Transient Roots Performance, place and exterritorials

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Notes

¹ Baumann's term raises controversial readings around community and emplacement, as I discuss elsewhere(Mackey 2006).

² For details about Caer Llan Field Studies and Conference Centre, the location of the research project, see www.caerllan.co.uk

³ Within this article, I use the terms site, place, environment and location. I equate site with location, as a geo-physical, chorographic, delineated area. (Clearly, site can be used conceptually, as it is in the Crary citation below. In this article, I use it geographically.) Location nods at person-inhabitation whereas site need not have that nuance. I employ them as congruent terms here. In using environment, I am suggesting delineated areas that embrace a stronger cultural influence than site or location, where the surrounding conditions are constituent of that environment. I use place as the aura (pace Benjamin) of a location together with the location itself and one with which human beings build a personal relationship and interaction. Place is both known physical materiality and psychological construction, therefore.

⁴ For example, ‘The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology that form the ground on which we stand – our land, our place, the local.’ (Lippard 1977: 7)

¹ In using ‘assemblage’, I purposely wish to convey the aggregation of concepts and practices associated with current Deleuze and Guattari-usage of assemblage, interpreted as a ‘site at which a discursive formation intersects with material formation’ (Crary 1992: 31).

⁶ It might appear that I am suggesting place became known through some form of Cartesian binary, which is not, in fact, the intention; I am intending to convey the inhabitation of place as a complex embodied experience. An unusually close physicalengagement took place with the materiality of the sites in this project, however, such that I want to draw particular attention to this, as the body in landscape was a noteworthy factor in the whole project (see Tilley 2004: 1–31 for a discussion on ‘From Body to Place to Landscape’).

⁷ Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga suggest, ‘humans “write” in an enduring way their presence on their surroundings’; this is ‘how people form meaningful relationships with the locales they occupy, how they attach meaning to space and transform “space” into “place”’ (2003: 13). This is strongly align to the seminal theories suggested by Lefebvre (1991 [1974]). I would question to what extent anybody writes their presence on place in an enduring way, however; I am unconvinced that we wrote ourselves in anything but the most fleeting way onto the Caer Llan landscape, for example. (Nor do I see us necessarily writing our presence onto longer-term landscapes.) However, we attached our meanings onto Caer Llan, certainly.

⁸ An AHRC-funded DVD, ‘Performing Place: The Caer Llan Trilogy’, will be published in Research in Drama Education 12(2) (June 2007).