The blog which follows is now presented chronologically as an archived blog narrative.
Professor Christopher Bannerman
First posted: April 2017
Update: March 2021
Now the day arrives when we begin to work on Forest Revisited and I admit that this event caused both excitement and trepidation. The excitement stemmed from my experiences as a dancer in 1976-77 when the original work Forest was first created as part of London Contemporary Dance Theatre’s (LCDT) residencies in UK teacher-training colleges and then assembled as a work for performance in 1977. The making and performing of Forest were special experiences for me.
The residencies provided a time in which we heard Robert Cohan, LCDT Artistic Director and choreographer of Forest, explain his approach to and philosophy of dance and as dancers we developed a clear sense of identity and saw the significance of the work in new ways. The trepidation arose because I was unsure that we could instil the essence of Forest in a new generation of dances whose training, reference points and indeed live experiences were so different. And the challenges of Forest, led me as a dancer into the practice of T’ai Chi as I learnt that I needed softness and not what I had perceived previously to be strength. This took me some time to learn as a young dancer wanting to succeed; and it seemed to me that the best approach to Forest would be to learn the movement quality before learning the movements, an approach that takes time and patience. In the event we moved to learning the movement…