BRADFORD — A small clearing surrounded by tall, leafy trees was suspended in stillness, emerald green and bathed in afternoon light.
An audience of 10 sat on a long wooden bench by a dirt road, waiting. Slowly, a line of people emerged from the woods. They moved closer to the onlookers, snaking down a grassy track, clapping with synchronized movements and humming, like a giant insect.
They continued on until they’d passed the clearing, then wandered again into the trees.
This was the beginning of “Forest,” a site-specific dance from Washington, Vt. choreographer Hannah Dennison that was performed by an ensemble of dancers on Sunday afternoon in Bradford.
The show was part of a series of performances continuing through September and set in two east Central Vermont woodlands, one in Bradford and the other in Washington.
In between the seven scenes at the Sunday show, a single narrator read passages about the forest’s evolution, shaped by both nature and the hands of man. Like all modern dance, meaning is what the viewer of “Forest” makes it, but running through the piece are questions about our relationship to the forest, as individuals and at the collective level.
“Forests don’t need humans, but we need forests,” goes a part of the narration.
The seed of “Forest” took root in 2022, when Dennison experienced a moment of awe while immersed in the woodlands on a peninsula in Maine.
“I felt I had entered another universe, stirring, beautiful and stark, tall Spruce, rock outcroppings, moss covering everything, the smell and sound of the ocean,” Dennison wrote in the program for the Bradford show.
Moved as she was, she had just finished “The Quarry Project,” an ambitious performance set in the Wells-Lamson Quarry in Websterville, Vt., and she wasn’t ready to take on a new piece.
She worried too about dancers disturbing the delicate plants growing on the forest floor, and whether audiences would be willing to attend a performance in such a remote setting.
Staging “Forest” along a road in the woods was a way to address these concerns and anchor the audience as they ventured into strange territory, Dennison said in a recent interview.
Across her decades-long career as a choreographer, Dennison has found setting to be her “primary creative partner,” she said in a 2022 Valley News piece about “The Quarry Project.”
Growing up Framingham, Mass., Dennison, who founded the dance nonprofit Cradle to Grave Arts, viewed the forest as a site of exploration, “a place of magic.”
After purchasing land in Chelsea in 2000, where she roamed the woods, studying mushrooms and listening to birdsong, she became interested in being “a good steward of the land,” she said.
She connected with people who shared her interest in land conservation, including Orange County Forester David Paganelli, who helped locate sites for “Forest” and who acts as one of the narrators.
Dennison eventually settled on the Bradford and Washington sites, which are privately owned, as they were easily accessible to dancers and onlookers.
Fit for an audience of 30, “Forest” is among Dennison’s more intimate works, but it was still a big lift to pull off.
Between planning the route for the dancers, coordinating costume changes and music, and talking with landowners, the project was “sick with details,” Dennison said.
She received support from her devoted collaborators, many of whom have worked by her side for years. They include co-choreographer Ellen Smith Ahern, artistic partner and costume designer Leslie Anderson, and Julia Barstow, who photographed the recent performance, among others. Chloe Schafer, who recently performed in The Junction Dance Festival, is also listed as a co-choreographer and dancer.
At 78, Dennison doesn’t dance anymore. She’s also learned by now to switch off at the end of the day so ruminating on a project doesn’t consume her whole life. But her work is still central to who she is.
“This is what I do completely,” she said. “It’s all of me.”
That feeling of entering “another universe” that Dennison experienced in the forest in Maine rang true as I watched the Sunday afternoon performance, the show’s second public dress rehearsal. There was an otherworldly quality to the dancers, who emerged from the woods as if called forth by the music performed by Dennison and several others. They hopped among stumps or weaved around trees before wandering back into the thicket.
With their earth-toned dresses and occasional giggles, the dancers reminded me of the fairies that inhabit the enchanted woods of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
But in the world of “Forest,” that sense of enchantment mingles with the markers of industry and the modern world. Interstate 91 was close enough to hear, and Bradford’s town center was even closer.
“It does feel like the forest primeval and yet the road is right there,” Dennison said.
There was some safety in knowing that the familiar trappings of modern life were nearby during the show. But that reality also points to the fraught relationship between nature and humanity, how our dependence on the forest’s natural resources has caused it to be sliced up and extracted.
Dennison’s show asks the audience to sit with that history, but its forest setting also exists as an uplifting reminder about how we look to nature as a source of creativity.
As the narrator said on Sunday: the forest shows us “what true resilience entails.”
A public dress rehearsal of “Forest” is slated for Aug. 9 in Washington, Vt. Tickets are $20. Subsequent performances are scheduled for Aug. 29 and 30 and Sept. 5 and 6 in Washington, Vt., and Sept. 19, 20, 26 and 27 in Bradford. Tickets to those shows are $30 and can be purchased at hannahdennison.org.
Film fest
The annual Vermont Film Festival begins Friday, July 31, with screenings at Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock. Organized by Collen Doyle and Matt Vita, the comedians behind the Woolen Mill Comedy Club in Bridgewater, the festival will feature more than 20 films based in Vermont and farther afield that will be screened over two days, plus social mixers and a comedy show on Sunday, Aug. 2. To purchase day passes ($25) and learn more, go to vermontfilmfestival.com.
Summer youth theater
Northern Stage is returning to the golden age of Broadway with a youth production of “Oklahoma!,” up through Aug. 9 in White River Junction. For tickets ($38; $25 for students, and youth 25 and under) go to northernstage.org or call 802-536-1784.
Another student production, BroadwayVentures’ take on the British comedy “Something Rotten!,” is up Thursday, July 30 through Saturday, Aug. 1 at Lebanon Opera House. Tickets are $14 to $17. Go to lebanonoperahouse.org or call 603-448-0400 for more information.
