Mike explains how performance can function as both an innovative mode of enquiry and a research output, enabling the integration of academic and professional research procedures. In relation to work on landscape and environment, performance can illuminate the historically and culturally diverse ways in which a particular landscape has been made, used, reused and interpreted; and help make sense of the multiplicity of meanings that resonate from it.
Mike often works as a solo performer. In the document below he outlines how solo performance can draw together narratives, data sets and disciplinary perceptions, and explains that solo performance permits the use of the biographical as a framing and structuring device: the performer, as both narrator and the subject of narration. He also reflects on the process of writing performance work.
Mike outlines a range of approaches or research methodologies that can be used in the field and elsewhere including questioning, interviewing, walking, and archival research.
Warplands was commissioned as a contribution to the Landscape and Environment Programme Director’s Impact Fellowship by Professor Steve Daniels and designed to enhance the reach and significance of the Landscape and Environment programme. Download the document below to read more about the background to the making of Warplands or listen to the recorded interview with Mike Pearson and John Hardy reflecting on the research process and performance.
This toolkit is an attempt to make available some of the techniques used in creating Warplands with the hope of inspiring other works, by others, in other contexts.
School of GeographyUniversity ParkUniversity of Nottingham Nottingham, NG7 2RD
telephone: +44 (0) 115 84 66071 email: landscape@nottingham.ac.uk
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