allemeersch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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<\/a> 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,<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cdoes not smooth over complexity but lets contradictions breathe; a language that cracks open spaces for listening, trembling, and beginning again.\u201d Taking their cue from Rebecca Solnit\u2019s book Hope in the Dark<\/em>, they also argue that \u201ceven amid fracture, seeds of connection and imagination can be sown\u201d (6th<\/sup> International Forest Festival). Solnit claims that \u201chope locates itself in the premises that we don\u2019t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty there is room to act\u2026Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists\u201d (xii). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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