Beyond Darkness
Site-specific Performance

BIOCOENOSIS

premiered in August 2025

at Hareskoven, Furesø

BIOCOENOSIS is a walking encounter with the forest, a choreography that unfolds between trees, fungi, humans, and time. Guided along trails and through undergrowth, you will encounter forest choreographies, amplified listening, and intimate rituals. Across the three perspectives — tree, fungus, human — you are invited to move, pause, listen, and experience how these life forms shape, support and disturb one another.

The performance unfolds through a series of encounters where choreography, sound, and sensory experiences reveal the forest as a living network of interdependent relationships. Inspired by research into mycelial networks, tree communication, fungal warfare, and human interference, BIOCOENOSIS invites us to look beyond individual organisms and attune ourselves to the exchanges taking place around us. The ecological concept of biocoenosis describes a community of different species sharing a habitat and mutually shaping one another. In this work, the forest becomes both stage, collaborator and performer. It reveals a place where survival is negotiated, decay becomes new life, and humans are reminded that we are not outside the ecosystem, but deeply entangled within it.

“We move through the darkness like mycelium beneath the earth, in symbiosis with the forest and the group — carriers of nature’s stories. In the end, the guide invites us to return to our attention cards and let the listening journey continue within us.”

Miamanda Bovin, Metropolis Blog

Read more about the performance by

Miamanda Bovin, Metropolis Blog

Credits

Concept
Beyond Darkness
Choreography
Beyond Darkness in collaboration with the performers
Dramaturgy
Nadja Mattioli
Performance
Anna Stamp, Nanna Hanfgarn Jensen, Cecilie Kjær
Performance Guide
Nadja Mattioli
Sound
Eliza Bozek
Text
Eliza Bozek
Costumes
Lærke Barfod
Mycologist and dialogue partner
Martin Schier Christiansen
Biologist and dialogue partner
Stephan Springborg
Photography
Marine Gastineau