Being both material realities and imaginative representations, landscape and environment are the loci and medium for the negotiation and expression of complex ideas, feelings and experiences – physical, sensual, emotional and cognitive – about beauty, belonging and identity, access to resources, relations with nature, the past and the future, making sense of the world and people's situation in it. Since 2005, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's multi-disciplinary programme Landscape and Environment has funded research into the whole breadth of these concerns and in relation to a range of places – urban, rural and industrial, spectacular and overlooked, everyday and enchanting, remembered and contested, protected and degraded, embodied, looked at, moved through, worked on and lived in.
As the research programme got under way, performance quickly established itself as a significant theme – not only as a creative practice and mode of representation but also as a vital means of embodied engagement and enquiry. Performance emerged strongly across as well as within projects, in formal and informal encounters between people inside and beyond the programme, in workshops, seminars, symposia and conferences. These included projects that had not explicitly or extensively specified it as a term, as well as those for which it was a topic of study, a central theoretical trope and part of the methodological apparatus. This reflects the wider performative disposition of the arts and humanities at present, in conversation with the wider spatial disposition which framed the programme. We took the opportunity to focus on this relationship and develop it further: landscape and performance, performance in landscape, performance about landscape, performance as landscape, landscape as performance … How might the rich implications of these conjunctions be further explored, examined, evoked, re-imagined and transformed, in grasping the wider relations between the human and non-human worlds? A new, potentially transdisciplinary, possibly post-disciplinary field opens in which scholarly and artistic practices intersect.
A key stage in this process, as both platform and event, was a workshop, with a central element of fieldwork, run as part of the Living in a Material World research network based at Bristol University and held at Mynydd Epynt, in the Sennybridge Milititary Training Area (SENTA), in mid-Wales. A gathering of researchers explored the complexities of the field as a place of practice, mindful in this place of its military meanings as terrain for the simulation of battle, a theatre of war, and of the fields of farming, the landscape of livelihood and identity, which had been appropriated when the training ground was originally created. Here we explored some of the groundwork of relations between landscape and performance, and their wide valency, and the various material processes of engagement (walking, crouching, huddling, map reading, observing, photographing).
Such was the momentum of performance-related research in the programme that it was chosen as the theme of the programme's annual conference, held in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, Aberystwyth University, under the title Living Landscapes. Its aim was to explore and demonstrate the manifold ways in which performance shapes and is shaped by landscape and environment. Among the questions posed by this event were: How are landscape and environment imagined, experienced, animated and represented by, in and through performance, at different scales? And how can performance inform, extend and enhance their appreciation, engagement and interpretation? What strategies and forms of performance exposition does working with landscape – as both medium for and scene of expression – inspire and necessitate? How are landscapes lived on, in and through? What is the life of landscape and environment, and how is it performed?
The international event brought together researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines to consider these questions. In papers, presentations, installations and performances, artists, activists and academics examined site-specific performance, walking projects, land art, itinerant research, traditional customs, mediated visits, leisure activities, environmental advocacy, travel, pilgrimage, transhumance, dwelling… Of particular note were the commonalities of interest and attitude that the event revealed between scholars and artists working in performance studies and those working in human and cultural geography.
This issue of Performance Research responds to and expands on themes and concerns that have arisen from the Living Landscapes conference, framing them under the title ‘Fieldworks'. It includes a number of contributions from the conference and others solicited by an open call. Fieldworks is a richly resonant term. It recalls traditions and techniques of open-air research and teaching, field studies, field trips, field trials, field walking and field notes, which some contributors reference in practices of observation and mapping, and develop in imaginative ways, for example to record sound and movement. Contributors draw on the histories and memories of fieldworking, the fields of farmworking, as well as the excursions of geography and excavations of archaeology. They probe underworlds and overworlds, of air, earth and water, and their mixtures and surfaces, in the edges and encounters between the body and the environment. They chart fields of vision as well as physical sites and spaces and the place of seeing and representation in the repertoire of experiencing, knowing and imagining landscape and environment.
Hayden Lorimer and John Wylie open their essay with open wings, a poem whose physical shape recalls the form of Tornado jets that scream overhead and Red Kites that wheel and twist in the thermals as the two make their way walking the hills of mid-Wales towards Aberystwyth, charting the topologies of sound between both their ears and the valley sides.
Dee Heddon and Cathy Turner relate their encounters with women artists whose practice is based on walking. Such practices reclaim walking as a convivial or communal activity, challenging and over-writing the powerful (art-) historical figure of the solo male walker.
In reference to his own practice, Nigel Stewart develops the concept of environmental dance as a means not only of deepening appreciation of the natural world, at the liminal space of solid and liquid, but of generating new ecological knowledge and of exploring environmental values.
Derek McCormack explores the field of the air through the practice of ballooning, as a material and imaginative space of things, bodies and relations. The ballooning craze of the eighteenth century mixed the conduct of scientific experiment with that of spectacular entertainment, a platform of practice that persists in subsequent ballooning projects. These include artworks and atmospheric experiments that take their flights of fancy to the edge of outer space.
Kate Lawrence, herself a practitioner of vertical dance, proposes that such a dance practice – which places the body literally on the edge – may be regarded as a kind of spatial fieldwork that uses the (dis)orientation of the vertical dancer to develop new understandings of our gravity-bound world.
Luis Carlos Sotelo calls attention to the political dimension to walking. Walking is used as an opportunity to explore, exhume and transform into something positive what it might mean today for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to share – voluntarily, peacefully and poetically – a moment in the so-called ‘wild’ in Colombia.
David Matless identifies the performative register of the most descriptive of field writing, including the itemized record of his own observations, whilst making a journey through Norfolk's Broadland. In these prose passages he charts six localized ‘pressure points' on a brightly appealing leisure map of the Broads, ‘where tensions of landscape become acute’ and where, as if on a new kind of narrative map, the wider field of regional culture and its complications are unfolded.
Jo Robinson addresses the challenges of capturing the lived experience of landscape in the past as she reflects on a project on mapping the performance spaces and activities of nineteenth-century Nottingham, from theatre-going to street parades. Mindful of the theoretical suspicion of cartography as the static view from above, she tests the capacity of various forms of mapping, from current digital cartography to traditional town plans, to offer insights into this world, particularly its sense of process and mobility, and focuses on a popular form of visual-geographical entertainment and instruction of the time, the moving panorama, as a medium for the encounter of representation and practice, past and present.
Michael Shanks and Chris Witmore attend to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarian activities in Italy, Northumberland and Greece in order to explicate the entwined notions of itinerary, topography and chorography and to locate their contemporary potential as a richly complex field of method, in which current technical and theoretical issues of landscape involvement and representation maybe identified. The ‘predisciplinary world’ of early modernity offers a genealogy for ‘our current disposition towards inter- or transciplinary spaces' and opens us up to ‘all kinds of creative possibility’ in representing places, regions and communities.
Dutch farmer's daughter and artist Wapke Feenstra describes two of her projects, which both involve engagements with local memory and differentiated experiences of landscape through the identification and creation of particular locales in rural contexts and a direct involvement with land and land-use.
Jacquie Clarke reminds us of the importance of water, not only as a practical necessity for human existence, and a large element in bodily constitution, but as a basic feature of human consciousness and its material and mental imagination. She shows how water features as a basic resource for designing and planning cityscapes with respect to their living ecologies.
Helene Varopoulou reports on a unique pedagogical undertaking: the Greek Summer Academy of Theatre, which over the span of a decade pioneered site-responsive learning and teaching practices through situating its pedagogies in carefully considered relationships to a variety of landscapes and environments.
Finally, David Williams offers a counter history of waste, which draws together poetic reflections upon current eco-mafia activities in Italy, the Fresh Kills site on Staten Island, and the work of artists and writers who are inspired by and working with and through ‘the excessive remainder of production and consumption, the redundant and disorderly rejected in all processes of “ordering”’.
The three sets of artists' pages that punctuate this volume are all visual snapshots of what are ongoing, long-term artistic explorations of the complex relationships between bodies, environments and perceptions. Sophia New and Daniel Belasco-Rogers of plan B have contributed a series of GPS ‘drawings'. What at first looks like a map to guide our movements reveals itself on closer inspection as the result of a myriad of movements, a constantly evolving cartography of the choreography of everyday life. Simon Whitehead and Barnaby Oliver similarly explore modes of mapping, but they do so through an assemblage of a wide range of materials, compiled not so much in order to explore how distances can be represented spatially but to explore how spaces can be represented across distances, how the memories of one location travel – physically and imaginatively – from this place to another. John Fox, too, is concerned with the representation of place and our relationship with it, in particular with our exploitation – physically and imaginatively – of the natural environment. For ‘Fieldworks' he has contributed a meditation on the domestication of England's wilderness, embodied here in the fate of its last wolf inhabitant.
Taken together, the contributions to ‘Fieldworks' survey a cross-disciplinary field of enquiry, with a range of perspectives and topics, as they move from the practices of walking, dance and aerialism, through re-evaluations of regionality and rurality, to questions of pedagogy and, finally, to an evocation of the politics and poetics of entropy.
The Haxey Hood
The Haxey Hood is a wide-ranging game played on 6 January each year in and around the communities of Haxey and Westwoodside in north Lincolnshire, UK. The first written accounts date from the early nineteenth century. Over a period of several hours, competing groups of men attempt to ‘sway’ the ‘hood’ – a metre-long leather cylinder – in a tight scrummage, across surrounding fields and through village streets, into one of several nearby public houses where it remains for the following twelve months. Organized and policed by a number of costumed figures – Lord, Fool and Chief Boggin with his twelve red-shirted attendant boggins – the event includes performative phases of communal singing, speech-making, procession and the throwing of mock sack hoods (as here), culminating in the game itself, which annually replays and reiterates communal relationships with a particular landscape, though few of its participants now work – as once – in farming.
In 1976, Richard Gough and Mike Pearson, then co-directors of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, attended several manifestations of calendar and traditional customs in Britain, accompanied by US photographer Michelle Bogre: the Haxey Hood in Lincolnshire, the Midgley Pace Eggers in Yorkshire and the Bacup Coconut Dancers in Lancashire. The images printed here (including the cover image by Bogre) were recorded during those visits at a time when the continued survival of some activities seemed in jeopardy as local affiliations loosened. But most rallied: at Haxey, it is now impossible to see these isolated figures in the landscape for the press of the crowds of both players and spectators.
Haxey Hood, 1928.
Haxey Hood, 6 January 1976. left Fool and Lord above right Lord and Chief Boggin below right Chief Boggin
Notes
1 For further description of the Haxey Hood, see Mike Pearson's In Comes I: Performance, memory and landscape (2006: 152–62).
Related Research Data
