An article I had published earlier this year opens with the line “Performance as an art form is live, ephemeral, and of the moment” (Cultural Geographies, April 2020). Are these words still relevant in the context of this global pandemic?

As a performance-researcher I am keen to examine the way in which contemporary performance-making responds to social, political, ecological and cultural events. I have previously written about the flurry of creative activity which was…

Arriving

“The more beavery the landscape is, the harder it is to find them.” This is what Laura Ogden, an environmental anthropologist from the US told us on our first evening in Bamff in Perthshire as we took an evening walk around the land to try to spot some beavers. An interdisciplinary group of ten researchers including artists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists visited the estate for four days to explore “landscaping with beavers”, and the possibility of…

Over the past few years I have undertaken numerous creative residential retreats. This prompted me to think about the benefits of these processes for artists, writers, thinkers and performance makers. All images are the author's own from the Performing Wild Geographies event at the Knepp Estate in October 2017.

Retreating: Thinking, Making, Being

The word retreat implicitly has the promise of a “treat” within it, referring to the…

Under the Surface of Knepp

(This was written as a response to the Performing Wild Geographies event which took place at Knepp Estate on the 2-4^th October 2017).

An arch of ghostly manta rays

Entrance to a wild place

Petrified and stacked

Bleached brown coral reef

Signalling death and end

Palimpsests

of lasts

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