Forest of SoulsForest of Souls
Creative development in 2005/6
An inflatable interactive environmental installation with animatronic puppet creatures and a live giant puppet character as an indigenous caretaker.
The Forest of Souls will explore issues related to biodiversity, Indigenous peoples connections to land, Australian setter interactions with the land, and our current relationships with nature. The audience will encounter and explore a forest environment. It will combine inflatable trees and plants, animatronic puppets of birds and Australian marsupials, a giant puppet gardener/caretaker of the land, poetry and music soundscape, spoken word (in various languages) and song.
The value we place upon the land and being aware of the ground on which we tread depends on our social, political and environmental context and is highly relevant to a contemporary Australian audience. The soundscape will draw on the audible history and pre-history of the forest: animals, Indigenous and European loggers, settlers and hunters. The work will include children's voices to appeal to children and also to adults on a different level.
The audience will discover the caretaker character and she/he
will reveal the story. The forest is a metaphor for our deepest
unconscious, our connections with the early green chaos. Walking
through the forest we are treading a path that our ancestors trod,
triggering memories of earlier lives. If we look closely we can
see the footprints of earlier loggers and hunters. If we listen
closely we can hear the voices of hundreds of generations of children
and of the wildlife they knew (much now gone). Forest of Souls
is a place where you can hear the whispers of present and past
tenants, joyful and sorrowful memories of those who lived in this
place before.