Project outline
This network was primarily composed of researchers in theatre/performance studies, but also had significant input from geographers, artists, and activists. It examined the potential of site-based performance as a means of representing the dynamics (and histories) of envir-onmental change. Most genuinely site-specific theatre practice tends to be explicitly local in orientation–e.g. reflecting on local history or community identity. But can the local specifics of human habitation and environmental impact also be used, in performance, as a means to reflect on global ecological questions? To help focus our discussions, the network met in three contrasting, iconic sites: Fountains Abbey World Heritage Site (N. Yorks); Cove Park artists’ retreat (Argyll & Bute); Kings College’s former Anatomy Museum (central London).
The contrasting locations reflected differing types/degrees of human intervention in the environment, and varying histories of cultural-natural, urban-rural, and human-animal interaction.
Events
Workshop 1
Location: Fountains Abbey, near Ripon, North Yorkshire
Date: October 16th-17th 2010
Operated by the National Trust, this World Heritage Site demonstrates many contrasting forms of interaction between humans and environment taking place over centuries. The largest medieval abbey ruins in the country sit alongside England’s most spectacular Georgian water gardens. Landscaped grounds give way to working farmland. The River Skell has been redirected for both pragmatic and aesthetic purposes. In the medieval deer park, “wild” animals are managed as livestock. Fountains Abbey represents some of the most treasured aspects of English heritage, yet such delicately maintained sites are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Workshop 2
Location: Cove Park artists’ centre, Argyll & Bute
Date: February 12th-13th 2011
Situated on a fifty-acre site overlooking Loch Long, on the fringes of the “Loch Lomond and the Trossachs” National Park, Cove Park lies in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), where the mountainous landscape has prevented excessive human exploitation. The site has a history as a conservation park, dedicated to the preservation of indigenous plants, flowers and wildlife, and also grazes highland cattle and sheep. A few miles along the Loch is Coulport naval base, a storage site for nuclear missiles since the 1960s. The larger base at Faslane is also nearby.
Workshop 3
Location: Anatomy Theatre and Museum at King’s College, London
Date: May 20th-21st 2011
Now used for a variety of cultural and research events, this “site” is entirely human-made, in the heart of one of the world’s most densely-populated urban environments. Its history is rooted in the enlightenment project of categorising and (literally) anatomising the natural world, as a means of bringing it under “rational” control. Located on the Strand, the venue is close to the hub of London’s commercial theatre district, and to the headquarters of global oil companies such as Shell and BP, whose business “performance” depends upon the exploitation of fossil fuel resources, often in environmentally sensitive areas of the planet.
Guest presenters at the event included; representatives from Platform (the London-based eco-activist arts collective), cultural geographer Doreen Massey, performance scholar Jon McKenzie (University of Wisconsin), and Julie Laffin, a performance artist and campaigner on environmentally safe housing. The day's events were concerned with critical/performative responses to toxic environmental impacts, with the symposium taking place shortly after the first anniversary of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Network meeting
Location: Cabot Institute, University of Bristol
Date: 16th September 2011
A follow-up meeting with representatives from the network and the Environment Agency. EA representatives identified a site for analysis – the area of the city’s Eastville suburb where the canalised River Frome flows into sluice gates / culverts. A follow-up funding proposal outlining plans for pilot, community-facing performance projects in Eastville and Shipley (Bradford) has now been submitted to the AHRC.
Achievements
As a practice-focused network, our work sought to develop perspectives and approaches relevant to various external partners/stakeholders. These include the National Trust, at Fountains Abbey, where a collaboration with the estate’s Head of Landscape is moving towards on-site public performances in 2012, exploring both historic environmental changes and current threats to ‘heritage ecology’ from climatic conditions. This project is coherent with NT’s new policy of extended public engagement through arts. Another developing outcome is a collaboration with the Environment Agency, towards devising performance models for engaging communities with questions of flood risk (follow-up meeting planned in Bristol at Cabot Institute). This will build, particularly, on themes of home and habitation explored extensively by network. Also engaged during network programme have been professional artists/companies including Dead Good Guides, NVA, Fevered Sleep, and PLATFORM, whose work has been variously used as a focus for critique.
At Cove Park, ten solo performances were made and presented (and documented in detail on our blog), representing a spectrum of individual responses to the physical location and climatic conditions. For the London meeting, three new performances were commissioned in advance, which fused the intimacy and locatedness of live encounter with the fact of London’s status as a global hub of environmental impacts (e.g. via oil industry). These included two city walks (by PLATFORM and Phil Smith) and a live, online collaboration with environmentally ill performance artist Julie Laffin (confined to her home in US).
Other planned outcomes include journal editions and conference activities, as well as critically-informed performance work.