Hannah Dennison claims she doesn’t have a good turnout — the ability to rotate the hips and legs outward at least 45 degrees, essential for ballet dancers. During a recent interview at her Washington, Vt., home, the 78-year-old contemporary dance choreographer sprang from her living room lounge chair and stood, heels together, to demonstrate. It’s one of the reasons she didn’t feel comfortable onstage back when she was dancing, Dennison said. Instead, she turned to developing site-specific performances, which have become her life’s work.
Vermont audiences likely know Dennison from her last creation, The Quarry Project, which took place in 2022 at a particularly dramatic site: a disused, flooded granite quarry in Websterville. Barefoot dancers in crimson-hued dresses performed on floating platforms in front of towering walls of stone. One platform carried musicians, including a soprano, performing original music. That turnout, in the word’s other meaning, was evidence of its success: Fourteen shows sold out. The work’s life was extended with a film that toured the state and with “Quarry Project Echoes,” a 2024 exhibition at the Kents Corner State Historic Site in Calais displaying other artists’ responses to Dennison’s piece.
Now Dennison has made a new work, Forest. Its eponymous setting is both more familiar and more vast: The state is three-quarters forested, and most Vermonters have hiked, camped or lived in or near woods. Originally envisioning a four-location work, Dennison settled on two: forests in her town and in Bradford, for which she has developed slightly different performances. They’ll take place on eight dates in late August and September, with a dress rehearsal open to the public this Sunday, August 9.
In each location, audiences will follow the troupe and musicians along a dirt road, stopping to witness dance scenes performed on either side and listening to narrators describe the forests’ specific histories, ecologies and human interventions. As in all of Dennison’s work, there is no story; viewers will interpret for themselves the 10 dancers’ abstract and partly improvised movements and gestures among the trees, as well as their incongruous cocktail dresses and work boots, and the combined sounds of nature and human-generated music. One thing is clear, however: Forest will render a familiar milieu strange and new.
Dennison lives in the woods. Her house — built by her late partner, carpenter Dave Severance, herself and one hired hand — is perched on an overlook above 300 conserved acres. A long span of southern-facing windows frames miles of uninterrupted forest.
Dennison is wiry and thin, with salt-and-pepper hair cropped close to her head and a gleeful smile. The day Seven Days visited, she sported glasses with light-green frames and soft, well-worn clothes: a long olive-and-white polka-dot dress buttoned at the waist over a brown shirt and loose-fitting turquoise pants. While her 3-year-old Australian shepherd, Willi, herded us to the seating area, she apologized for eating a late breakfast — a bowl of brown rice.
Wrestling a pair of red reading glasses atop her green ones, she found a video on her phone she had shot in October 2022 of the site that inspired Forest: a forest in Maine rising from a carpet of moss.
“It was lush, powerful; there was a depth to that site that really caught my attention — a depth of what I could see and what I could imagine,” Dennison said. She envisioned scenes in flat spots or behind logs on the varied topography, and imagined how to keep the dancers off the moss: “OK, maybe they’ll fly or bungee.”
Whenever I make a piece,it starts really huge, and then reality sets in.
Hannah Dennison
“Whenever I make a piece, it starts really huge,” she continued, “and then reality sets in.” A year later, she began conceiving a project in Vermont’s woods — ones where no moss could be damaged.
Filmmaker Lukas Huffman shot Dennison’s Quarry and Dear Pina, a 2012 work performed in the cavernous Breeding Barn at Shelburne Farms, and considers her a mentor.
“The two big pieces I’ve done with her are in large-scale, massive, awe-inspiring places,” Huffman said. “For whatever reason, she’s drawn to [them]. The tension for her is: How do you create choreography that feels vulnerable and intimate within these places?”
Dennison didn’t become a choreographer in a traditional manner. In fact, she didn’t know about contemporary dance until she was 29. Born in 1947 in Framingham, Mass. — then a land of forests and farm fields — she grew up solidly middle class: Her mother was a homemaker and her father a factory manager at an adhesive and paper products company. She and three siblings roamed the area freely. “I had 17 forts as an 11-year-old,” Dennison recalled.
No fan of school, she played field hockey and lacrosse and downhill skied around New England with wooden skis and leather boots. At the University of Denver, she survived three semesters “mostly [by] drinking with a boyfriend, smoking dope and staying out past curfew.” Years of heady decisions followed: working as a go-go girl; “shoplifting”; joining a commune in California for a few months; living in a macrobiotic community in Boston whose members ate only rice, grains, beans and vegetables.
“We chewed each bite 50 times, so there was not a lot of talking,” Dennison recalled of her Boston experience with a laugh. Nevertheless, she met her husband, Warren, there; they married in 1970, when she was 23, and she gave birth to her only child, a son, the next year. On the invitation of friends and an aunt in Vermont, they moved to Woodstock in 1972 and ran a natural-foods store in a former mill while living upstairs.
“It took me a long time to understand I was a kinesthetic person,” Dennison said. The realization struck after her move to Burlington in 1973 when, newly divorced, she joined a friend at an African dance class.
“A big door was opened,” she recalled. “I knew this was something I wanted to do. I liked moving with a lot of people.”
Soon she joined Main Street Dance Studio, Burlington’s hub for dance classes of all types above the nightclub Nectar’s, where she studied and then taught stretch-and-tone, jazz, and modern dance classes. Later, she picked up jobs teaching dance at Trinity College and Burlington Technical Center. She stayed afloat thanks to a Section 8 housing voucher and then-mayor Bernie Sanders’ decision to offer the third floor of Memorial Auditorium to the contemporary dance community for free.
Vermont Symphony Orchestra violinist Sofia Hirsch, who will play viola, electric viola, percussion and ocarina and contribute improvised vocals in Forest, took dance lessons from Dennison as a teenager in the mid-1980s.
“I loved how free she was,” Hirsch said, recalling that Dennison’s nonconformity extended to her instructions on how to spot — fixing one’s eyes on a mark during a continuous spin. “She said, ‘You’re going to whip your head around so that the snot comes flying out of your nose.’ I thought, Yeah, I get that,” Hirsch said, laughing. “She does nothing halfway.”
Dennison never formally studied dance, but she drew inspiration from her contemporaries. After glimpsing photographs of German choreographer Pina Bausch’s company in a magazine, she boarded a cheap flight to Germany in 1983 and saw Bausch’s The Seven Deadly Sins in Wuppertal. “I was blown away,” she said.
Washington, D.C., choreographer Liz Lerman’s was an inspiration, too; she put together a company that enlisted dancers of all age and sizes multigenerational. Dennison created her own such troupe, which performed her first Vermont work, Gather, Gather, Hold Your Breath, among an audience seated onstage at the Flynn theater in 1993. By then, she had established a nonprofit, Cradle to Grave Arts, to fund her projects.
Dennison went on to produce projects in the Woolen Mill in Winooski honoring its former textile workers — a venture into realism she said she’ll never repeat; and in the abandoned Rose Street Bakery in Burlington (now cooperative housing), where she discovered a trove of suitcases, a recurring motif in her work that will reappear in Forest. The Waterfront Project brought attention to the postindustrial Burlington waterfront; The Hay Project, to the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed grounds of Shelburne Farms.
When Dennison began building her Washington house in 2000, where she moved in 2004, she took time off from dance — until Bausch’s sudden death in 2009 catapulted her into creativity again. Dear Pina, dedicated to Bausch, was followed by Threads and Thresholds at Kents Corner, an experiment in moving audiences from room to room to witness discrete scenes.
Dennison tends to use similar dance moves in all of her work, including what’s known in the dance world as pedestrian movement: walking, running, skipping, standing still. Additionally, she said, “I’m really interested in gestural language. I’ve really enjoyed grand entrances. And I have a big interest in doing what you’re not supposed to do on a table or a chair.” In a scene in Forest, the dancers drape themselves face-down across a table, then swirl green-gloved fingers at the audience.
Collaboration is key to Dennison’s choreography, particularly with her artistic partner, Leslie Anderson of Charlotte, the brains behind costume and set design who also helps shape every project. The Pratt Institute-trained artist, now 83, also studied the dance techniques of pioneer Martha Graham and began as a dancer with Dennison nearly 40 years ago.
“As a choreographer, her goal is to help the dancers do the best they can do with the material,” Anderson said. “When you see a dancer who has worked with Hannah, you’ll see a personality coming through. They’re not dolls.” They’re also collaborators: Dancers Ellen Smith Ahern and Chloe Schafer contributed to Forest’s choreography.
Burlington dancer Claire Cook, 27, one of five in Forest who were also in Quarry, described a creative environment that values both precision and improvisation.
“Hannah is very specific and very clear about the quality of the movement, [like] how spread out your fingers should be,” she said. “She may describe an energy or a mood quality for a scene: ‘Too somber or sentimental,’ she’ll say, and invite us to play and interact more with each other.”
Of a scene in Forest in which the dancers sway and crouch atop tree stumps, Cook added, “The movement is very slow, but we’re also getting eaten by bugs and there’s a bee flying up someone’s dress. We have license to deal with the environment.”
The movement is very slow, but we’re also getting eaten by bugs and there’s a bee flying up someone’s dress.
Claire Cook
As in all of Dennison’s projects, Forest involves a host of other nondancer collaborators. Writer-editor Stephen Long and poet Judith Chalmer helped craft the narrative passages — and Chalmer contributed a poem to the finale — with input from Orange County forester David Paganelli and others. Chalmer also served as accessibility consultant, securing golf carts to transport audience members who need it. Recent University of Vermont music-major graduate Koa Ritz wrote the music for, among other instruments, toy piano, water-filled jugs and a “kitchen chandelier” — old silverware hanging from a large ring. Photographer Julia Barstow is capturing moments of the work in arresting photos, while Jude Domski filmed a test run in 2025 and Graydon Hanson is making the touring film. Artist Erin Hanley made the wood covers of the audience-response books, bookmaker Marcy Kass bound them, and Anderson contributed pen-and-ink drawings in the margins.
Dennison secured funding from the Vermont Arts Council, Vermont Community Foundation and private donors to cover production expenses and also things such as liability insurance and portable toilet rentals. She approached landowners for permission to allow the public into their forests and, with Chalmer, recruited volunteer narrators.
Cook, who majored in dance at UVM, marveled at Dennison’s creative process.
“The way it comes together is very different from other things I’ve been a part of,” she said. “It’s a lot of logistics and organization and visioning for a long, long time. And sometimes you have no idea what’s happening — for years. Then, at the end, you realize you’re part of something magical.” ➆
Related
This article appears in August 5 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
