REQUIEM for a FOREST

A collaborative project by Nathalie Larquet, Julie-Anne Stanzak, Scott Jennings, Pawel Malicki, and Ophelia Young

REQUIEM FOR A FOREST

 

For over a year, choreographer and film-maker Nathalie Larquet has been working this collaborative project with Julie-Anne Stanzak, Scott Jennings, Pawel Malicki, and Ophelia Young in a forest near Wuppertal. Four films were made in this beautiful area. .

 

 

‘REQUIEM FOR A FOREST’ is a poetic and unsettling meditation on environmental loss, memory, and transformation. Over the course of two years, choreographer and filmmaker Nathalie Larquet documented a forest near Wuppertal—first as a place of natural beauty and then as a site of devastation. What was once a sanctuary of stillness, inhabited by the rhythm of trees and wind, has turned into a barren battlefield—ravaged by drought, disease, and deforestation. The forest is gone.
In response, Larquet has created a multi-channel film installation featuring four dancers from her collective timefellows, filmed during the forest’s final seasons. Their movements are elegiac, echoing both the vitality of the forest and its disappearance. Through embodied gestures and subtle rituals, the performers carry the memory of the forest in their bodies. The choreography is sparse, tactile, and rooted in the landscape—branches become limbs, fallen trees become altars.
The work is not a documentary. It is a requiem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Julie Anne Stanzak, Ophelia Young, Scott Jenings, Pawel Malicki – Voice and text: Ophelia Young

In less than a year, this forest has gradually disappeared due to climate change. ‘Requiem for a forest’ is a tribute to this forest that no longer exists. For REQUIEM, we went back to the beginning of the very first collaboration with Julie Anne Stanzak, the emblematic dancer of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and REQUIEM thus became a suspension in time, a shared moment. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Förderer & Unterstützer

REQUIEM for a FORREST entstand  mit freundlicher Unterstützung des Kulturbüro Wuppertal und in Teilen in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch im Rahmen von UNDERGROUND VII and special thanks to Matthias Louis