Performance in the Field: Interdisciplinary Practice-as-Research 3031214242, 9783031214240

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Performance and Discipline
Performing Fieldwork
Histories and Memories
Mapping the Field
References
Chapter 2: Ecology: Patchy Performance at Bamff Beaverlands
Fieldwork at the Edges
Beaver Believers
Staging Beaver Worlds
Mapping and Walking
Sensing and Swimming
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Heritage: Following the Alloway Suffragettes
Departures
Glasgow to Alloway, July 1914
Glasgow to Ayr, May 2014
Robert Burns Birthplace Museum to Robert Burns Cottage, Alloway, June 2014
Performing Heritage
Performances of Mobility
Performances of Immobility
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Clubbing: Relational Performance at Death Disco
Clubbing Collectives
Midland Street
Clubbing and Performativity
Limitations and Antagonism
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Mobility: Performative Counterpractice for Regular Routes
Commuting, Creativity and COVID-19
Traversing the ‘Mundane Roadscape’
Object Journeys
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Deep Time: Future Pasts at Gully Cave
Quaternary Drift
Deep Time Imaginaries
Breathing In
Staying with the Detail
Conclusion: Breathing Out
References
Chapter 7: Conclusion: Encounter, Intervention and Co-becoming
A Model for Performance Fieldwork: By, for, with/as Field Site
(In)conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Performance in the Field Interdisciplinary Practice-as-Research David Overend

Performance in the Field

David Overend

Performance in the Field Interdisciplinary Practice-as-Research

David Overend The University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-21424-0    ISBN 978-3-031-21425-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21425-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Iona and Ruairidh, my collaborators in the field

Acknowledgements

The performance fieldwork in this book has involved many collaborators, including numerous co-investigators in the research teams, and all the artists, scientists, landowners, land managers, venue staff, producers and many others, who have contributed greatly to these projects. The list that follows is my attempt to thank all of the people I have worked with by name, but I apologise for the inevitable omissions. Thank you to all at Bamff Estate in Perthshire: the Ramsay family, especially Louise, Paul, George, Sophie and Dave Maric for a generous welcome and for joining in the fun; to Jamie Lorimer for all the wild adventures and for valuable comments on the introduction; to Clemens Driessen, Laura Ogden, Beatrice Searle, Scott Twynholm, Jenna Watt and Lewis Hetherington; to our official photographer Iona Bianchi-Overend; and to Laura Bissell for over a decade of making routes together and for all those yet to come. Thank you to Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Oxford and the Royal Society of Edinburgh for funding. Many thanks to everyone at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway: to Victoria Bianchi, for this collaboration and all our other escapades, and for comments on an early draft of the heritage chapter; to Annaliese Broughton and Pamela Reid, Jamie McGeechan and Mark McCrone, and Education Manager, Chris Waddell; and also to Helen Nicholson for comments on an even earlier draft and for suggesting it might work better as a book chapter rather than an article, which got me thinking about what the book could be. Thank you to South Ayrshire Council and Creative Scotland for funding the project, to South Ayrshire Arts Partnership for supporting our work and to the National Trust for vii

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Scotland for hosting us. Thanks also to all the staff, clubbers and audiences at the Arches arts centre in Glasgow: to my PhD supervisors, Deirdre Heddon and Minty Donald at the University of Glasgow; and Jackie Wylie at the Arches, along with LJ, Rob, Jason, Niall, Andy, John, Abby and everyone else who worked with me during my residency, but especially to Chris Hall for all the creative support. For the Midland Street project, thanks to the performers—Ed Cartwright, James Oakley, Rose Ruane, Mhairi McGhee, Louise Emslie, David Crompi and Karen Fishwick. Thank you to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my doctorate. My thanks to everyone I met (and those I never could) on my commuting routes between Glasgow and Ayr, and Glasgow and Heathrow: to Laura Bissell (again) for trespassing and transgressing and for feedback on the commuting chapter. And also to those at Ebbor Gorge in Somerset: to Danielle Schreve, who has shown me how to travel through deep time; to Jamie Lorimer (again) to Laura Bissell (yet again); to Helen Billinghurst, Catherine Dunn and Jack Reid; and to Phil Smith, who kindly offered comments on an early draft of the deep time chapter and who has been a mythogeographical mentor throughout these field trips. Thank you to our funders at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Thank you to Ashley Lewis-Cole for all the Tuesdays and for much-­ valued support in the last stages of the project. Thanks also to Jill Robbie for the inspiring interdisciplinary conversations. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback. And thank you to my publishers, to Arunaa Devi, Sathiyavathi Pajaniradj and Eileen Srebernik, and to everyone else at Springer Nature and Palgrave Macmillan. The performances, interventions and collaborations that feature in this book have not only involved human collaborators. I also want to acknowledge the myriad more-than-human actors that have become part of the relational assemblages of the work. Thank you, too. Chapter 4 was originally published as ‘Clubbing Audiences: Relational Theatre Practice at “Death Disco”’ in New Theatre Quarterly (28:1, pp.  67–79). Thanks to Cambridge University Press for permission to include a revised version in this book.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Performance and Discipline   7 Performing Fieldwork  10 Histories and Memories  14 Mapping the Field  23 References  26 2 Ecology 31 Fieldwork at the Edges  34 Beaver Believers  38 Staging Beaver Worlds  41 Mapping and Walking  45 Sensing and Swimming  50 Conclusion  56 References  57 3 Heritage 61 Departures  64 Glasgow to Alloway, July 1914  64 Glasgow to Ayr, May 2014  65 Robert Burns Birthplace Museum to Robert Burns Cottage, Alloway, June 2014  67 Performing Heritage  70 Performances of Mobility  73 ix

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Contents

Performances of Immobility  81 Conclusion  85 References  88 4 Clubbing 91 Clubbing Collectives  94 Midland Street  99 Clubbing and Performativity 102 Limitations and Antagonism 106 Conclusion 110 References 111 5 Mobility115 Commuting, Creativity and COVID-19 118 Traversing the ‘Mundane Roadscape’ 124 Object Journeys 134 Conclusion 142 References 143 6 Deep Time147 Quaternary Drift 150 Deep Time Imaginaries 156 Breathing In 160 Staying with the Detail 167 Conclusion: Breathing Out 171 References 173 7 Conclusion177 A Model for Performance Fieldwork: By, for, with/as Field Site 180 (In)conclusion 184 References 184 Index187

About the Author

David  Overend  is an award-winning theatre director and Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research focuses on contemporary theatre and performance, often at the intersection with cultural geography. Previous publications include Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010–2020 with Laura Bissell (2021), and an edited collection, Rob Drummond Plays with Participation (2021). David has also written numerous articles for journals including Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly and GeoHumanities. As well as over a decade of site-based performance practice, he has directed for many theatres, including the National Theatre of Great Britain.

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

A sculpture built by Laura Bissell, Jamie Lorimer and Laura Ogden as a ‘gift’ to the beavers during a workshop at Bamff Estate, Perthshire Fig. 2.2 Our group traces the external border of the estate: a border zone between neighbouring arable farmland and the wilder landscape of Bamff Fig. 2.3 A deep map of our fieldwork presented in texts and traces Fig. 3.1 Still from video footage of cycled journey from Glasgow to Ayr, May 2014 Fig. 3.2 Still from footage after the camera was knocked out of place Fig. 3.3 Pamela Reid performing CauseWay outside the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum Fig. 5.1 Poster by Rachel O’Neill for Everyday Commuting Excursions Figs. 5.2 Postcard (front and back) by Rachel O’Neill for Everyday and 5.3 Commuting Excursions Fig. 5.4 Pterodactyl en route between Glasgow and Heathrow Fig. 6.1 Jamie Lorimer as hippopotamus in Trafalgar Square Fig. 6.2 Phil Smith attends to something off camera as the group walk towards Gully Cave Figs. 6.3– Exquisite, deep time corpses 6.5

36 47 49 66 67 79 130 131 135 151 161 165

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 1985, Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels began an annual fieldtrip to the Veneto region of northeast Italy with their final year geography students. Their interest was in the ways in which landscape is culturally represented. Conceiving of the relationship between land and life as a ‘play of representations’, the region was explored not only through its artistic and literary iconography but also by paying close attention to the performative qualities of a wide range of sites—from urban streets to villa gardens and irrigated farmland (1989, p. 169). By studying these phenomena in the field, the group was able to place themselves within their environment ‘as actors within the drama of the place being studied’ (p. 173). As field researchers, they became part of the representational processes that constitute these sites, engaging with the dramatic interplay between insight and illusion, depth and surface, setting and action. In searching for an appropriate metaphor to make sense of the various representations of the Venetian landscape, Cosgrove and Daniels settle on theatre as ‘an arena of make-believe and a vehicle for probing the most profound truths about human conditions’ (pp.  170–171). Creative and empirical ways of knowing coexist in this field. Landscape is understood through performances of knowledge, power and belonging. Theatre is particularly appropriate as a lens through which to study the region’s capital, Venice, which the authors remind us is the city of rich theatrical traditions including commedia dell’arte. But the analogy extends to the quotidian city, as evident in the tradition of the passeggiata: an early © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Overend, Performance in the Field, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21425-7_1

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evening group stroll through the streets and piazzas. This is interpreted as a performance of citizenry, through which a large-scale participatory drama plays out against the expansive staging of the city’s architecture. While conceptualisations of landscape have been continually reframed and revised (Duineveld et al., 2017; Howard et al., 2018), Cosgrove and Daniels offer an important provocation that is worth revisiting for its potential contribution to contemporary field research. Their key suggestion, which informs the enquiry of this book, is that ‘it is perhaps time to see fieldwork less as a recording science and more as a performing art’ (1989, p.  171). This book moves across disciplinary boundaries to ask how far this call has been taken up. Identifying a space for its further application in the field of theatre and performance studies, it documents and reflects on a series of practical investigations into the limits and possibilities of performance fieldwork. In this research, field sites are understood not only as represented through this emerging methodology but also as constructed, determined and potentially enhanced—or challenged, subverted and reconfigured. This is a practical and embodied investigation that plays out across a range of sites. It interrogates the idea of fieldwork as a performing art by putting it to work within an updated critical framework, testing the dynamic and responsive methods of performance against contemporary environmental, social and spatial contexts. The case studies that follow provide a critically informed ‘toolbox’ of playful, experimental and creative methods for engaging with landscapes and environments. As Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri suggest, theatre and performance have a ‘long history of landscape representation and [a] more recent history of landscape practice’, which make performing art particularly well placed to contribute to ‘a vigorous inquiry into the role of spatial experience in constructing cultural meaning’ (2002, p. 6). Just as Cosgrove and Daniels approach Italian cities as stages of sorts, attending to the performances through which a region is represented, it is assumed that all sites can be encountered through their multiple performances. Performance research provides a rich set of ideas, concepts and methods to engage with field sites on these terms. Adopting a practice-­ based approach allows immersion in messy, unpredictable and exploratory processes, which often lead to surprising or unexpected results. This makes performance a powerful mode of engagement with sites that are composed of multiple elements in a continual process of becoming (Massey, 2005). Performance is well placed to engage with interactions between

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political and ecological systems, forces and energies, which are experienced at various scales and speeds. The key terms used in this book are complex and contested. Landscape includes the assemblage of material, social and cultural factors that determine the areas in which we work. It is encountered here as ‘ground rather than background’ (Pearson, 2019, p. 123). Informed by developments in performance studies at the intersection with human and cultural geography, it is accepted that in many ways, landscapes are created through processes of representation. But unlike historical conceptualisations which emerged through the traditions of landscape painting, for example, they are also understood as something to perform within, and as part of, rather than scenery to be viewed from afar. As the editors of the Performing Landscapes series suggest, landscapes ‘are encountered, represented, contested, materialised and made sense of through and in performance’ (Heddon & Mackey, 2020, p. v). Furthermore, As Duineveld et al. argue, a return to materiality across disciplines has seen the reconceptualisation of landscapes as ‘relational entities, entanglements of human and non-­ human elements, that co-constitute each other’ (2017, p.  375). Performance fieldwork has the clear aim of entering directly and physically into dynamic configurations of geographical features, anthropogenic systems and more-than-human inhabitations, as opposed to representing or recreating these processes elsewhere (such as in a painting or a theatre). Environment is a holistic term that recognises the web of connections that determine the space we inhabit—both observable and unobservable—and which we, in turn, create through our actions. Environments are encountered at a granular level within the scale of human experience. In this book, ‘environment’ is applied widely, for example, to the small-­ scale socio-spatial construction of a nightclub, the enclosed rural space of a conservation site, and the cross-country journeys of commuting routes. While this leads to a diverse selection of case studies, a common approach emerges through the enactment of performance within interconnected spatial relationships. Performance researchers (broadly and inclusively defined) have swum in the Beirut Sea, traversed Arctic icefields and walked the ‘mundane landscapes’ of the British motorway network (El Khoury, 2016; La Cour, 2018; Pinder, 2018). A series of situated encounters with diverse environments demonstrate the role that performance might have in imagining and creating future worlds. However, as these examples attest, it is no longer possible to remain at a local level. The sea is a perilous

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migration route that is full of sewage, the polar ice is a melting and disputed territory and the oil is heating the planet even as it runs out. The more-than-geological Anthropocene now draws everything into its orbit. The accelerated popularisation of this term has brought about important benefits, leading many of us to belatedly recognise the destructive forces that our infrastructures are wreaking on the planet (Howe & Pandian, 2020, p. 18; Tsing et al., 2020). However, such totalising narratives subsume individuated experience into a unifying planetary paradigm. This creates a ‘lexicon of geology that takes possession of people and places, delimiting the organisation of existence’ (Yusoff, 2018, p.  99). Kathryn Yusoff’s brilliantly titled book calls for A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None and is one example of a burgeoning critical remapping of myriad Anthropocene origin stories, which reveals the injustices of interconnected colonialist and extractivist projects. It has been made clear that the causes and effects of planetary destruction are far from evenly or universally experienced. An approach is therefore required that recognises contingency and temporality within sited encounters in specific landscapes. This is the ‘patchy Anthropocene’, which acknowledges that within landscapes that are ‘increasingly dominated by industrial forms’ more-than-­ human life is impacted unevenly (Tsing et al., 2019, p. S186). In the Anthropocene, neither environments nor landscapes can be isolated from the planetary forces that they relate to and develop within. However, as Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian suggest, ‘climate change and other expressions of threat and uncertainty at a worldwide scale demand a bifocal perspective, in which global optics like the Anthropocene are matched with careful reflection on the potentials, both positive and negative, of intimate forms of life and circumstance’ (2020, p.  20). Movement between perspectives is crucial. While Mike Pearson rejects a conceptualisation of landscape as background, Timothy Morton points out that ‘in an age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no foreground’ (2013, p. 99). In other words, granular, quotidian performances are inextricably bound up in and constitutive of massive-­ scale phenomena. Paradoxically, the ‘hyperobjects’ of global warming, extinction and habitat loss are primarily experienced at a local level. Terminological distinctions collapse into each other: landscape opens up to environment and environment is inseparable from the Anthropocene. While ‘environment’ and ‘landscape’ are not used interchangeably in this book, there is a considered flexibility in their usage. As with the numerous field reports on human-instigated ecologies that have surpassed

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human control, captured evocatively in the digital maps of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and her collaborators’ Feral Atlas (2020), polysemic terms are deployed to keep multiple meanings circulating. This book is also certainly a humanist project that wants ‘words to be flexible, open signifiers, drawing readers through the charismatic and suggestive multiplicity of their referents’. Throughout these field experiments, specific methods and techniques from theatre and performance—as well as art, film and creative writing—are embraced as powerful tools for engendering such openness and multiplicity. However, this is not to preclude the kind of transdisciplinary collaboration that is central to projects such as Tsing’s. When fieldwork involves close interaction between artists and scientists (who often seek precision over looseness), it is still possible to create ‘art science worldings’ by entangling our projects with those of others, including the assemblages of more-than-human life that comprise our field sites (Haraway, 2016, p. 67). To develop the relationship between performance and fieldwork, it is necessary to move beyond the artistic or aesthetic imperatives of theatre to attend to the more generalised and prevalent processes of performance that are identifiable in a diverse range of fields. The focus is on the ways in which landscapes are constituted through performance, which is understood broadly as the process by which human and non-human actors practice and display agency within their environments. While theatre is a useful metaphor for understanding the cultural representation of landscape, this book follows more recent conceptualisations and actualisations of performance as more than analogous to the subjects and methods of fieldwork (H.  Lorimer & Wylie, 2010; Overend & Lorimer, 2018). In fact, for Nigel Thrift, performance has potential for ‘producing a different ethos of engagement with the world’, one that is creative, careful and artful in its methods (2007, p. 121). Across a range of locations, and within different eco-anthropological contexts, this book reveals how performative processes continually play out ‘in the field’. In so doing, it practices a creative engagement with landscapes and environments, which has the potential to imagine and enact alternative ways of co-existing and co-evolving at these sites. Approaching fieldwork as performance is a way of entering directly into dynamic spatial relationships. Taking the theatrical metaphor further than simply reading the performances of field sites, this is to acknowledge the ways in which the fieldworkers’ presence and activity become part of them (Overend, 2012; Pearson, 2006). Here, fieldwork is approached self-reflexively as it

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enters into a formative relationship with its environment. This is a way of working that not only reveals the performative relations between land and life, but also recognises that research itself is a kind of performance that enacts a particular relationship to the world. While creative fieldwork takes a direct and ‘hands on’ approach to working with sites, the particular role and function of performance in this context requires some qualification. There is now a long-established consensus that the relational dynamics of the theatre are inherently implicated in wider ecological energies and processes (Chaudhuri, 1994; Kershaw, 2007; May, 2020). It follows that the environmental potentialities of performance are not necessarily reliant on propinquity to the phenomena that are being explored. For example, Carl Lavery attends to ‘the specific ways in which the theatrical medium conveys and produces ecological experience in and by itself’ (2019, p. 258; Lavery & Finburgh, 2015). For Baz Kershaw, in the modern world, ‘all human life is theatricalised and dramatized, including, crucially, its interactions with other species and the environment’ (2007, p.  12). For example, we encounter wildlife in the Anthropocene as a series of mediated spectacular events, as images of the natural world are constructed and circulated through documentaries, news stories and artistic representations (J.  Lorimer, 2015). Venturing into ‘wild’ places may be an attempt to move beyond this mediascape, but even such acts of retreat or exploration are culturally coded and shaped by narratives of wild adventure and conquest. Performance is already part of the imaginaries and conceptualisations that define our relationships and determine our place within the world. Many performance scholars have expressed scepticism about the efficacy of field-based approaches. Theatre is seen as capable of responding to ecological phenomena without the need for its practitioners to roll around in the mud, so to speak. Lavery critiques a tendency ‘either to advocate for a direct intervention into ecological and environmental matters and/or [to make] largely positive—perhaps even hyperbolic—claims for theatre’s capacity to bring about behaviour change’ (2016, p. 229). This often happens ‘through some ecstatic or enchanted immersion in “environment” or “nature”’, which can lead to unconvincing and ineffective practice. While this is a valuable warning for performance fieldworkers to heed, this book argues that the value of sited interventions can be upheld if a critical and questioning spatial practice can be developed.

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As I go on to discuss, fieldwork has been conceived and conducted reflexively across multiple disciplines for many decades. Positioning performance research within this lineage is an opportunity to practice research carefully, experimentally and creatively in various and diverse contexts. As with other modes of creative research, it becomes possible to adopt a responsive position and to make ethical and collaborative interventions (Hawkins, 2021). The methodology proposed in this book allows subscription to the value of sited experiments, while avowing the multiplicity of experience and also avoiding problematic claims of efficacy through an uncritical immersion or enchantment. In this way, fieldwork can enter into a relationship with the ecologies and performances of its sites, contributing new forms of embodied and situated knowledge. The resulting insights may be something akin to the ‘weird knowing’ of Timothy Morton’s ecognosis, as discussed later in the introduction—‘a knowing that knows itself’ (2016, p. 5). This knowing requires recognition of its positionality and its localised perspective, even as it is affected by wider environmental systems and processes. It is an approach that begins with acknowledgement and conscious negotiation of its own contradictions, tensions and limitations.

Performance and Discipline Rather than looking to theatre as an analogy from the perspective of other disciplines such as cultural geography, this exploration of fieldwork is located within performance studies. From this conceptual position, it moves outwards, connecting with diverse fields including ecology, heritage, clubbing, mobility and deep time. For Richard Schechner, performance is a ‘field without fences’ (2020, p. xi). It has been called an inter-discipline, a post-discipline, an anti-discipline and a quasi-‘discipline’ (Kershaw & Nicholson, 2011, pp. 3, 8; Roach, 1995, p. 46; Schechner, 2020). This hybrid status makes performance research particularly well placed to move into and through diverse fields of knowledge and practice. Performance emerges as the method, subject and outcome of fieldwork. Despite its openness and responsiveness to multiple perspectives and ways of being and knowing, performance involves specific approaches and more or less definable methods that can be ‘put to work’ in different contexts with a degree of precision and rigour. This is what Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson refer to as the ‘collection of skill-sets and knowledge-­ domains’ that are specific to theatrical structures (2011, p. 7). Importantly, they argue that creative research practices, including theatre and

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performance, ‘can both be defined as disciplines that encompass more or less specific subject skill-sets—say, playwriting, scenography, performer training of various kinds—and by their cultural, organisational and technological capacities to reach beyond disciplinarity as such’ (2011, p. 7). Mary Modeen and Iain Biggs put this differently when they argue that while the ‘community of action’ that emerges in artistic fieldwork ‘may draw heavily on skills learned in the professional worlds of the arts and the university, it remains open to, and engaged with, the full spectrum of challenges posed by the more inclusive concerns it addresses’ (2021, p. 215). The implication of this for a project that locates fieldwork within the somewhat loosely defined field of performance studies is that focussed, specialised and methodical research activities are not precluded, but that these must remain open and adaptable to the full complexity of the sites to which they respond and of which they become a part. Kershaw and Nicholson explain the both/and status of performance with a useful schematic, which maps the disciplinary ‘language game’ of multi-/inter-/trans- against the trilogy of drama/theatre/performance. The narratives and thematics of drama draw on an ever-expanding constellation of concerns and preoccupations, albeit frequently at domestic rather than environmental scale. For its realisation in performance, drama requires the coming together of different disciplines, as a uniquely collaborative and co-authored artform that can only be created through engagement with multiple actors on the expanded stage of the theatre. Theatre is understood as ‘a discipline that is inherently multidisciplinary in terms of skill-sets, say, but also interdisciplinary in its capacity significantly to engage other disciplines, such as anthropology, archaeology and ecology’ (Kershaw & Nicholson, 2011, p. 7). Operating in the space between these various ideas and knowledge systems, theatre does not necessarily move into a formative relationship with them. Before following Kershaw and Nicholson into the third stage, which is the transdisciplinarity of a broader conceptualisation of performance beyond the theatre, it is helpful to ask how ‘the theatre’ relates to ‘the field’ in this formulation. It is tempting to suggest a homology between the scientific laboratory and the ‘theatre laboratory’, which is often conceived as a studio or company devoted to training in a certain technique for theatre-making. However, even in this specific context, identifying a counterpoint to ‘the field’ is not straightforward, as Bryan Brown’s (2018) history of the theatre laboratory makes clear. It is a misconception to assume that the laboratory is a place that is disconnected or removed from

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the ‘interdependent relations or ethical bonds’ of collective and communal practice (p. 9). The theatre laboratory is not a hermetically sealed space that is set apart from its relational spaces and networks. This understanding of the theatre as porous and open to the world recalls Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh’s assertion that it has the capacity to produce ecological experience, rather than simply representing it (2015, p. 38). The essential point is that performance does not need to take place outside the theatre in order to generate social and environmental impact. Attending to the transdisciplinarity of performance informs an understanding of the practice of fieldwork, which engages with established or emerging systems and processes of performance beyond the constructed environment of the theatre-as-laboratory. A movement into the study of performance in fields outside the theatre takes us into the third level of Kershaw and Nicholson’s model: Performance shares [an] interdisciplinary capacity with theatre, but rather significantly reaches beyond that when posited as a paradigmatically integral factor of, say, human cultures or weather systems or the evolution of galaxies, i.e. as a trans-disciplinary vector of all or most events. (Kershaw & Nicholson, 2011, p. 7)

This concern with the transdisciplinary vectors of ecological performance processes will be returned to later in this chapter through a discussion of Kershaw’s own (literal) fieldwork in an English meadow. Transdisciplinarity in this context refers to the way that performance is ‘always operating in yet-to-be-defined intersections between disciplinary fields’ (Kershaw et al., 2011, p. 66). Regarding the elucidation of performance fieldwork, it is possible to move further beyond the analogical tactic of deploying theatre as a metaphor for landscape by entering into an expanded performative realm. This creates an active role for theatre and performance methods in engaging with the performances of diverse fields, which Schechner notes can all be studied as performance (2020, p.  1). This book therefore embraces what Schechner refers to as the ‘unsettled, open, diverse, and multiple’ qualities of performance studies in order to identify and engage with large-scale performative processes (Schechner, 2020, p. xii). But it is also concerned with the practice of specific tasks and activities drawn from the creative practice of performance that can be conducted in the field. This is to take as literally and seriously as possible the

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notion that fieldwork can be practiced as a performance art, which is now possible at the level of both localised actions and wider environments. This introduction proceeds by reviewing some of the ways in which fieldwork has been performed in different contexts. Reviewing some examples of creative fieldwork, it considers possible reasons for the limited uptake of the methodology in performance studies. It then pauses to chart a selective history of fieldwork which turns to field research in other disciplines in order to establish a set of key concerns that inform the discussion that follows. Finally, it introduces the series of excursions and visitations that comprise the main chapters. These case studies explore a series of experimental performance projects at several field sites, which took place between 2009 and 2021 in the United Kingdom. These diverse performance projects all involve a practice-based approach to research. However, it is important to note that they differ significantly in their methods, and that this study of fieldwork is a way of making sense of this body of work retrospectively.

Performing Fieldwork Despite the promising invitation to conceive of fieldwork as a ‘performing art’, this is an idea that has not gained as much traction as it might have— neither in the discipline of geography nor in the field of theatre and performance studies. Fieldwork practices have, however, been influenced by relevant and related epistemologies. Rather than apprehending phenomena through ‘filters of discourse or cultural signification’, non-­ representational theory has strengthened a concern with ‘immediacy and direct impact of practice’ (H. Lorimer, 2010, p. 74): attention has been paid to the ways that geographical knowledge is formed through everyday performances (Dewsbury & Naylor, 2002); and geography has become ‘affective’ in its concern with lived experiences of human and non-human subjects (J. Lorimer, 2008; Nicholson, 2015). It is against this backdrop that Daniels returns to the relationship between theatre and fieldwork, collaborating with performance scholars Mike Pearson and Heike Roms to co-edit a special issue of Performance Research on ‘Fieldworks’. This disparate collection of articles is introduced with consideration of a wide ‘repertoire of experiencing, knowing and imagining landscape and environment’, which can be imaginatively developed by performance researchers (Daniels et al., 2010, p. 2).

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The essays in the Fieldworks collection represent a broad church of practice/research. As the editors note, they ‘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’ (Daniels et  al., 2010, p.  4). Most of these examples are—much like the chapters in this book—gathered together under the title of ‘Fieldworks’ without necessarily conceiving or proclaiming themselves as such from the outset. This framework provides a way of consolidating a set of shared concerns that align with the case studies in this book: 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? (Daniels et al., 2010, p. 2)

While the critical take up of fieldwork has been something of a slow burner in performance studies, as the examples gathered in this journal attest, performance fieldwork is not a new phenomenon. Part of the task at hand is a recognition that much of what has already been happening has a very close relationship with what other disciplines have routinely referred to as fieldwork, even though that term has not been widely used in performance studies. One reason for this is that the set of activities that are typically referred to as fieldwork in other disciplines have different genealogies in performance. Site-specific performance, in particular, includes many of the encounters and interventions that in certain contexts would be recognised as fieldwork (Pearson, 2010; Smith, 2018). Artistic residencies also include many of the activities of observation, participation and documentation that would elsewhere be referred to as field research (Elfving et al., 2019). These often take place over a longer period of time (three years in the case of my Underneath the Arches project at the Arches arts centre in Glasgow, which includes the case study in Chap. 4) and may be delivered with a particular community group or organisation. Because such site- and

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community-oriented practices are frequently conceived and theorised as dichotomous to theatre-based performance, there is a parallel to be drawn between the field/lab distinction, which has been a major concern of science studies (Gieryn, 2018; Greenhough, 2006; Kohler, 2002). The laboratory is often understood as ‘a “made” space for controlled experiments’, while field sites are approached as ‘specific authentic spaces “found” by scientists’ (J. Lorimer & Driessen, 2014, p. 173). As discussed in the following section, the distinction between lab and field is not an easy one to uphold. However, inasmuch as its differences can be articulated—even if that is ultimately in order to critically problematise them—then the theatre might be usefully aligned with the scientific laboratory and the traditions of ‘site-specificity’ with the methods of field scientists or geographers. Another possible reason for the relative obscurity of fieldwork in performance studies relates to the previous discussion of the (inter/trans) disciplinary nature of the work. Due to the hybrid nature of performance, it often turns to established practices in other areas rather than inventing its own. In the case of fieldwork, human geography and science studies offer a ready-made set of methods and concepts that performance enters into a dialogue with. For example, as Harriet Hawkins suggests, ‘[T]here seems to be increasingly common conceptual ground and a growing set of shared practices between geographers and artists’ (2013, p. 1). In projects such as Phil Smith’s (2010) Mythogeography, as the name suggests, art and geography can be combined in such a way as to recognise and build on the methodological traditions of both. Performance has not tended to borrow terminology from these disciplines because their close relationship upholds their autonomy, maintaining ‘productive differences as well as shared areas of enquiry’ (Hawkins, 2013, p. 1). The concept of fieldwork offers a distinct approach to performance research that is at once separate from the practices of site-specific performance (even though it overlaps significantly), and also distinct from the research practices of other disciplines. An intriguing example of this is ‘In Comes I’, Pearson’s autobiographical exploration of Performance, Memory and Landscape (2006). Moving through three areas of expanding scale—a North Lincolnshire village, its neighbourhood and the wider region— Pearson explores a performance event, reflects on an excursion through ten specific locales and proposes a new performance project. At times, performance is not mentioned at all and the excursions evoke the traditional field report. However, the approach is to story the landscape—a performative ‘deep map’ that incorporates ‘juxtapositions and

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interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the discursive and the sensual’ (Pearson & Shanks, 2001, p. 64). As a leading proponent of Site-Specific Performance (2010), Pearson’s work is typically geared towards the development of (occasionally very large scale) performance projects, such as those undertaken with the Welsh environmental theatre company Brith Gof in the 1980s and 1990s. However, his work consistently brings the artist back to the existing textures and trajectories of the site. Performance is practiced as a way of understanding and inhabiting a landscape. Looking back across several decades of site-based performance practice, Pearson identifies fieldwork as one of the performance practitioner’s key modes of engagement with landscape and environment. A number of questions are posed for the ‘fieldworker: in pursuit of objects of study’:

• What are my objectives? Have I gone prepared? How is my visit planned in advance? Am I on a quest? Do I have an itinerary? Am I purposefully lost in space, trying to get my bearings? Do I have tasks to fulfil? • How do I orientate myself? Do I need a map to get around or am I drawn to, and moving between, old haunts on familiar routes in an ‘archi-textural meshwork’? (Ingold, 2007, p. 80). Am I met and shown around, my attention drawn to this or that which I might otherwise not have noticed? • Am I directed by the exhortations, admonitions and signposts of others? Am I pursuing quarry, following the tracks of animals or the flight-paths of birds? • Do I seek out the traces, archaeological traces, of other (former) visitors and occupants? As I move around do I leave marks: ‘to walk is to leave footprints’ (Roms, quoted in Whitehead, 2006, p. 4) • Am I simply enthralled by the place? Or is it difficult to know where it ends and I begin? • Is my journey a private, performative undertaking occasioned by the nature of the place: pilgrimage, ‘walkabout’? (Pearson, 2010, p. 21)

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These questions orientate the performance fieldworker. They also establish a reflexive approach from the start of the process, which is central to the frameworks that have been developed here. Kershaw and Nicholson argue for the necessity of a reflexivity that is doubly ontological and performative (2011, p. 7). This is a formulation that makes sense of performance fieldwork, which not only ‘alert[s its subjects] to the assumptions on which their “reality” (or ontology) rests’, but also applies this insight by enacting interventions within its sites. Reflexivity also underpins Cosgrove and Daniels’ interest in the theatrics of fieldwork, which is in part a response to a recognition in the social sciences of the ‘representational nature of our own academic writing and conduct’ (1989, p. 171; cf. Gregory, 1989). As they suggest elsewhere, ‘every study of a landscape further transforms its meaning, depositing yet another layer of cultural representation’ (1988, p.  1). The Venetian fieldtrip took place against the backdrop of a ‘turn’ to reflexivity in the social sciences, which brought questions of subjectivity and representation to the foreground of diverse research processes. Karen Lumsden notes the enduring influence of this concern with reflexive research, as a way of enabling ‘conscious[ness] of the social, ethical and political impact of our research; the central, fluid, and changing nature/s of power relations (with participants, gatekeepers, research funders, etc.); and our relationships with the researched’ (including non-humans) (2019, p.  4). Importantly, Lumsden argues that ‘reflexivity is (and can be) creative’. Within this context, although examples are less common of performance research explicitly proclaiming itself as fieldwork, fieldworkers in other disciplines have been more likely to follow Cosgrove and Daniels in looking to the reflexive practices of performance to creatively reimagine their own research methods (Castañeda, 2006; Wolcott, 1995).

Histories and Memories Daniels, Pearson and Roms engage with fieldwork as a ‘richly resonant term’ that can be creatively applied by performance researchers (2010, p. 2). This is to situate performance within an alternative tradition, one with various ‘histories and memories’ that do not always align with popular modes and methods of performance-making—such as site-specific theatre—but which share similar considerations and inform both complementary and divergent approaches. This section engages with some key developments in the history of fieldwork in order to highlight

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some of the key concerns that inform the chapters that follow. It also provides examples of artistic engagements with fieldwork, both from within and from outside the broad field of performance studies. These diverse perspectives and practices are connected through a concern with placing knowledge and knowing place. In this section and throughout the book, I attempt to position myself in relation to the theorists and practitioners from whose insight and ideas I have benefitted. As Haraway has suggested, when knowledge is situated it can be called into account (1991, p.  191). Haraway’s is a feminist response to totalising claims of scientific authority, but I do not write from a ‘subjugated’ position and nor would such a position guarantee ‘more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world’ (although it might make it more likely) (p. 191). My intention is to bring my partial knowledge and located enquiry into a relationship with ‘webs of differential positioning’ (p. 196)—the multiplicity of experiences, perspectives and knowledge practices through which field sites can be understood and encountered. This allows me to open up and connect my own interventions and interpretations to those of others who experience the world differently, thereby emphasising the partial and contingent nature of field-based research. The field trips in this book are afforded by privileged access to its sites, supported by funding grants and accessed through travel networks and capabilities. As the lead researcher in these projects, I am benefiting from my position as a male, white, non-disabled academic. Fieldwork is often conducted by people like me. I therefore attempt to learn from others who experience the world differently and have unique relationships to their environments that might unsettle the status and authority of my research process. I occasionally refer to cultures and traditions that I do not know, have not encountered and could never be part of. In so doing, I strive to avoid misrepresentation and generalisations. I acknowledge that I may not always get this right. However, in turning to a range of specific, sited experiences it is hoped that multiple voices, ideas and concepts can be mobilised alongside and in dialogue with my research, in order to demonstrate that fieldwork enters into existing spaces, which have also been lived in, interpreted and shaped by others. The way that fieldworkers have engaged with specificity of place has differed significantly across disciplines and through new conceptual and methodological developments. In the late twentieth century, anthropologists George Marcus and Michael Fischer criticised established fieldwork

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methods, which involved detailed and intensive ‘participant observation in traditional single site[s]’ (Marcus, 1995, p. 114; Marcus & Fischer, 1986). From this point of departure, Marcus and Fischer looked to multiple locales and a mobile form of ethnography that could adapt sited research practices to respond to a world system that was constituted through ‘the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-­ space’ rather than seeing field sites as natural entities that could be accessed in their totality, somehow revealing their true essence or essential characteristics (Marcus, 1995, p. 96). This was an influential intervention, which freed up fieldwork from rigid methods, narrow focusses and problematic claims. As the social sciences ‘turned’ to mobilities in the early years of the twenty-first century (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007), mobile methods found new popularity as many academics have taken to the road, seeking to understand a world in constant motion (Büscher et al., 2011; Fincham et al., 2010). A growing recognition of the dynamic interconnectedness of things has had a huge influence on field studies, and this has had relevance to performance studies and environmental humanities alike. The multi-sited approach has been criticised for its aspiration to ‘follow’ everything (Candea, 2007, p. 174). In his defence of the single field site, Matei Candea argues for the value of ‘processes of bounding, selection, and choice’, which have been too easily rejected at times (p. 169). This is not to advocate a return to traditional methods, however. The bounded field site offers a way of embracing the ‘the teeming multiplicity of an unfamiliar context’, which is compromised by multi-sited fieldwork in its claims of holism (p. 173). Arbitrary selection is way of problematising essentialist claims, acknowledging and avowing inconsistency and incompleteness. As a global academic and theatre director, accustomed to international travel and interested in contemporary mobility systems, I have often been tempted by the experiences and opportunities of mobile or ‘multi-sited’ fieldwork. However, I have also been mindful that the impulse to conduct research ‘on the move’—following whatever trail happens to present itself—is often problematic, particularly considering the detrimental role of mass-scale international travel to stable ecologies (Hill, 2021). Working with self-imposed limitations is one way of resisting the impulsive mobility that has so often been a feature of my own professional life. However, the field sites in this book are not selected randomly or freely, as the term arbitrary selection may imply. They are encountered, accessed and inhabited as a result of the opportunities and affordances of my

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position. In each case, specific relationships, invitations and permissions are required, which take time and resources to establish. In conducting fieldwork, it is easy for me to take safety and accessibility for granted. But this is not a straightforward methodology for everyone. Reflecting on a performance field trip to Waikuku Beach in Aotearoa, New Zealand, with ‘a theatre group of people deemed to have cognitive differences’, performance scholar and disability activist Petra Kuppers reflects on ‘access to expression’, asking ‘who is seen to be part of the citizenship of this thing called theatre, with its own histories of class and gender differences’? (2017, p. 73). Recognising that bodies are differently able, field trips are understood as situations in which more or less vulnerable subjects enter into new situations and relationships. Recent work in disability studies revisits the emotional and affective dimensions of fieldwork (Valente, 2017). As Janine Natalya Clark (2022) suggests, this can lead to particular insights and unique perspectives. For example, she notes that ‘having significant mobility issues has changed how I see things and what I see’ (p. 4). Cultivating new ways of moving and seeing is an important part of this methodology, which can be enhanced by the perspectives of those who access and experience field sites in different ways. These field sites are not arbitrary, then, at the level of my own access to them. But they are so in relation to my selected enquiry and through the partial and incomplete access that they provide to wider contexts and environments. In this sense, field sites can be approached as places of negotiation between the known and the unknown, the knowable and the unknowable. For Cosgrove and Daniels, this is one of the main reasons to undertake fieldwork, as ‘scientific knowledge can be generated by the contrasts between what is known and familiar and what is unexpected and disturbing to our assumptions’ (1989, p.  172). The experience of the fieldworker is key to this balance, which can be expanded to include negotiation of that which is accessible and inaccessible, available and unavailable. Candea concludes his article with a call ‘to recapture the value of not knowing certain things’ (2007, p. 181). This is proposed as a ‘new experimental moment’ (p. 180). If the performance research in this book can be considered ‘experimental’, the unexpected, disturbing and unknown qualities of the field sites have been significant factors in selecting the methods of enquiry. I have therefore turned to researchers in other fields who have embraced a lack of control in their experimentation. For example, examining ambiguous definitions of ‘experiment’ in environmentalism, Jamie Lorimer and Clemens

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Driessen propose the concept of ‘wild experiments’ to account for ‘open-­ ended, uncertain and political negotiations between people and wildlife’ (2014, p. 169). Wild experiments ‘occur in inhabited places and involve multiple forms of experience, not all of which are human’ (p. ibid.). This formulation extends Thomas F. Gieryn’s (2006) discussion of field sites as ‘found’ spaces, which he contrasts with the ‘placeless’ artificiality of the laboratory setting. Field experiments are characterised by ‘tentative procedure adopted in uncertainty’, but they are also ‘much more public and visible than laboratories and interventions will have real-world consequences’ (J. Lorimer & Driessen, 2014, p. 170). Problematising binary distinctions between laboratory and field, Lorimer and Driessen position their concept of wild experiments within the complex ecologies and politics of the Anthropocene, tracing negotiations between ‘found’ and ‘made’, ‘order’ and ‘surprise’, and ‘secluded’ or ‘wild’ epistemologies. Perhaps it is the willingness to experiment across epistemic boundaries that prompts a turn to creative practice in other disciplines. Working hard, and at times counterintuitively, to embrace the unfamiliar, Harriet Hawkins foregrounds the ‘responsive openness’ of creative fieldworkings (2021, p.  45). This phrase suggests a valuable approach to a fieldworker who wants to listen to and learn from field sites, rather than claiming to fully know them or using them to extract ‘findings’ or ‘solutions’. For Hawkins, artistic researchers cultivate ‘an experience of collective thinking with the site, where we are alive and responsive to the world around us, experiencing and experimenting with it, imaginatively open to it’ (2021, p.  45). These insights emerge from time spent in the field with artist-researchers, including a visit to Gully Cave in Ebbor Gorge (the site also visited in Chap. 6). In conversation with the artist Flora Parrott, Hawkins reflects on a sense of being out of place, as established perceptions of fieldwork were tested through collaboration with a visual artist: For me it was tough to think openly without goals, to invest without already fixing an outcome—this paper, that book chapter. Instead, I had to trust that out of the midst of all the things we were doing might come, or not come, outputs whose form we also had to be open to. This required cultivating a certain kind of attitude toward ‘making time’ that was not only different from that I had had before but also was a different sense of both outputs and research process—something that I think is crucial for the conditions of working and collaborating in the contemporary academy. (Parrott & Hawkins, 2021, p. 353)

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In response to this cultivated trust for emergent processes, here and elsewhere, Hawkins identifies the potential of artistic fieldwork as a way ‘to muse and play and explore the field’, rather than emphasising mastery of technique (Hawkins, 2021, p.  44). The value of negotiating ‘tough’ experiences and recognising the need for attitudinal change is important in this account, and may be a particular contribution of artistic research in reimagining traditional fieldwork practices. Modeen and Biggs also reconsider the concept of fieldwork to argue for a ‘hopeful […] collaborative and active praxis that can first imagine, and then create, a more sustainable future’ (2021, p. 220). The authors do not underestimate the complexity of such an endeavour, but their emphasis on the emergent ethics and contingent politics of site-based artistic research promotes fieldwork as an active methodology for ‘rebalancing and reconnecting life styles to our environment’ (p. 210). This requires nothing less than a ‘fundamental rethinking of the field traditionally referred to as “art”’ (p. 211): […] it is no longer a question of whether it is necessary to conduct fieldwork, but to what extent we are the fieldwork. […] In order to know the world in a manner sufficient to live attentively as a component part of dynamic matter, it is necessary to know what surrounds us, and how complexly we interact with our world. Fieldwork, then, takes on a whole new significance as we test and interact with our sister atoms, our sibling energies, our familial beings. (p. 214)

Artistic fieldwork divests an iterative process of ‘art-making’ from its singular, possessive individualism, and expands the field to account for multiple voices and perspectives coming together in specific field sites, in response to a multitude of possible futures. This approach also advocates a radical responsiveness to place, in which fieldwork recognises its part in the ‘mesh of connectivities’ that constitute its sites (p. 215). Acknowledgement and respect for the connectivity of all aspects of a place has been widely practiced outside the academy and beyond Western worldviews. A deep and long-established understanding of specific landscapes is recognised by Modeen and Biggs in their commitment to re-­ indigenising knowledge. Learning from Indigenous scholars, such as trawlwulwuy geographer Lauren Tynan, creative fieldwork might set out to better understand ‘a reality in which all entities are related’ and to practice forms of relationality that attend carefully to this as a way of living

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with and knowing the world (2021, p.  607). This can emerge through movement and processes of making with others (Barker & Pickerill, 2020). These insights are sometimes encountered through Indigenous and decolonial geographies, which value and acknowledge ‘the roles, affordances, emergence and collaborations of animate and inanimate non-humans’ (p. 647). An open and exploratory approach to research aims to uphold these principles through methods that aspire towards meaningful and respectful relationships with the land. In referring to these examples, my aim is always to avoid counter-­ intentionally contributing to the colonisation of knowledges, a process that Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues has played a significant part in the formation of the modern university and its insulating ‘disciplinary boundaries’ (2012, p. 132). Field research has a nefarious colonialist history and has often been conducted without the consent of those who live and work in the places that have been studied. Remembering the contentious and contested status of ‘research’ in their communities, when Indigenous people have been actively involved in research processes the emphasis has often been on co-becoming with the land and a consideration of the implications for academic research of an ontology—such as that of the Yolŋu—that understands ‘everything as knowledgeable, vital and interconnected’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2016, p. 270). As with the collective of Bawaka Country in Arnhem Land, Australia, multiple actors constitute the ‘shared author-ity’ of the research process (Bawaka Country et al., 2015). Such principles of decentring the human and treating landscape and environment as co-researchers are informed by the active and dynamic collaborations of Country, in the Aboriginal English term: ‘all the animals, plants, winds, processes, things, dreams and people that emerge together in nourishing, co-constitutive ways’. However, as Bram Büscher (2021) points out, in some circumstances, it is also necessary to re-centre certain humans and to acknowledge historical processes of dehumanisation that cannot be obscured by the turn to more-than-human geographies. These diverse perspectives prompt careful attention to questions of ownership, agency and authorship in field research. Artistic representations and performances of field sites have captured and enacted the tensions between response and intervention in order to position them as dynamic spaces of diverse meaning and potential. There is an inherent eco-politics at play in these works, which opens up to a progressive relationality with the more-than-human (or ‘more-than-life’ to use Büscher’s preferred term to address a ‘highly uneven capitalist

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biopolitics’ (2021, p.  66)). This awareness of, and attentiveness to, co-­ presence can be experienced as unsettling in its recalibration of habitual responses, or for Timothy Morton (2016), weird. Morton argues that ‘the experience of art provides a model for the kind of coexistence ecological ethics and politics wants to achieve between humans and non-humans’ (2018, p. 41). This is because feelings of unreality are intrinsic to an ecological experience. While many have been experiencing life on a damaged planet for some time, for those of us who have finally—occasionally reluctantly—started to recognise and respond to planetary crises, our arrival in the current geological epoch is akin to visiting an unfamiliar country, where things (lights, furniture, circadian rhythms) seem ‘strange, yet familiar, yet familiarly strange—yet strangely familiar’ (p.  44). Artistic methods are uniquely placed to enact this sense of the uncanny because they enact a ‘not-quite-reality [that is] vital to our experience of ecology’ (pp. 39–40). In this view, embracing the unknown is essential for ecological subjectivity (Hopfinger & Bissell, 2022). This is because we live in a world that cannot be fully known. ‘Inviting in the unknown’ is to recognise and work with the multiplicity of experience that constitutes this ecological moment. While the current geological epoch may have already begun by the nineteenth century, contemporary art and literature is distinct in its self-­ conscious negotiation of human impact on a planetary scale. As David Farrier suggests, this creates an ecological imperative ‘to address the fact of living in a present so intruded upon by deep pasts and deep futures’ (2019, p.  17). These alternative temporalities come together in strange and unexpected ways. Like the case studies in this book (particularly the chapters on Ecology and Deep Time), many of the artistic projects that have addressed these questions head-on have counterintuitively scaled down their modes and methods, enacting ‘closeness to the earth’ as a means of repairing our relationship with it (Morton, 2008). In Meadow Meanders, his ‘meadow-based rural performance experiment’, Baz Kershaw speculates on the possibility of making some of the features of the global ecosystem transparent through a manifestly local experience of walking through an English field (2012, pp. 13-16). Taking the form of a roughly hewn path through a tangled sward, Kershaw invites participants to walk a route with an undisclosed global significance: its correspondence to a major ecological feature of planet Earth. This remains undisclosed—at least initially—in order to generate a particular quality of exploration. This ‘simple and somewhat ridiculous path in an

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unremarkable countryside field’ acquires significance for the meanderers, as the embodied, repetitive act of walking a tangled line is experienced as a performance compulsion that is simultaneously mundane and powerful (p.  16). It is worth noting the romantic undertones of such a project, remembering that the ostensible unremarkability is only so to those who are invited and included. But for Kershaw, it is the familiarity of individual practices that may prevent abandonment of our everyday performance compulsions, which are cumulatively destroying the planet. Meadow Meanders gently repairs this compulsion by allowing its participants to become performed by ecology, as ‘ecologically the pathway’s energies/ agencies may be flowing through us’ (Kershaw, 2016, p. 283). Kershaw acknowledges that this act may be so ‘banal’ and ‘trivial’ as to be ‘easily dismissed’ as ‘useless’ (2012, p. 16). However, it creates a space that is radically open through its staged encounter with unknowable entities (Heron & Kershaw, 2018). This is a space of reflection and reconfiguration, which connects the walker in this specific site to a knowledge of planetary ecological movements. What is the particular form of knowledge that seems to be accessible via these ostensibly unremarkable pathways through a real or represented field? While accessibility has to be carefully considered, Kershaw claims that these meanders open up a space of transdisciplinarity, in which the traveller enters into a sort of environmental void space, in which ‘nothing is known for sure’ (Heron & Kershaw, 2018, p. 22). The mode of knowledge that they suggest is transdisciplinary because it utilises the inherently boundless nature of performance to open up ‘a lacuna or gap in experience’, which the meanderer is invited to spend time within (Heron & Kershaw, 2018, p. 21). As a way of knowing, this has clear resonances with Morton’s ecognosis: Ecognosis is like knowing, but more like letting be known. It is something like coexisting. It is like becoming accustomed to something strange, yet it is also becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation. Ecognosis is like a knowing that knows itself. Knowing in a loop—a weird knowing. (Morton, 2016, p. 5)

In both formulations, the point is not the pursuit of complete or comprehensive knowledge. Rather, through ecologically oriented practice, the politics of co-existence (with fields, concepts, performances) position knowledge as inherently partial, contingent and fragile. As Morton

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suggests, this is a ‘world in which objects are suffused with and surrounded by mysterious hermeneutical clouds of unknowing’ (2016, p.  6). Field sites are uncanny: they help us to encounter places of dark ecologies and everyday performance compulsions, where familiarity opens up to weirdness in unexpected and unsettling ways. They are also multiple: they contain pasts and futures, natural and social forces, human and non-human spheres of activity. Performance fieldwork can attune research processes to the hidden, overlooked and unknown qualities of its sites, revealing and enacting their expanded potentialities.

Mapping the Field This book documents a series of excursions, visitations and interventions that took place between 2009 and 2021. In different ways, and with varying degrees of success, these events were all attempts to travel out from the ‘discipline’ of performance studies. They are interdisciplinary in the sense in which Robert Frodeman uses the term, both as ‘intra-academic integration of different types of disciplinary knowledge’, and as beyond this epistemic task through communication beyond the academy (2017, p.  4). They are also, at times, transdisciplinarity in their radical openness to converging knowledge practices. For Kershaw, in such epistemological between-spaces, ‘you are entering into a relationship with your surroundings that potentially leaves you more open to what is happening in those surroundings and the forces, energies, and so forth that are circulating there’ (Heron & Kershaw, 2018). As with Hopfinger and Bissell, and Morton’s, recourse to the ‘unknown’, this requires a particular field methodology that is emergent and site-specific. In the chapters that follow, a set of features and principles are revealed, which are summarised in an (anti) conclusion that aims to keep this space open for new formations and trajectories. As mentioned, the majority of these projects took place in the United Kingdom—more specifically, in Scotland where I have worked as a theatre director and academic for two decades, and where I now teach Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh. On one level, the Scottish focus is a situation determined by my location and is therefore a limitation imposed by practicality. On another, in terms of carbon emissions there is great value in prioritising the local and national over the international (Quinton, 2020). This approach may also be of some methodological value as it provides a bounded context for the field sites that are

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explored in this book. This resonates with the ‘patchy’ methodology of taking a localised and granular approach that is then placed in dialogue with related projects in other contexts (Tsing et al., 2019). Proposing a new model for anthropology, Tsing and her co-authors note the importance of ‘attending to specificity without being parochial’ (p. S186). Importantly, like the use of ‘patchy’ in Feral Atlas—a term that is borrowed from landscape ecology and deployed to trouble totalising conceptualisations of the Anthropocene—its use here refers not to separate or disconnected areas, but also to links, interconnections and entanglements. This is an approach to working at specific sites that explores the smallest of details but then relates individual situations to the wider patchwork of interrelating phenomena. This is a diverse selection of projects at different types of field site, from conservation projects to nightclubs, flight paths to museums. Collectively, the reflections and analyses presented here provide a sort of textual map of interdisciplinary practice-as-research. Tsing et al.’s (2020) reimagining of the form of the atlas to chart the ‘feral effects’ of anthropogenic infrastructure allows us to ‘imaginatively locate ourselves within landscapes, both known and unknown’. The constellation of fieldworks in this book is offered with a similar aim—to develop ‘practices of staying present and receptive to material processes and ecological transformations in the world’. As such, each of the case studies is framed as precisely located and described in enough detail to situate the reader imaginatively in the places where these projects take place. But like Feral Atlas, they are also intended to be generative mappings that open up to the possibility of future performance fieldwork at other sites by other researchers. Rather than the usual convention of summarising the content in the introduction, each chapter begins with a brief field report, which responds to the below set of prompts to offer an easily navigable route map for each project. This approach helps to bring these disparate case studies into a dialogue with each other around the interpretive framework of performance fieldwork. In some cases, this strategy allows a retrospective framing of the research projects. In line with the earlier discussion, these were variously conceived as artistic residencies and site-specific theatre and performance; also as practice-as-research, creative workshops, performative counterpractice, mobile autoethnography and relational performance practice. Performance fieldwork is a concept that serves to consolidate

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over a decade of practice/research to trace ongoing and emerging enquiries and to reflect on a wide range of performative experiments. Field  In each case, the field of enquiry is introduced and mapped out. The concept of field is tested and developed throughout. Performance enters into each field in very different ways. Openings  Fields are not usually wide open. In most cases, some kind of gatekeeper is involved, at least in the early stages of the project. The invitation, request or application is a key stage in the process and often significantly determines the way that a project develops. Enquiry  This starts tentatively and gradually comes into focus after a period of exploration or investigation. Sometimes it changes completely by the end of the process. It is not a hypothesis to be proved or disproved, but an open, generative question to be considered and only occasionally answered. Approach  The enquiry guides the particular activities. But sometimes in these projects, the proposed or commissioned output predetermines the work undertaken. A range of methods are employed, but in all cases, some form of performance practice takes place at the field sites, prompting creative ways of engaging with specific situations and contexts. Outputs  Ranging from academic journal articles to public performances, the outputs of these projects are as varied as their field sites. The chapters in this book gather together published analyses, written and photographic documentation and excerpts of texts from performances. As will become clear, artistic fieldwork does not always set out with an endpoint in mind. The value of this work is often to be found primarily in the process. As Daniels, Pearson and Roms suggest, to frame performance research in this way ‘recalls traditions and techniques of open-air research and teaching, field studies, field trips, field trials, field walking and field notes’ (2010, p.  2). To a greater or lesser extent, the chapters that follow all engage with these methods. Individually, all these case studies can be understood as experiments in the practice of performance at different field sites. Collectively, they represent a wide range of approaches to researching diverse landscapes and environments through the ‘performing art’ of fieldwork.

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References Barker, A. J., & Pickerill, J. (2020). Doings With the Land and Sea: Decolonising Geographies, Indigeneity, and Enacting Place-agency. Progress in Human Geography, 44(4), 640–662. Bawaka Country, Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., et al. (2015). Working with and Learning from Country: Decentring Human Authority. Cultural Geographies, 22(2), 269–283. Bawaka Country, Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., et al. (2016). Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space. Progress in Human Geography, 40(4), 455–475. Brown, B. (2018). A History of the Theatre Laboratory. Routledge. Büscher, B. (2021). The Nonhuman Turn: Critical Reflections on Alienation, Entanglement and Nature Under Capitalism. Dialogues in Human Geography, 12(1), 54–73. Büscher, M., Urry, J., & Witchger, K. (2011). Mobile Methods. Routledge. Candea, M. (2007). Arbitrary Locations: in Defence of the Bounded Field-site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(1), 167–184. Castañeda, Q. (2006). The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography: Performative Principles of Fieldwork. Anthropological Quarterly, 79(1), 75–104. Chaudhuri, U. (1994). “There Must Be a Lot of Fish in that Lake”: Toward an Ecological Theater. Theater, 25(1), 23–31. Clark, J.  N. (2022). Disability and Fieldwork: A personal Reflection. Qualitative Research. Cosgrove, D., & Daniels, S. (1988). The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge University Press. Cosgrove, D., & Daniels, S. (1989). Fieldwork as Theatre: A Week's Performance in Venice and its Region. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 13(2), 169–182. Daniels, S., Pearson, M., & Roms, H. (2010). Editorial. Performance Research, 15(4), 1–5. Dewsbury, J.-D., & Naylor, S. (2002). Practising Geographical Knowledge: Fields, Bodies and Dissemination. Area, 34(3), 253–260. Duineveld, M., Van Assche, K., & Beunen, R. (2017). Re-conceptualising Political Landscapes After the Material Turn: A Typology of Material Events. Landscape Research, 42(4), 375–384. El Khoury, T. (2016). Swimming in Sewage: Political Performances in the Mediterranean. Performance Research, 21(2), 138–140. Elfving, T., Gielen, P., Kokko, I., Alexander, L., & Anglès, N. (2019). Contemporary Artist Residencies: Reclaiming Time and Space. Valiz.

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Farrier, D. (2019). Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. University of Minnesota Press. Fincham, B., McGuinness, M., & Murray, L. (2010). Mobile Methodologies. Palgrave Macmillan. Frodeman, R. (2017). The Future of Interdisciplinarity: An Introduction to the 2nd edition. In R. Frodeman, J. T. Klein, & R. C. Dos Santos Pacheco (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (pp. 3–8). Oxford University Press. Fuchs, E., & Chaudhuri, U. (2002). Land/Scape/Theater. University of Michigan Press. Gieryn, T. F. (2006). City as Truth-Spot: Laboratories and Field-Sites in Urban Studies. Social Studies of Science, 36(1), 5–38. Gieryn, T. F. (2018). Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe. University of Chicago Press. Greenhough, B. (2006). Tales of an Island-Laboratory: Defining the Field in Geography and Science Studies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(2), 224–237. Gregory, D. (1989). Areal Differentiation and Post-Modern Human Geography. In D. Gregory & R. Walford (Eds.), Horizons in Human Geography (pp. 67–96). Macmillan. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hawkins, H. (2013). For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. Routledge. Hawkins, H. (2021). Geography, Art, Research: Artistic Research in the GeoHumanities. Routledge. Heddon, D., & Mackey, S. (2020). Series Editor's Preface. In Performing Landscapes [series]. Palgrave Macmillan. Heron, J., & Kershaw, B. (2018). On PAR: A Dialogue about Performance-as-­ Research. In A.  Arlander, B.  Barton, M.  Dreyer-Lude, & B.  Spatz (Eds.), Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact (pp. 20–31). Routledge. Hill, T. (2021). Travel's Place in the Environment. In M.  Niblett & K.  Beuret (Eds.), Why Travel? Understanding Our Need to Move and How It Shapes Our Lives (pp. 275–296). Bristol University Press. Hopfinger, S., & Bissell, L. (2022). Performance Research and Pedagogy: Inviting in the Unknown. Media Practice and Education, 1–18. Howard, P., Thompson, I., Waterton, E., & Atha, M. (2018). The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies. Routledge. Howe, C., & Pandian, A. (Eds.). (2020). Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon. Punctum Books. Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A Brief History. Routledge.

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Kershaw, B. (2007). Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events. Cambridge University Press. Kershaw, B. (2012). ‘This is the Way the World Ends, Not …?’: On Performance Compulsion and Climate Change. Performance Research, 17(4), 5–17. Kershaw, B. (2016). Projecting Climate Scenarios, Landscaping Nature, and Knowing Performance: On Becoming Performed by Ecology. Green Letters, 20(3), 270–289. Kershaw, B., Miller, L., Whalley, J.  B., Lee, R., Pollard, N., & Nicholson, H. (2011). Practice as Research: Transdisciplinary Innovation in Action. In B.  Kershaw & H.  Nicholson (Eds.), Research Methods in Theatre and Performance (pp. 63–85). Edinburgh University Press. Kershaw, B., & Nicholson, H. (2011). Research Methods in Theatre and Performance. Edinburgh University Press. Kohler, R. E. (2002). Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology. University of Chicago Press. Kuppers, P. (2017). Theatre & Disability. Bloomsbury. La Cour, E. (2018). A Montage of Notes from Svalbard: Mediating the Arctic through Artistic Research. In G. Hedin & A.-S. N. Gremaud (Eds.), Artistic Visions of the Anthropocene North: Climate Change and Nature in Art. Routledge. Lavery, C. (2016). Introduction: Performance and Ecology—What Can Theatre Do? Green Letters, 20(3), 229–236. Lavery, C. (2019). How Does Theatre Think Through Ecology? In M. Bleeker, A.  Kear, J.  Kelleher, & H.  Roms (Eds.), Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (pp. 257–269). Bloomsbury. Lavery, C., & Finburgh, C. (2015). Introduction: Greening the absurd. In Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage (pp. 1–58). Bloomsbury. Lorimer, H. (2010). Forces of Nature, Forms of Life: Calibrating Ethology and Phenomenology. In B.  Anderson & P.  Harrison (Eds.), Taking-Place: Non-­ Representational Theories and Geography (pp. 55–78). Ashgate. Lorimer, H., & Wylie, J. (2010). LOOP (A Geography). Performance Research, 15(4), 6–13. Lorimer, J. (2008). Counting Corncrakes: The Affective Science of the UK Corncrake Census. Social Studies of Science, 38(3), 377–405. Lorimer, J. (2015). Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation After Nature. University of Minnesota Press. Lorimer, J., & Driessen, C. (2014). Wild Experiments at the Oostvaardersplassen: Rethinking Environmentalism in the Anthropocene. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39(2), 169–181. Lumsden, K. (2019). Reflexivity: Theory, Method and Practice. Routledge.

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Marcus, G. (1995). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Marcus, G., & Fischer, M. (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. SAGE Publications. May, T. J. (2020). Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater. Routledge. Modeen, M., & Biggs, I. (2021). Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies. Routledge. Morton, T. (2008). John Clare's Dark Ecology. Studies in Romanticism, 47(2), 179–193. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press. Morton, T. (2016). Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press. Morton, T. (2018). Being Ecological. Penguin. Nicholson, H. (2015). Affective Geographies of the Ballot Box. Contemporary Theatre Review, 25(2), 230–241. Overend, D. (2012). Performing Sites: Illusion and Authenticity in the Spatial Stories of the Guided Tour. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 12(1), 44–54. Overend, D., & Lorimer, J. (2018). Wild Performatives: Experiments in Rewilding at Knepp Wildland Project. GeoHumanities, 4(2), 527–542. Parrott, F., & Hawkins, H. (2021). Conversations in Caves. Leonardo, 54(3), 350–354. Pearson, M. (2006). "In Comes I": Performance, Memory and Landscape. University of Exeter Press. Pearson, M. (2010). Site-Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan. Pearson, M. (2019). How Does Theatre Think Through Things? In M. Bleeker, A.  Kear, J.  Kelleher, & H.  Roms (Eds.), Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (pp. 115–129). Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Pearson, M., & Shanks, M. (2001). Theatre/Archaeology: Disciplinary Dialogues. Routledge. Pinder, D. (2018). Envisioning Networked Urban Mobilities: Art, Performances, Impacts. In A.  A. Kjaerulff, S.  Kesselring, P.  Peters, & K.  Hannam (Eds.), Envisioning Networked Urban Mobilities: Art, Performances, Impacts (pp. 48–62). Routledge. Quinton, J.  N. (2020). Cutting the Carbon Cost of Academic Travel. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 1(1), 13–13. Roach, J. (1995). Culture and Performance in the Circum-Atlantic World. In A.  Parker & E.  Kosofsky Sedgewick (Eds.), Performativity and Performance (pp. 45–63). Routledge.

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Schechner, R. (2020). Performance studies: An introduction (4th ed.). Routledge. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38(2), 207–226. Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books. Smith, P. (2010). Mythogeography. Triarchy Press. Smith, P. (2018). Making Site-specific Theatre and Performance: A Handbook. Macmillan International Higher Education. Thrift, N. (2007). Performance and Performativity: A Geography of Unknown Lands. In J. Duncan, N. C. Johnson, & R. H. Schein (Eds.), A Companion to Cultural Geography (pp. 121–136). John Wiley & Sons. Tsing, A. L., Keleman Saxena, A., Zhou, F., & Deger, J. (2020). Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene. Stanford University Press. feralatlas.org. Tsing, A.  L., Mathews, A.  S., & Bubandt, N. (2019). Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20. Current Anthropology, 60(S20), S186–S197. Tynan, L. (2021). What is Relationality? Indigenous Knowledges, Practices and Responsibilities with Kin. Cultural Geographies, 28(4), 597–610. Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Polity. Valente, J. M. (2017). Anxiety as a Tool for Critical Disability Studies Fieldwork. Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, 13, 2. Whitehead, S. (2006). Walking to Work. Shoeless. Wolcott, H. F. (1995). The Art of Fieldwork. AltaMira Press. Yusoff, K. (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 2

Ecology: Patchy Performance at Bamff Beaverlands

Field 56.6472, -3.2672 Bamff Estate, Perthshire Bamff is a 1300 acre estate in the region of the River Tay. It is home to the Ramsay family, who have owned the land since 1232. 1 In 2001, beavers were first spotted in the Tay, having escaped from private enclosures. A year later, the current owners attempted to establish a population at Bamff. They persevered after some early mortalities, and beavers have now been breeding successfully since 2005. (continued)

1  Ben Goldfarb recounts this colourful mythology of the Bamff Estate: ‘King Alexander II gifted Neish Ramsay a sizeable parcel of fields and woodlands in a verdant corner of eastern Scotland. Neish did much to earn his bequest: Local legend purported that he’d studied medicine under a wizard and, in the source of preparing some magical pharmaceuticals, had ingested a dollop of white snake venom, which, naturally, imbued him with X-ray vision. When the king fell ill, the physician hastened to the palace, where he diagnosed Alexander II with a hairball lodged in his innards and—via surgery, not sorcery—extracted the offending object’ (2018, 195).

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(continued)

Today, Bamff hosts the longest established population of reintroduced beavers in Scotland and the longest beaver dam in the United Kingdom. The environment is undergoing dramatic transformation as a result, with the agricultural enclosures that previously dominated the landscape opening up to a shifting patchwork of fields, plantations and wetlands. The management of the landscape at Bamff embraces the ‘patchiness of multispecies politics’ (Tsing et al., 2019, p. S193). Consequently, the Ramsays’ openness to the transgression of anthropogenic systems by a reintroduced keystone species is subject to a range of more-than-­human negotiations and tensions. Openings The fieldwork at Bamff was built on the success of previous performance research at Knepp Castle Estate in West Sussex—the site of a large-scale ‘rewilding’ project (Overend & Lorimer, 2018). This work established an ongoing collaboration with Jamie Lorimer—a geographer at the University of Oxford, whose study of Wildlife in the Anthropocene (2015) had informed my early interest in experimental conservation practices. Lorimer introduced me to the Ramsays, who were open to our suggestion of artistic fieldwork at the estate. We then undertook a series of fieldtrips between June 2019 and March 2020. As with our work at Knepp, our team consisted of multidisciplinary artists and researchers in search of shared understandings and methods. Our initial fieldwork had revealed a productive connection between the process-led conservation methods of rewilding and collaborative performance practices. Developing this methodology at Bamff was an opportunity to enact a ‘patchy’ performance practice within the specific multispecies assemblage of the beaver reintroduction project. Enquiry Approaching Bamff as performance fieldworkers, we were ‘in pursuit of objects of study’ (Pearson, 2010, p.  21)—literally in (continued)

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(continued)

this case, as we searched Bamff’s waterways hoping to encounter the elusive Castor fiber. We also wanted to discover how the environment at Bamff had been affected by the ecological entanglements that were in process at the site (Haraway, 2017). Much of our enquiry was located at the complex internal and external borders, which were often revealed as contested. Performance was explored as a way of engaging with, and entering into, these relational assemblages of human interlocutors and newly resident beavers, co-­existing within a dynamic environment. In the context of the patchy ecologies of the Anthropocene, the beaver is an agential world-maker. Our performance fieldwork set out to understand how the beaver remakes land and waterscapes and to explore research methods for responding to and making with these processes. Approach This fieldwork centred around several activities: sensing, swimming, mapping, walking and making. We initially explored the estate through maps and on foot, searching for evidence of emerging ecologies. We then used collaborative performance tasks to generate a collection of creative responses—fragments of text, movement and images, which we combined into curated performance events and installations. This methodology placed us directly within the various performances and ecologies of this specific field site. Importantly, working within a highly fragmented landscape, our methods sought to identify and explore edges, borders and zones. The temporary and contingent interventions that we made in these places offer a model for performance fieldwork that insists on situatedness and specificity but has the potential to inform a wider project of more-than-human world-making. Outputs This project generated a range of texts, artefacts and performances. Many of these have been documented through a series (continued)

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(continued)

of essays by some of the research team (Bissell & Overend, 2021). The project also informed the development of George FinlayRamsay’s CASTOROCENE (2021), a ‘film pome’ that imagines disconcerting beaver-human futures. An article in RUUKKU: Studies in Artistic Research by one member of the research team, Laura Bissell (2020), explores the ‘ecologies of practice’ that this work emerged from. This chapter develops and expands on my own article in Studies in Theatre and Performance, which offers a model for ‘wild experiments for performance research’, drawing on our fieldwork at both Knepp and Bamff (Overend, 2021). The chapter begins with an introduction to the ‘patchy Anthropocene’. Understanding the fragmented, dispersed land and waterscapes of Bamff in these terms places the estate in a relation to both wider planetary processes and the more granular ‘feral effects’ of anthropogenic infrastructures (Tsing et al., 2020). The chapter introduces Bamff and its boundary-crossing beavers, exploring the ways that the environment has changed since their introduction. The performance of the beavers is then explored, along with a discussion of the ways in which beavers have been performed by humans. This sets up a critical reflection on our field experiments at Bamff. A model for performance fieldwork is developed that operates at the edges of fragmented landscapes and patchy environments.

Fieldwork at the Edges At Bamff Estate in Perthshire, the landscape has become terraqueous as waterways fragment into channels that cut through adjoining fields and woodland. The main driver for this process is the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber). Beavers were introduced to the site in the early years of the twenty-­ first century as part of an experimental conservation initiative, which is currently expanding after almost two decades of innovative land management.

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The beaver reintroduction project has brought about significant changes including the transformation of agricultural land into a comparatively species-rich and heterogeneous wetland environment (Law et  al., 2017). Introducing the shifting wetlands of Bamff by focussing on their internal and external boundaries, this chapter reflects on a series of performative interventions in a fragmented or ‘patchy’ field site (Tsing et al., 2019). This project takes place at multiple border zones: between land and water; agricultural and riparian; human and non-human. In ecological terms, such areas have been referred to as ecotones: ‘place[s] where two or more ecologies meet and mingle’ (Kershaw, 2007, p. 19). Baz Kershaw notes that these areas of convergence ‘often produce new hybrid life-forms as a result of the “edge effects” characteristic of the meeting of ecosystems’ (p.  19). Considering ‘edge effects’ counters a prevailing trend in ecological research to conceive of and engage with environments as discrete, homogeneous units. Notwithstanding, it is at the boundaries between distinct ecosystems that the most dynamic systems and the greatest biodiversity often emerge (Hufkens et al., 2009). In his study of the ‘cultural’ ecologies of theatre and performance, Kershaw analyses points of connection between stage and auditorium, actor and audience, which are encountered as ephemeral human events with ecological resonances and correlations (see also Lavery, 2019; May, 2020). While Kershaw engages with ecological concepts in order to understand the theatre system, a concern with specific, sited wild processes might inform an understanding of performance processes in the field. 2 This fieldwork therefore (re)locates performance within ecological ecotones, developing a series of creative experiments that play out at the edges of a complex field site (Fig. 2.1). The patchy environment of Bamff’s fragmented wetlands has been created through an assemblage of more-than-human actors within a changing landscape. These processes have involved the Ramsay family, the beavers, standing and fallen or submerged trees, waterways, numerous other species, local and national government and neighbouring farmers. Landscape is both the site and the product of these negotiations around

2  We explored these concerns together at Knepp Castle Estate, where Kershaw joined us on one of our field trips (Overend & Lorimer, 2018).

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Fig. 2.1  A sculpture built by Laura Bissell, Jamie Lorimer and Laura Ogden as a ‘gift’ to the beavers during a workshop at Bamff Estate, Perthshire

species introduction, land use and boundaries. This creates a challenging situation for the performance fieldworker to enter into and work within. However, such patchiness may be precisely what we need to work with in the unpredictable, dynamic contexts of the Anthropocene. ‘Patchiness’ has recently been adopted as a conceptual tool for understanding Anthropocene environments (Tsing et  al., 2019). Rather than approaching the current geological epoch as a unified and totalising condition—a primary criticism of the concept of the Anthropocene—its application in this context draws attention to the variegated effects of anthropogenic landscape modification (or, infrastructure) within the last

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500 years. This roughly corresponds to the beaver’s absence from Scotland. Paying attention to the ‘feral effects’—both predictable and unpredictable—that arise from such modifications, Anna L.  Tsing and her colleagues’ (2020) digital mapping project, Feral Atlas, focusses on some of the most destructive and damaging of these unforeseen processes, from ‘invasive’ American bullfrogs to polluted Delta river water. However, it also explicitly opens a space for attention to more positive feral ecologies. If more-than-human assemblages are to be studied at ecotonal ‘meeting points’ (including those of artistic practices taking place within ecological processes), this may imply the existence of separate entities that only come together at such intersections. In fact, as Donna Haraway (2016) and others have argued, human beings are existentially entangled with the ‘natural’ world, even from the level of the trillions of microbes comprising our bodies. Entanglement has become an important ecological paradigm, which offers a mode and a method to practice-based researchers in the field (Hopfinger, 2020; Ingold, 2011). Haraway describes ‘holobiomes, or holoents, in which scientists, artists, ordinary members of communities, and nonhuman beings become enfolded in each other’s projects, in each other’s lives; [and] come to need each other in diverse, passionate, corporeal, meaningful ways’ (2016, p. 72). Artistic research has often set out to enter into complex relationships with ecological assemblages, recognising itself as implicated in the environments that it seeks to understand and reveal. Performance fieldwork has the potential to develop holoents—of artists, researchers and myriad other actors—and to employ entanglement as a methodology for conducting this work. For Carl Lavery, ‘[T]heatre’s role is not to produce the real, it is to corrode it, to make the world problematic, multiple and complex’ (2016, p. 233). Similarly, Lisa Woynarski notes the distinctive ecological contribution that theatre and performance can offer in ‘upend[ing] reductive narratives and images, embodying and performing contradictions, erasures and imaginative possibilities’ (2020, p. 2). As a result, the work discussed in this chapter does not attempt to resolve the tensions and contradictions that arise from a situated engagement with patchy environments. Rather, it encounters, explores and experiments with the field site, aiming to prompt complex, multiple and imaginative ways of thinking and practicing.

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Beaver Believers Beaver reintroductions play out differently in distinct contexts, which determine their own scales and significances.3 In Scotland, a lucrative fur trade drove beavers to extinction in the sixteenth century and they only returned at the beginning of this century after an absence of around 500 years. After an official trial in Argyle stalled for several years, mainly due to fisheries and farmers objections, some beavers escaped from a wildlife park in 2001, leading to a wild population living in the Tayside region. In 2012, the beaver was given official recognition—a ‘leave to remain’. Beavers were not given European Protected Status until as recently as 2019, which means that populations can now, in theory, expand naturally and that a government licence is required to kill, trap or destroy dams or lodges. However, this has caused controversy with many landowners expressing serious concerns about the impact of large beaver populations on the landscape (Brooks, 2019). The beaver’s eradication was perhaps a foreseeable outcome of anthropogenic infrastructures of ‘conquest, business and governance’ (Tsing et al., 2020). However, removing a keystone species from an ecosystem can have particularly significant and wide-reaching impacts. In the case of the beaver, this can include deepening rivers, increasing erosion and cascading ‘feral effects’ on a range of other species and environments. Beavers are often referred to as ‘ecosystem engineers’. They might more precisely be understood as ecotonal architects. Beavers are particularly impactful due to their transgression of natural boundaries. When they inhabit a river, 3  In the Patagonian Tierra del Fuego, an unlikely attempt by the Argentinian government to establish a fur trade in the mid-twentieth century led to the proliferation of a small number of North American beavers (Castor canadensis). This contributed to a significant degradation of forest environments, an act of ecological vandalism that is bound up with ‘settler colonialism, including the eradication of Selk’nam people from the park that now bears their name’ (Ogden, 2018, p. 74). In this context, Laura Ogden describes the Tierra del Fuego as a landscape ‘marked by multiple cycles of multispecies violence’. Conversely, in a NorthAmerican colonial context, Ogden likens European settler colonialism to ‘an imperial war machine fuelled by beaver pelts’ (2021, p. 67). Expansion at the frontier is closely aligned with the eradication of long-established beaver populations. Reversals of this pattern are now driven partly by Indigenous people hoping to restore complex ecosystems to their territories. For example, in 2014 the Tulalip Tribes won the legal right to reintroduce beavers into their Washington community (Sherriff, 2021). While these developments have been challenging and contested, many Native Americans have recognised the value of beaver reintroductions as part of a wider decolonising project.

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they cut channels from the bank into adjoining land, causing the water to spread out and submerge surrounding areas. In this way, they create pathways, which are used as routes for direct access to feeding grounds and quick retreats to underwater sanctuaries. Damming activities and the gnawing and felling of trees can cause radical alterations to the landscape, often including farmland. Boundaries are redrawn and waterways redirected. Our first visit to Bamff took place in June 2019 and involved twelve participants from a range of disciplines, several of whom had also accompanied us to Knepp Wildland Project in West Sussex two years earlier. At Knepp, we had first began to conduct ‘wild experiments’ in collaborative performance practice at conservation sites—then in response to the large herbivores that had been reintroduced to radically reform the landscape, including Tamworth pigs and Old-English longhorn cattle (Overend & Lorimer, 2018). At Bamff, we were interested in adapting our methods for a very different habitat driver and we were intrigued to encounter this unique environment. A small group approached from Glasgow by car, as we drove towards the estate’s main residence—the thirteenth-century ‘tower house’ where we would meet our hosts. We could immediately see the impact that the beavers had made on the landscape. This was also observed by Amy Clarkson during another creative workshop at Bamff: A blurring had occurred; no longer a clearly defined dichotomy of plantation against sheep field, but a habitat in the state of becoming beyond human design. Trees lay in abrupt horizontal intersections; water channels had been widened and cleared. The fields—no longer the domain of sheep— were flooded, reeds usurping grasses to weave new layers across the peaty banks and the submerged architecture of these beaver lands. (2019, p. 16)

Over the last decade, Bamff has undergone a gradual process of relaxation of previously rigid internal boundaries. The Ramsays are embracing a specific version of ‘rewilding’, an approach to nature conservation that is gaining prominence in scientific and policy circles and in popular culture (Lorimer et al., 2015; Monbiot, 2013; Pettorelli et al., 2019). Rewilding constitutes a movement in conservation ‘towards ecological processes— especially predation, grazing, succession, dispersion and decomposition’ (Lorimer & Driessen, 2014, p. 172). Through rewilding and other ‘probiotic’ projects, Lorimer suggests the makings of ‘new worlds attuned to living with feral relations’ (2020, p.  364). At Bamff, the beavers have

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initiated this process as their damming activities have brought about a number of benefits including increasing biodiversity, ‘providing habitat for invertebrates such as bees, amphibians, fish, wetland birds, otters, water voles and much else’ (Ramsay, 2018; see also Law et al., 2017). One of the key factors that led us to work at Bamff was the owners’ openness to unruly and unpredictable methodologies and creative processes, including artistic experiments in the field. The Ramsays have made significant efforts to engage local communities and to invite wider publics to visit and engage with their conservation initiatives. However, at the same time, external borders have had to be carefully managed, preventing intrusion into neighbouring farmland and protecting species from external antagonists with traps and shotguns—both legal and illegal (Scottish Natural Heritage, 2019). This reminds us that the agricultural ‘edge effects’ at rewilding sites are often politically charged and constituted through regulation, with potentially violent conflict between human and non-human subjects. It is important to note that the blurred internal borders at sites like Bamff are often only possible as a result of their containment within external borders that are often harder, cleaner and more fixed. As a privately owned estate, Bamff is implicated in ‘questions of land ownership, access rights, and elite power’ that have complicated arguments for rewilding (Ward, 2019, p. 47). Private land still holds the most potential for the development of large-scale rewilding projects (Donlan et al., 2006). Notwithstanding, the beaver project at Bamff serves as an important and influential model of ecosystem management that exemplifies the potential of rewilding for ‘maintaining, or increasing, biodiversity, while reducing the impact of present and past human interventions through the restoration of species and ecological processes’ (Lorimer et al., 2015, p. 40). These wild potentialities have not necessarily been at the expense of human inhabitations, although this tension remains a key point of negotiation in conservation research (Lorimer, 2015). Rather, they serve to illustrate how rewilding can flourish alongside other modes of existence—enhancing civilisation rather than abandoning a sophisticated economy with high crop yields (Monbiot, 2013, p. 10). In previous essays, I have considered the potential of rewilding as a model for performance research (Overend, 2021; Overend & Lorimer, 2018). Rewilding is a process-driven model of conservation that often leads to unexpected and unpredictable results. Its unruly, tangled ecologies are homologous to the devising practices of collaborative performance makers. Sarah Hopfinger explores the possibility of ‘producing

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unpredictability in performance’ as well as structuring dramaturgical connections between ‘human and nonhuman performances’ (2020, p.  2). Focussing on a specific example of performance-ecology at the edges of an experimental conservation site, this chapter aims to demonstrate the potential for a ‘patchy’ performance practice. This approach would be well placed to respond to Feral Atlas’ call for structuring landscape through processes of ‘active world-making with many players’ (Tsing et al., 2020). The following sections offer a critical account of our fieldwork at Bamff, which builds on examples of the different ecological and artistic performances of the Eurasian beaver.

Staging Beaver Worlds At Bamff, beaver conservation is a project of passion and of resistance to profit-driven monocultural farming practices that preclude the recovery of vibrant ecosystems (L. Ramsay, 2018). As Lorimer (2018) points out, this is a very different rationale to the contradictory logic of ‘green capitalism’, which allows business-as-usual, as long as mitigation is built into the machine: [B]eavers are not [usually] reintroduced to live in full control of their means of production. Nor do they enjoy an emancipated relationship with their work. Instead, their rights to the benefits of their work remains conditional on their economic performance.

In contrast to such a profit-driven approach, collaborating with the beavers in an artistic performance is conceived as a way of generating intimacy, fostering dynamic, unpredictable systems and prompting alternative worldings (Haraway, 2016). In the context of beaver conservation, performance methods offer collaborative ways-of-knowing (or unknowing) that do not demand that the beavers work for us. Placing this problem in the North American colonial context, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Cole examine ‘the particular beaver worlds that occur in a colonised hydrology defined by tens of thousands of large dams that block water flow and fish migration on nearly every river’ (2019, p. p. 300). Working against this mode of ecology, which is understood as an aggressive colonial dispossession of beaverlands, Woelfle-Erskine and Cole advocate a stochastic reimagining of human-beaver worlds that would insist on dynamic and fragmented waterscapes rather than attempting to

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fix predictable and controllable systems. Stochasticity is another key feature of the ecotone, which resonates with more recent conceptualisations of the ‘patchy Anthropocene’. Essentially, the concept is that the same interactions in the same environments do not guarantee the same outcomes. Adapting a definition put forward by Marjorie M. Holland et al. (1991), Koen Hufkens et al. define an ecotone as ‘a multi-dimensional environmentally stochastic interaction zone between ecological systems with characteristics defined in space and time, and by the strength of the interaction’ (2009, p. 979). For Woelfle-Erskine and Cole, beavers are the ideal inhabitants of these patchy environments: A beaver rivals any entity within riparian worlds for mounting stochastic operations and for thriving in stochastic zones—beavers reoccupied Mount St. Helens within months of the eruption and thrive in postmeltdown Chernobyl. When beaver dams break—routinely, unpredictably—they unleash a flood of water and sediment downstream; beavers rebuild dams within days or leave them breached and move elsewhere. Strategies adapting human livelihoods to anthropocene circumstances require that humans pay close attention to other species and notice how they respond stochastically to human actions and ecological forces. (2019, p. 300)

Writing from the perspective of trans people and trans-naturalists, with a particular ‘indebtedness to indigenous discourses and practices’ (p. 298), Woelfle-Erskine and Cole consider the potential ‘to bring together human and nonhuman engineering, and undercut […] the stability of resource-­ extraction logic with trans-species environmental imaginaries’ (p.  299). We will make progress not only by asserting our human agency: lobbying governments, gathering quantitative data on hydro-ecology, which, at its worst, involves ‘enlisting beavers as one more tool to manipulate landscapes for human gain’ (p. 313). But also by following Haraway in a move away from human exceptionalism towards more-than-human relationality: fostering kinship with other species and establishing sympoietic processes. This is where performance research can contribute: as a way of generating intimacy; fostering dynamic, unpredictable systems; and prompting alternative worldings from the edges (Haraway, 2016). After all, as Victoria Baskin Coffey (2020) points out, the Anthropocene is ‘alive at the edges of things’. In their reimagining of human-beaver worlds, it is significant that Woelfle-Erskine and Cole turn to a theatre performance as an example of

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the kind of collaboration with the ‘transgressive, transforming beaver’ that might resituate the human ‘within and of ecological relations’ (2019, p. 308). Their example is a project with San Francisco-based collective, the Water Underground. The Gold Fish, or Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined (2010) is a queer musical ‘in which engineers and dispossessed riparian creatures take stock of each other and eventually join forces against an evil water tycoon’ (p. 308). Woelfle-Erskine and Cole identify a transgressive queer ethics in this performance, which they suggest may engender human-non-human collaborations that have the potential to redirect human engineering and resist Manifest Destiny thinking—the ideology that attempts to naturalise settler expansion across North America. Our collaborator Beatrice Searle (2019) offers another example of an explicitly theatrical performance of beavers nearer to the Bamff Estate: Perth Theatre’s 2019 pantomime performance of Sinbad. Searle recounts the appearance of ‘Simone de Beaver’ and ‘the rescue of the beloved Tay beavers [from] a malevolent stepmother’, leading to an explicit call to SAVE OUR BEAVERS.  These exuberant portrayals of beavers operate very differently to our fieldwork activities at Bamff. There are commonalities, however, and the seriousness with which Woelfle-Erskine and Cole analyse their slapstick salmon migration musical suggests the value of building trans-species imaginaries and ‘enacting an embodied world-to-­ come’ (2019, p. 312). In these examples, the theatre becomes a site of encounter with more-than-human worlds. Elsewhere, beaver performances have been developed in the field. Feminist filmmakers and performance artists Christy Gast (USA) and Camila Marambio (Chile), embrace ‘undisciplined research’ in the Patagonian Tierra del Fuego, starting with the open question: ‘how do we include beavers into the decision-making about their own future?’ (Ogden, 2021, pp. 116–117). Their work involves a programme of films, lectures, essays, performances and installations. These outputs emerge from significant time spent living and working in this fragmented landscape, which has been heavily impacted by the introduction of beavers to the area by the Argentine government in the mid-twentieth century. The duo’s use of oversized beaver costumes is discussed by our mutual collaborator Laura Ogden, who claims that ‘these pieces demonstrate how performance can provoke curiosity about other worlds and other futures’ (2021, p. 118). In one performance event, audience members were invited to wear the costumes, which prompted consideration of the sensory experience of beavers. There is an awkwardness that is acknowledged and embraced

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here—the silence at the beginning of a performance, the discomfort of the scientist entering into dialogue with these playful and irreverent actors. However, Ogden’s account of Gast and Marambio’s work reveals how productive and generative these encounters can become. Perhaps the discomfort that performance can generate is a vital tool in moving beyond colonialist, extractivist and anthropocentric worldviews? In their film Castorera (A Love Story) (2014), it is Gast and Marambio’s field scientist colleagues who wear these large, comical beaver costumes, carrying out a series of tasks in the woodland, such as collecting and carrying branches. These tasks move from ‘beaver’ to ‘human’ as the chores and activities transfer to a human domestic environment, blurring the boundary between species. The film is knowingly ridiculous in its low-key aesthetic and clumsy theatrics. From this comical position, it asks where cultural associations and ecological processes meet, and how such lines might be crossed. Lavery’s suggestion that ‘theatre’s success may be found in the exposure of its own artifice’ goes some way to explaining the effect of this surreal film (2016, p. 233). It certainly does nothing to conceal its artifice and we are never meant to believe we are watching beavers. However, there is more going on here than a failed mimetic act. Gast and Marambio, in conversation with Ogden, have suggested that these performed actions counterintuitively reveal more about being human than being beaver (Ogden, 2021, p. 122). This suggests ‘a way of exploring the affective registers that compose and differentiate beaver and human worlds’ (p. 123). Rather than pretending to be beavers, in this case performance functions as a prompt, or an invitation, that leads audiences and participants to think in new ways about ecological relationships and points of connection and disconnection with non-human others. Not all of these examples are performed in the field, and they may now be accessible only through their documentation in theatre and film or through critical accounts of these events. Nonetheless, they inform an approach to performance fieldwork by suggesting the ways that these creative practices can function ecologically. This does not occur by making great claims about efficacy, but rather by offering alternative positions and imaginaries that work against anthropocentric worldviews and the logic of resource extraction, developing trans-species imaginaries. Accepting Lavery’s view of the ‘corrosive’ role of theatre (‘to make the world problematic, multiple and complex’ (2016, p.  233)), performance fieldwork has the potential to extend this function beyond the theatre and into the wider environment. Entering already problematic, multiple and complex

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fields, this research can engage with and contribute to such transgressions and transformations; in this case, following beavers as they reach out ‘across streams to divert water down multiple paths’ (Woelfle-Erskine & Cole, 2019, p. 308).

Mapping and Walking Our fieldwork at Bamff progressed with a series of structured activities. These helped us to feel out the edges of the estate, tracing dividing lines between ecosystems and devising creative experiments that frequently took place at ridges, bridges and ruptures along its borders. We spent a lot of time in the field, in the company of beavers (or in search of them), developing novel methodologies for attuning to the animals, their landscapes and their landscaping activities. These related activities cumulatively facilitated different types of sympoietic interaction in and around the patchy wetlands. During our first field trip, Lorimer introduced us to maps of the estate and we engaged with explicitly representational practices, surveying existing charts and visualisations of the Bamff landscape and the Tay catchment. We were also shown aerial photographs, with the bird’s eye view on the beaverlands demonstrating stark dividing lines between the different areas of the estate and its neighbouring farmland. This abstract, cartographical engagement with Bamff was deepened by an autobiographical element (or autotopographical, to use Dee Heddon’s (2007) neologism) as we were accompanied by members of the Ramsay family, who framed this activity with personal narratives and insights. The result was akin to a process of ‘deep mapping’, which Les Roberts (2016) understands as a theatrical and performative approach to cartography. A related approach to mapping is offered in Victoria Baskin Coffey’s digital maps for Feral Atlas, which aim to situate the human navigator in the ungraspable worlds of the patchy Anthropocene. Through strategies of spillage, leakage and blockage, these layered representations create a triadic relationship between body, image and text: My flow maps […] cannot make a patchy Anthropocene more concrete for you. My effort here is to make it more recognizable, to allow us to hold these stories in our bodies. I am not here to tell you how to look, but I do want your attention. I want a particular kind of attention with a unique texture: I want you first to notice. (Baskin Coffey, 2020)

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Our mapping activities at Bamff had a similar rationale. We enacted a movement back and forth from cartography to topography, representation to situation. This informed an understanding of ‘the cultural representation of environmental, spatial and social relations’ at this specific field site (Cosgrove & Daniels, 1989, p. 169). But it also allowed us to enter into a direct relationship with these processes, recognising our place within the performances, conceptualisations and ecologies of the site. This was an ongoing process throughout our fieldwork. A range of multi-layered representations and performances informed our exploration of the estate on foot. This allowed us to place our own bodies within the abstract landscape represented on the maps. We walked along the road bordering the rewilded areas and encountered the tarmacked no-man’s-land between strikingly different ecosystems (Fig. 2.2). Documenting this walk, Bissell (2020) describes the road as ‘a visual divide between two opposing ideas of land management’: On the left, the neat, flat, familiar fields of green and yellow of a traditional agricultural farm. To the right, the tall, leafy, dark green trees of the Bamff estate loom above the road, swaying in the wind. The buzzards flying overhead seem to favour the airspace over Bamff.

This contrast was also apparent within the estate as the organically farmed fields were contained behind fencing, while those parts of Bamff given over to wilder processes were notably different, lacking in definable boundaries and more complex in their composition. However, this particular borderland was akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) striated space, as opposed to the smooth spaces that allow more fluid and unregulated movements. This was not immediately accessible as an ecotonal space as the tarmac of the road directly prevented the sort of stochastic transfer that makes riverbanks or hedgerows the loci of hybrid lifeforms. We had encountered a similar process of ecological border regulation at Knepp, where a 50 metre strip of land is carefully managed to prevent the spread of ragwort and other ‘injurious’ weeds onto neighbouring land (Tree, 2018, pp. 137–149). Concerns about the potential for poisoning of horses in adjoining fields, for example, have been significant and have required a robust defence at the edges of the estate. The permeability of the external boundaries of Bamff has been cause for controversy, and the population of beavers in the region of the Tay is likely to have been bolstered by escapees. Ben Goldfarb summarises the

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Fig. 2.2  Our group traces the external border of the estate: a border zone between neighbouring arable farmland and the wilder landscape of Bamff

potential damage that beavers can do from an agricultural perspective: ‘Beavers clogged drainage ditches, flooded fields, and burrowed into riverbanks, destabilising flood defences and eroding farmland’ (2018, p. 203). The local politics that emerge from this close proximity of diverging interests can lead to significant tensions. On one occasion, Paul Ramsay was arrested for the presence of beavers outside the boundaries of the estate. Shootings and poisonings have continued in the area regardless of legal protections. These are reminders that rewilding is a highly contentious approach to wildlife conservation and land management, which can be strongly opposed by those whose land and livelihood are affected (Caro & Sherman, 2009). As we walked the boundary of Bamff Estate, the clean lines of the maps were transposed into politically and culturally loaded borderlands. Our journey took us around the perimeter of a site that was enclosed to limit stochasticity and to prevent ecotonal transferal beyond its edges. On one

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level, this project was largely successful—the stark contrast captured by Bissell’s description is indicative of this. Ecosystems were kept separate and there had actually been relatively little disruption to neighbouring farmland. However, our sensibility to the cultural and political entanglements of ecology offered another way of thinking about the border. The importance of rewilding to ecology is not limited to the relatively small areas to which it is physically confined. Rewilding sites also demonstrate a possible future of complex, bio-abundant habitats that invite a model for ecological co-existence. Moving through this space placed us within a cultural ecotone and suggested the possibility of a patchy performance practice that places our human activities and responses in a wider context of ecological entanglements. This aspiration continually informed our work at Bamff, through which we aimed to place ourselves more directly within this relational realm. Our mapping and walking activities paved the way for some initial experiments in active landscaping, designing and making, which aimed to simulate the practices and performances of the beaver. They were also intended to explore the possibility of collaboration between human and non-human actors at their meeting points: the conceptual ecotone of trans-species imaginaries. The first of these established a concern with experiencing this environment through alternative sensibilities. The second was more ambitious and experimental, as well as more ethically and ecologically contentious. When the playwright Lewis Hetherington joined us for a second visit to Bamff, his brief poetic responses to the site captured an often-unspoken anxiety about the efficacy of performance research in this context. In his ‘Song to a Beaver’, Hetherington accepts that the beavers are indifferent, ‘or more precisely,/unaware,/of my poem’ (2021, p.  208). In fact, on that particular trip we did not even manage to see a beaver. However, as Hetherington also noted, their traces were everywhere: in the gnawed chips of wood, the fallen trees, the caves made of fallen tree roots and in many other natural and cultural signals and symbols. When we left the site, these traces remained with us, just as we left our own behind (Fig. 2.3). The main beaver lodge at Bamff is hidden behind a tangled veil of rhododendrons—a non-native species which blooms dramatically from spring to early summer. The beavers are evasive, preferring to emerge only at dawn and dusk and spending a large part of their day out of sight. In the evening, they can sometimes be observed feeding from the lawns around the main lodge or maintaining the dams, building and repairing as they

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Fig. 2.3  A deep map of our fieldwork presented in texts and traces

swim between areas. It is not always possible to see the beavers at all and this possibility led one of the groups to experiment with leaving gifts and messages that could be visited over time. A series of sculptural installations were created over the course of an afternoon. Each of these suggested a different mode of engagement for our riparian ‘collaborators’. One of the most generative of these involved an ‘offering’ to the beavers in the form of segments of apple skewered onto sticks reaching from the riverbank towards the beavers’ aquatic realm. Members of this group recounted their delight as the offer was taken up, evidenced the following morning by missing apples and gnawed sticks (Bissell, 2020; Ogden, 2019). Bissell also reflects on the last of the sculptural encounters, which took place at the edge of the estate: We returned to the path by the beaver pools and realised that a small waterway at the end of the river which ran under the forest was the point of departure for beavers leaving the estate before moving out into the landscape beyond.

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We decided to mark this point of transition and decorated this passageway with an arch-shaped garland of the same pink flowers as the rhododendron bush at the beavers’ lodge. Jamie scratched on a slate the message ‘GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY’ as we hoped the beavers would continue to thrive and breed beyond this boundary line which demarcated the safety of Bamff.

Although playful and performative, this was a contentious intervention in this context. We followed a promenade route along the sculpture trail later that day, which prompted various reflections and conversations about beaver conservation. Members of the Ramsay family joined us on this journey and their response to the final sign gave us a greater insight into the complexity of a reintroduction project such as theirs. Their ambivalence about this sentiment arose from a strong advocacy for national reintroduction programmes, a cautious diplomacy with landowners, whose understanding and support is critical for the expansion of populations, and a concern with local impact to neighbouring properties if the beavers were actually to take up this invitation. As Bissell (2020) points out, ‘[B]eavers have no sense of the human division of land or the politics of land management but will instead move dependant on resources, environment and the presence of water’. However, the human conflict at the edges of this site has serious repercussions: beaver lives have been lost here and their residence has to be continually monitored, regulated and policed. In the Anthropocene, ecotones are always cultural and political, as well as ecological.

Sensing and Swimming Initially, we spent time in the immediate vicinity of the beaver ponds attuning our bodies to the life around us, the rhythms of the landscape and the corporeal activities of the beavers. This involved watching, but also acts of listening, considering the possible ways that beavers build by ear, following the sound of noisy water. Our aim, after Despret (2004), was to learn to be affected by the non-human inhabitants, processes and forces within the field site. This was part of the typology of ‘wild performatives’ that Lorimer and I developed following our fieldwork at Knepp (Overend & Lorimer, 2018, p. 529). Wild performatives are conceived as affective encounters that make an intervention into the sphere of relations between human and non-human actors:

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Learning to be affected involves practices of bodily calibration, developing and using unfamiliar senses, sometimes assisted by technologies. Here, a wild performative is akin to the ecological practices of field work or the archaeological practices of assemblage (Pearson & Shanks, 2001), which help scientists understand past and present rhythms of a location or habitat. Considering such practices as part of an ecological assemblage prompts a greater awareness of the coexistence and interrelatedness of individuals within a wider ecology. […] These forms of wild performativity need not be bound by the epistemic norms of field science, but can include more playful, fantastical, or disconcerting techniques for recalibrating human senses and perceptions of the wild. (H. Dewsbury & Naylor, 2002; Lorimer, 2006)

At Bamff, the suggestion that we could learn to be affected was intended as a generative and imaginative provocation that would guide the design and facilitation of a series of tasks and activities in and around the beaverlands. On the first full day at Bamff, participants gathered on a large lawn by the main house for a workshop led by Laura Bissell. Bissell recounts this work, which is framed as a transitionary process of ‘opening up’ to the ecologies of the site: I introduced the initial sensing session, encouraging participants to attune to the environment, attend to their senses and allow for an opening up to this place and what it had to offer. I asked people to use their animal instinct to find a spot to which they wished to respond. We started with a very human activity, writing, and from this we distilled our experience into a haiku, a short imagistic poem which takes place in the present, originally defined by Japanese poet Shiki as ‘sketch from nature’ (Ross, 2002, p. 12). These haikus were then translated into a live action, an embodied fragment of performance sited in our chosen spot. The responses to this task inviting participants to translate the written word into a physical action were varied: one sang an elegy while caressing a log, another cupped her hands in the water of the river then carried it to a tree to provide it with sustenance, one gave a lecture/litany about lichen, others used their bodies to explore the woods and the river bank while witnessed by others. I asked people not to view performance as a way of pretending or creating an artifice, instead, to invest in the real time/real effort mode of performance-making. Some used language, others song, while some remained silent. (Bissell, 2020)

My own response to these prompts led me to sit silently on the riverbank beside a large dam beside the beaver’s rhododendron-concealed

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lodge. This is where I had spent two hours watching the beavers the previous night as I stayed on my own in the ‘hideaway’ accommodation on the longest day of the year. Spending this time listening to the trickle of the water through the beaver-constructed channels, feeling the dampness of the grass that had been grazed by the beavers and watching furry bodies gliding through the water leaving trails in their wake, I gradually brought my pen to paper to attempt the poetic sketch I had been asked to create: Traces left behind Sunshine and thickening life Hide enclaves of time

Bissell’s exercise was already positioning us at the edges of this site. I had been drawn to the chips of wood that lined the banks with traces of the beavers’ gnawing practices. This resonated with our discussion of the ‘detritus’ of performance—the partial and incomplete archive that extends the performance event (Reason, 2003). All this had been momentarily framed for me as sunlight cut through the adjoining woodland illuminating a Brownian motion of bio-abundance as flies skitted across the water, ferns rippled in the breeze and beavers slid surreptitiously into the water. While this may well evoke the sense of enchantment that Lavery (2016) cautions against, this moment of heightened perception nonetheless drew my attention to the stochastic dynamics of the riparian ecotone. At the same time, something else seemed to be concealed. A synchronic snapshot—an enclave—captured in this short poetic form did not tell the whole story. My final five syllables spoke to the multiple temporalities from which this moment emerged. The haiku looked in all directions from this place by the riverbank. While my brief and hastily written lines do not amount to the reckoning with deep time that David Farrier (2019) argues is necessary for an Anthropocene Poetics, they do begin to look beyond the present moment to suggest an expanded temporal scale. In this way, this situated act of poem-making can function as what the poet Sean Borodale refers to as a ‘radical mode of theatre performance’ (2019, p. 265), through which an active, open engagement with the text and the site is invited. As an artistic output, the haiku would leave its own traces—in memories of words spoken, words scrawled across a page, with all the crossings out and alternative phrases evidencing a process of creation. It would also generate new

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activity as Bissell asked us to respond in some way to what we had written with a performed action. My own was small and simple. I placed my pen on the ground next to my notepad, removed my socks and shoes which I left nearby and walked barefooted up the path. Traces left behind; new routes being followed. Our initial sensing exercises had attuned us to the environment and initiated a process of art making at this field site. This would be developed further in the activities scheduled for the following day. We now turned our attention directly to the experiences of the beavers themselves, as the second part of this session attempted more haptic and ambitious methods such as crawling, smelling, nibbling and even submerging ourselves in the water. In our accounts of these activities, there is a common recognition of our failure to sense the environments as beavers: Bissell (2020) recounts her disgust at the taste of a piece of birch bark as she tentatively makes to gnaw it; and I confess to a feeling of clumsy awkwardness as I submerge myself in the beaver pool (Overend, 2021). These efforts were not ‘successful’ in terms of an attempt to somehow sense the world as beavers do. Rather, like Gast and Marambio’s Patagonian beaver performance, their value was what they revealed about our human positionality. The distance between us and our subjects, to whom we aspired to relate as collaborators or participants, was distilled into a moment of inaccessibility or removal. These were corporeal rejoinders to our developing methodology. When a small group returned to Bamff in March 2020—just days before the first COVID-19 lockdown was announced—we continued this exploration and swam out to the centre of the largest beaver pond on the estate. Our hired wetsuits allowed us to spend more time in the water. Our hope was that we would be able to repurpose creative walking methods for a watery environment. Lorimer’s (2021) reflections on this wild swim reveal the outcome: Striving to become comfortable in the cold I seek to appreciate the watery nature of my new existence. How should I orientate myself in this landscape? What would be my purpose now if I were a beaver? To start with I reckon I would need to orientate myself in relation to the sensory cues given by the pond and what they tell me about the environment. Deaf to the world and with an untrained and dull nose I decided I would look. I get down to pond level and scan like a crocodile. Then I plunge my head under water. The vision is striking, bewitching and somehow familiar from film

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footage seen in Laura Ogden’s collaborative film and on the BBC. 4 But this small comfort was undone by the shock of the cold water on my face, the only naked part of my body. I gasped. I ducked again, caught masochistically between an embrace of the pain and the security of warm air. I felt I should dive, duck under and swim lithesome through the weeds, sliding over the mud with my belly. But my bodily thermostat screamed no, stay up, keep the mind removed from sensory immersion and potential overload.

Lorimer’s insight was brief and painfully acquired. We attempted to submerge ourselves in a sensory realm that we did not belong to and could not stay within. While we had hoped to creatively explore the water, playing at beaver-like modes of being, we were hardly able to keep afloat and could not endure the temperature for more than a few, fleeting, uncomfortable minutes. This cold had a valuable function in preventing us from getting carried away. While we had set out with the aspiration of immersion, we found ourselves held in the riparian space between land and water. The ecotone offers a state of being where two systems come into contact. Occupying this terraqueous zone, however briefly, demands a new form of eco-consciousness in which enchantment is rendered impossible due to the pain of inaccessibility. Working directly and reflexively with notions of impossibility and inaccessibility may be our best chance of avoiding charges of anthropomorphism in our assumptions about non-human participants (Bastian et al., 2017). Nonetheless, following Indigenous perspectives, as well as ecofeminists such as Val Plumwood, we side with Michelle Bastian et al. in ‘recognising agential capacities of specific nonhumans’ (p. 9). One example is Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd’s (2018) exploration of human-fish relations in Paulatuuq and amiskwaciwâskahikan in the Treaty Six Territory of present-day Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada. Todd shows how anti-­ colonialist collaboration is ‘indebted to the labour and imagination of fish’ (p.  69), an idea that recalls Woelfle-Erskine and Cole’s queer and trans examination of human-beaver relations. If any level of ‘collaboration’ or ‘co-production’ is possible with the Bamff beavers, then this must surely begin in a process of active engagement in the field.5 Our fieldwork

4  See https://ensayostierradelfuego.net/field-notes/dreamworlds-of-beavers/. Accessed 10 April 2020. 5  For a discussion of the divergent history of co-production in more-than-human research and participatory research respectively, see Bastian et al., 2017, pp. 5–7.

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therefore enacted a transition from representational practices to smallscale interventions at the field site. One of the key features of ecotones is their indicative relation to environmental processes and changes (Wasson et al., 2013). The hybrid lifeforms that inhabit these spaces are often encountered at the limits of their tolerances, and one approach to ecotone science has been to study local phenomena in relation to broader processes such as climate change. This approach resonates with the patchy environments of the Anthropocene, which may also be best understood by attending to their peripheries. This fieldwork is located at the edges in order to explore the open and dynamic convergences that ecology continually negotiates, such as those between human and non-human worlds. The performances that emerged from these exercises were ‘patchy’ in multiple senses of the word. They were situated at various locations in and around the estate as distinct points in space and time. While one participant performed a ritual action of transporting water from the river to nourish a tree, another attended to lichen in the adjoining woodland, and I set off on foot along the river path. These performed actions were separated and scattered around the field site. This fragmented, partial and diverse collection of actions emerged from an approach to fieldwork that responded in the moment to the cues and affordances of the landscape. In this sense, like the agency and ‘author-ity’ of the research collective centred around Bawaka Country (an Indigenous Homeland in Northern Australia), fieldwork is clearly a ‘more-than-human practice’ that is manifested in the ways that Bawaka helps form our priorities and guides our choices. It opens some possibilities and closes off others. To acknowledge Bawaka’s place is to acknowledge its contribution to who we are, what we do and to the material processes of writing. (Bawaka Country et al., 2015, p. 274)

Performance, also, is a material process, which in this context is guided and enabled by Bamff. This is to recognise the agency of place—an Indigenous concept that is only recently influencing research practice in (more-than-)human geography (Tynan, 2021). Our emerging performance practice shared this common sensitivity and responsiveness to the agency of the beavers and the landscape of Bamff. This connected them to each other not as ‘a stable achievement between two different things (people and nature), [but more as] a process by which multispecies connections are made, unmade, and remade’ (Hodgetts,

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2017, p.  458). This is a methodology that enters into the patchy Anthropocene, ‘building a community of focussed attention and intention […] spending the time necessary to look, listen, and learn in particular situations’ (Tsing et al., 2020). These sensory immersions are crucial to performance fieldwork, but this research also develops more active interventions at its sites.

Conclusion This fieldwork developed a patchy performance practice with the potential to reshape imaginaries, prompt new collaborations and inform ‘practices of staying present and receptive to material processes and ecological transformations in the world’ (Tsing et al., 2020). Such practices will often have unexpected or unintended effects. For example, our artistic invitation for the beavers to ‘GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY’ prompted an awkward misstep into the politics of local border relations. These moments, along with some of Bamff’s historical dramas—such as Paul Ramsay’s arrest— demonstrate the controversy that surrounds this particular species in this particular context. But they also reveal the occasionally insurmountable distance between human and non-human experience, and the careful negotiation and regulation that is necessary to create enclaves of place and time when it is possible to temporarily and contingently entangle our projects. Performance has a ‘feral’ function in this sense: this work can be understood as an ecological agent that might lead to unexpected and unpredictable outcomes. Just as the beavers divert waterways and create new riparian habitats, performance researchers have the potential to disrupt imaginaries, setting in motion new lines of thinking and prompting multiple ways of being together on a damaged planet (Tsing et al., 2017). Our work at Bamff was characterised by moments of unexpected complexity, frustration or challenge that were simultaneously revealing, rewarding or compelling. This tension is revealed when Lorimer is ‘caught masochistically between an embrace of the pain [of the cold water] and the security of warm air’. This moment is an embodiment of a compulsion to connect, to relate, to sense the world as other beings experience it. The discomfort of the plunge into the water arises from a general inability to become fully immersed in the beaverlands. In this sense, performance fieldwork brings us to the edge of our knowledge, understanding and experience. It prompts us to look beyond the apparent confines of our bodies and pushes us over into other worlds and perceptions.

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The specificity of performance fieldwork at sites like Bamff may inform an understanding of a unique ecology, where beavers have been successfully reintroduced to a Perthshire estate. However, it also opens up to wider ecological concerns. As discussed in the introduction to this book, Matei Candea’s (2007) promotion of the bounded field site as productively and reflexively arbitrary enables a shift from holism to a kind of conceptual stochasticity. This is an encounter with ‘the teeming multiplicity of an unfamiliar context’ (p.  173), which performance fieldwork is particularly well placed to enter into. In this way, the patchy incompleteness of performance research at a bounded field site has the potential to inform strategies of co-existence in a variety of complex environments.

References Baskin Coffey, V. (2020). Mapping the Anthropocene: A Letter to the Human Navigator. Stanford University Press. Retrieved 6 October 2021 from https:// feralatlas.supdigital.org/?cd=true&rr=true&cdex=true&text=victoria-­baskin-­ coffey-­mapping-­the-­anthropocene&ttype=essay Bastian, M., Jones, O., Moore, N., & Roe, E. (2017). Introduction: More-than-­ Human Participatory Research: Contexts, Challenges, Possibilities. In M. Bastian, O. Jones, N. Moore, & E. Roe (Eds.), Participatory Research in More-than-human Worlds (pp. 1–15). Routledge. Bawaka Country, Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., et al. (2015). Working with and Learning From Country: Decentring Human Authority. Cultural Geographies, 22(2), 269–283.. Bissell, L. (2020). Ecologies of Practice: Landscaping With Beavers (p.  14). RUUKKU: Studies in Artistic Research. Bissell, L., & Overend, D. (2021). Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010–2020. Triarchy. Borodale, S. (2019). Towards a Poetics of Field Theatre: Situated Acts of Poem-­ making in the Work of Ted Hughes. New Writing, 16(3), 265–280. Brooks, L. (2019). 'Historic day for Scotland' as Beavers Get Protected Status. The Guardian. Candea, M. (2007). Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(1), 167–184. Caro, T., & Sherman, P. (2009). Rewilding Can Cause Rather Than Solve Ecological Problems. Nature, 462. Clarkson, A. (2019). Becoming With Beaver: Co-creative Ecology in Bamff Estate. Reforesting Scotland, 59, 16–17. Cosgrove, D., & Daniels, S. (1989). Fieldwork as Theatre: A Week's Performance in Venice and Its Region. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 13(2), 169–182.

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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum. Despret, V. (2004). The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-Zoo-Genesis. Body & Society, 10(2-3), 111–134. Dewsbury, J. D., & Naylor, S. (2002). Practising Geographical Knowledge: Fields, Bodies and Dissemination. Area, 34(3), 253–260. Donlan, C. J., Berger, J., Bock, C. E., Bock, J. H., Burney, D. A., Estes, J. A., et al. (2006). Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Agenda for Twenty-First Century Conservation. The American Naturalist, 168(5), 660–681. Farrier, D. (2019). Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. University of Minnesota Press. Finlay-Ramsay, G. (2021). CASTOROCENE. Retrieved 11 June 2021 from https://journal.rupert.lt/post-­pandemic-­futures/castorocene/ Goldfarb, B. (2018). Eager: The surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. Chelsea Green Publishing. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2017). Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble. In A. L. Tsing, N. Bubandt, E. Gan, & H. A. Swanson (Eds.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (pp. M25–M50). University of Minnesota Press. Heddon, D. (2007). Autobiography and Performance: Performing Selves. Palgrave Macmillan. Hetherington, L. (2021). Lewis Hetherington Swims with Beavers. In L. Bissell & D.  Overend (Eds.), Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010-2020 (pp. 207–209). Triarchy Press. Hodgetts, T. (2017). Connectivity. Environmental Humanities, 9(2), 456–459. Holland, M.  M., Risser, P.  G., & Naiman, R.  J. (1991). Ecotones: The Role of Landscape Boundaries in the Management and Restoration of Changing Environments. Chapman and Hall. Hopfinger, S. (2020). Doing the Ecological Through Performance. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 1–19. Hufkens, K., Scheunders, P., & Ceulemans, R. (2009). Ecotones in Vegetation Ecology: Methodologies and Definitions Revisited. Ecological Research, 24(5), 977–986. Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge. Kershaw, B. (2007). Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events. Cambridge University Press. Lavery, C. (2016). Introduction: Performance and Ecology—What Can Theatre Do? Green Letters, 20(3), 229–236.

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Lavery, C. (2019). How Does Theatre Think Through Ecology? In M. Bleeker, A.  Kear, J.  Kelleher, & H.  Roms (Eds.), Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (pp. 257–269). Bloomsbury. Law, A., Gaywood, M. J., Jones, K. C., Ramsay, P., & Willby, N. J. (2017). Using Ecosystem Engineers as Tools in Habitat Restoration and Rewilding: Beaver and Wetlands. Science of the Total Environment, 605-606, 1021–1030. Lorimer, H. (2006). Herding Memories of Humans and Animals. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(4), 497–518. Lorimer, J. (2015). Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation After Nature. University of Minnesota Press. Lorimer, J. (2018). Leave It to Beavers: Animal Work in Austerity Environmentalism. Fieldsights. Lorimer, J. (2020). Probiotic. In C.  Howe & A.  Pandian (Eds.), Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon (pp. 361–364). Punctum Books. Lorimer, J. (2021). Notes Towards Becoming Beaver at Bamff Estate in Perthshire. In L.  Bissell & D.  Overend (Eds.), Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010-2020. Triarchy Press. Lorimer, J., & Driessen, C. (2014). Wild Experiments at the Oostvaardersplassen: Rethinking Environmentalism in the Anthropocene. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39(2), 169–181. Lorimer, J., Sandom, C., Jepson, P., Doughty, C., Barua, M., & Kirby, K. J. (2015). Rewilding: Science, Practice, and Politics. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 40(1), 39–62. May, T. J. (2020). Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater. Routledge. Monbiot, G. (2013). Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding. Penguin Books. Ogden, L. (2019). The Gift in the Beaver. http://makingroutes.org/profiles/ blogs/the-­gift-­in-­the-­beaver Ogden, L. A. (2018). The Beaver Diaspora: A Thought Experiment. Environmental Humanities, 10(1), 63–85. Ogden, L. A. (2021). Loss and Wonder at the World's End. Duke University Press. Overend, D. (2021). Field Works: Wild Experiments for Performance Research. Studies in Theatre and Performance. Overend, D., & Lorimer, J. (2018). Wild Performatives: Experiments in Rewilding at Knepp Wildland Project. GeoHumanities, 4(2), 527–542. Pearson, M. (2010). Site-Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan. Pearson, M., & Shanks, M. (2001). Theatre / Archaeology: Disciplinary Dialogues. Routledge. Pettorelli, N., Durant, S.  M., & du Toit, J.  T. (2019). Rewilding. Cambridge University Press. Ramsay, L. (2018). How Scotland's Beavers Came Back, and How You Can Help. Open Democracy.

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Reason, M. (2003). Archive or Memory? The Detritus of Live Performance. New Theatre Quarterly, 19(1), 82–89. Roberts, L. (2016). Deep Mapping and Spatial Anthropology. Humanities, 5(1), 1–5. Ross, B. (2002). How to Haiku: A writer’s Guide to Haiku and Related Forms. Tuttle Publishing. Scottish Natural Heritage. (2019). SNH Beaver Licensing Summary 1st May to 31st December 2019. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6931216/ SNH-­Beaver-­Licensing-­Summary-­1st-­May-­to-­31st.pdf Searle, B. (2019). Swiss Army Knives, Sweet Track Incisors and Simone de Beaver. https://www.horsecross.co.uk/contemporary-­art/resources/contemporary-­ art-­blog/swiss-­army-­knives-­sweet-­track-­incisors-­and-­simone-­de-­beaver Sherriff, L. (2021, 23 February 2021). Beaver Believers: Native Americans Promote Resurgence of 'Nature's Engineers'. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/23/beavers-­native-­american-­tribes­washington-­california Todd, Z. (2018). Refracting the State through Human-Fish Relations. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 7(1), 60–75. Tree, I. (2018). Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. Picador. Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. A. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press. Tsing, A. L., Keleman Saxena, A., Zhou, F., & Deger, J. (2020). Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene. Stanford University Press. feralatlas.org. Tsing, A.  L., Mathews, A.  S., & Bubandt, N. (2019). Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20. Current Anthropology, 60(S20), S186–S197. Tynan, L. (2021). What is Relationality? Indigenous Knowledges, Practices and Responsibilities with Kin. Cultural Geographies, 28(4), 597–610. Ward, K. (2019). For Wilderness or Wildness? Decolonising Rewilding. In N. Pettorelli, S. M. Durant, & J. T. du Toit (Eds.), Rewilding (pp. 34–54). Cambridge University Press. Wasson, K., Woolfolk, A., & Fresquez, C. (2013). Ecotones as Indicators of Changing Environmental Conditions: Rapid Migration of Salt Marsh–Upland Boundaries, 36(3), 654–664. Woelfle-Erskine, C., & Cole, J. (2019). Transfiguring the Anthropocene: Stochastic Reimaginings of Human-Beaver Worlds. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2(2), 297–316. Woynarski, L. (2020). Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change. Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 3

Heritage: Following the Alloway Suffragettes

Field Routes leading to and from 55.4276, -4.6345 The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum (RBBM), Alloway, Ayrshire. RBBM was officially opened in 2011, bringing together the Burns Monument, Alloway Auld Kirk, Burns Cottage and the Brig o'Doon in a £21 million development, including a new museum building designed by Simpson and Brown Architects (n.d.) and an education pavilion next to the cottage. The main building includes an exhibition gallery, which displays a range of artefacts and interactive resources focussed on Burns’ work and legacy. Burns Cottage, where the poet spent the early years of his life, is at the other end of the village. Visitors can move between the two sites as they pass various sculptures and plaques along the ‘Poet’s Path’. RBBM is now a key feature of the cultural geography of Alloway and a focal point of the Burns heritage industry, which provides a major setting for the ‘play of representations’ that constitute the landscape of South Ayrshire (Cosgrove & Daniels, 1989, p. 169). (continued)

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(continued)

Openings From 2013 to 2016, I represented the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) as a member of South Ayrshire Arts Partnership—a group formed to deliver a large grant from Creative Scotland for arts activity in the region. In the first year of the partnership, I met RBBM’s inaugural director, Nat Edwards, who told me the story of two Suffragettes who attempted an arson attack on the cottage in 1914, after travelling by bike from Glasgow. Edwards suggested the possibility of a theatrical performance taking place at the site, which would re-enact this story for a contemporary audience at its centenary. Accepting an invitation to develop this project at the museum, I began to work with the Learning Manager, Chris Waddell, and the Scottish playwright, Victoria Bianchi—then a PhD candidate at UWS. We toured the estate, learnt about the work of the museum and explored the key locations. This led to a residency funded by South Ayrshire Council, during which we developed a deep understanding of the performances and narratives of Alloway over several months of work at the site, culminating in a public performance. Enquiry From the beginning of this project, we were concerned with various journeys to the site. Our questions were about disparities: between the androcentric focus on Burns and the feminist politics of the Suffragettes; between the fixed and static exhibition spaces and the ephemerality of the little-known attack on the cottage. How could a feminist politics be mobilised at this heritage museum? What methods would facilitate a re-­ mobilisation of the original journey taken by the would-be arsonists? How could our interventions coexist with the current uses and imaginaries of the site? These questions informed an emerging mobile performance practice, which was deployed as an artistic strategy to reimagine heritage sites from the periphery. This was an opportunity to mobilise a feminist (continued)

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(continued)

politics in a heritage context where ‘gender issues have very seldom been integrated and problematised’ (Grahn, 2018, p. 255). Performance fieldwork has the potential to make a meaningful intervention at heritage sites, enacting located and embodied engagement with historic struggles. Approach Our fieldwork included journeys to and from the village, including tracing the route that the Suffragettes took from Glasgow in 1914. In Alloway, we took part in tours, visited the museum and the local cafe and shop and explored the village with museum staff, local residents, our students and visiting members of the public. This informed a series of small-scale performance interventions. We sang Burns’ songs in the cottage and read texts aloud at the locations mentioned in old newspaper articles and court documents. Our main mode of travel was by foot back and forth along Poet’s Path, but the distance, and the historical journey that we were concerned with, called for bikes. Cycling allowed us to move quickly around the village and between the RBBM sites in a way that connected us to the physical environment in ways that would not have been possible in a car. Slowly, we began to understand the flows of people between the museum and the cottage, and discovered a forgotten history (or, to use Bianchi’s (2020) preferred term, ‘herstory’). Over several months, we returned again and again to Alloway as we devised a public performance that followed a route through the village and moved through 100 years of feminist mobility. Outputs I directed CauseWay: The Story of the Alloway Suffragettes for its first production in June 2014. It was then redirected by the author the following year, and later adapted for the stage at Òran Mór in Glasgow. CauseWay originally involved performers on bikes, travelling between the Museum and Burns Cottage, with the audience following on foot. The story of the (continued)

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(continued)

Suffragettes’ attempted arson attack was interspersed with Burns’ songs and reflections on the presence of women in contemporary heritage sites. Our work at RBBM is also discussed in two articles by Bianchi (2015, 2020). This chapter traces the routes, journeys and moments of immobility that comprise the CauseWay project. It considers a range of fieldwork activities throughout our residency at RBBM, but the main focus is on the performance itself, for which we employed a strategy that Bianchi (2020) has since conceptualised as ‘flexible characterisation’—a way of performing dynamic relationships between individuals within a marginalised historical narrative, the established heritage museum and its wider environment. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the importance of mobility to performance fieldwork. All of the case studies in this book are facilitated through movement—journeys to, from and within the field sites. It is suggested that this dynamic and responsive approach has great potential here, as it challenges the fixity of dominant and established spatial identity, thereby creating the conditions for alternative narratives and relational reconfiguration.

Departures Glasgow to Alloway, July 1914 In the summer of 1914, Ethel Moorhead and Frances Parker cycled from Glasgow to the village of Alloway in South Ayrshire. Today, they would have followed well-maintained cycle lanes beside the Ayr Road, weaving around the route of new M77 motorway. Their path would have cut unsympathetically through fields and woodland, dodging the flow of traffic under bridges and across roundabouts before following a network of country roads as the vista opened up to the Clyde Estuary and Ryanair planes roaring into the sky above Prestwick. They would have reached their destination in a few short hours.

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Over a hundred years ago, Moorhead and Parker’s journey would have taken longer and crossed rougher terrain.1 On heavier bikes, with more restrictive clothing, they would have had to pedal harder and travel further. That year, for the first time, the roads out of the city would have been newly painted with white lines, guiding their way before they crossed miles of open countryside. But although they may have completed the 40-mile trip in a single day, they would not have found it easy, weighed down as they were by metal canisters filled with explosives. The intended ‘destination’ of this journey by bicycle was the destruction of the cottage where Robert Burns was born. Not necessarily because of the National Bard’s problematic and complex opinions on gender, or his many unethical relationships (to say the least), but because of its public prominence and the wide-reaching impact an attack would achieve. The patriarchal appropriation of Burns’ ideas and values may also have been a motivating factor. But Moorhead and Parker never reached this end point. Unbeknownst to them, their arrival at Burns’ birthplace had been anticipated. After a spate of attacks on local buildings—including a stand at Ayr Racecourse that had been burnt down several months earlier—a night watchman had been employed. Robert Wyllie lay in waiting and the plot was foiled in the last moments as the Suffragettes were violently intercepted in their attempt to blow up the cottage. Moorhead (we assume it was Moorhead) managed to escape, but Parker, niece of the famous British Army Officer Lord ‘Your Country Needs You’ Kitchener, was arrested and thrown into Perth jail where she was brutally abused and scapegoated for a generation of ‘militant’ feminist protest. Glasgow to Ayr, May 2014 One hundred years later, I traced this route on a borrowed old mountain bike with a Go-Pro camera fixed to the handlebar. Cycling without a cause, or at least with a far less explicit one, I tried to imagine being driven forward through the inclement weather towards that final, explosive end point. With less political urgency, and undoubtedly less physical fitness, the miles seemed to expand exponentially in front of me. I was cold, wet, out of breath and thirsty. But at least I had the vote. 1  There are conflicting reports about the duration and origin of Moorhead and Parker’s journey. It is possible that their route included a stop in the town of Prestwick at the home of fellow Suffragette, Janie Allen.

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For the most part, I followed my regular route from my home in Glasgow to the University of the West of Scotland’s Ayr campus, where I worked at the time. I was imagining myself into Moorhead and Parker’s mission as I prepared to direct a new site-specific theatre performance at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum (RBBM), which would respond to the forgotten story of the Alloway Suffragettes. As I have written elsewhere, I am left with memories of ‘the exhilaration of the wind in my face as I sped downhill along country lanes, the mud splattering all over me, and the chilling soaking as I approached Ayr’ (Bissell & Overend, 2015, p. 491). The journey was not easy: I struggled with a rusty, squeaky old bike and a lack of training; was caught in the middle of unforgiving countryside in a hailstorm; and failed to record the journey as I had planned. Here, the challenge of mobility is reflected in its documentation: a series of still images from an unsatisfactory and unrecoverable video. Figure 3.1 shows the image from the first stage of my journey as I nervously manoeuvred my way through Glasgow. Shortly afterwards, I failed to notice a jolt knocking the camera out of position and for much of the rest of the day all that can be seen is my anxious face, framed by an overcast sky (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.1  Still from video footage of cycled journey from Glasgow to Ayr, May 2014

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Fig. 3.2  Still from footage after the camera was knocked out of place

This journey was part of a ‘mythogeographical’ exploration of the route (P. Smith, 2010)2: ‘a series of approaches to space and place that attempts to reveal the multiple meanings in any site and to set the ideas, feelings, symbols and discourses of these places and their people in motion about each other’ (Crabman, & Signpost, 2011, p. 20). As I cycled, I wondered how it might be possible to set the Suffragettes’ journey ‘in motion’ with these other elements. But I felt that Moorhead and Parker were always one step (or one rotation) ahead of me, and that in my eagerness to enact a contemporary version of this journey, I was failing to reconcile my own exploratory travel with the urgency of the Suffragettes’ cause. Could this experience of struggling to catch up be recreated for a mobile audience? Robert Burns Birthplace Museum to Robert Burns Cottage, Alloway, June 2014 CauseWay: The Story of the Alloway Suffragettes re-performed Moorhead and Parker’s journey in response to the absence of these women’s experience at RBBM, and to androcentric trends in the heritage sector more generally ‘by placing women’s stories and politics directly into the site’ 2  On another occasion, I walked ‘Route 77’ over three days (Bissell & Overend, 2021, pp. 29–51).

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(Bianchi, 2015, p. 52). At the centre of this performance was a collective journey, taken by the performers on bikes and the audience on foot, towards the cottage where the bomb plot was foiled. Our use of bikes was a key part of the feminist enquiry of the performance. In 1896, Susan B. Anthony claimed that cycling had ‘done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world’ (Bly, 1896). Accordingly, we set out to explore the emancipatory potential of a cycled performance, cutting subversive and incongruous paths through a carefully curated heritage site. CauseWay began as a small group of audience members assembled behind the museum and were greeted by two performers, Annaliese Broughton and Pamela Reid, who introduced the story of the planned Suffragette attack. As Broughton and Reid adopted the personae of Moorhead and Parker respectively, they set off by bike towards the cottage, and the audience duly followed on foot: across Murdoch’s Loan and along the cleanly landscaped Poet’s Path connecting the two sites. Progress was sound-tracked by Little Fire, the Ayrshire folk musician Jamie McGeechan. McGeechan’s role was to ‘stand in’ for Burns, guiding the walking group to key locations on the path. Meanwhile, the actors kept the narrative moving, literally and thematically: ETHEL: 38.9 miles. That’s 205,392 feet and my feet are on the pedals for every one of them. And my skirts bunch up uncomfortably around my thighs, and my head is overheating because my hair has been coiled around it inside my cap and my heart is beating louder and harder than I think it ever has before. And the reality of what’s up ahead, what we have to do, the darkness and the bang and the swirling flames, all of that pulses through me as I go. And I’m just as terrified as every other time and the people who tell you that it gets easier were lying. Because I’m still terrified, and this terror will stay with me for 205,392 feet, but my legs keep moving.3

To keep up with the bikes, the audience had to maintain a brisk pace, to the tempo of McGeechan’s songs. This introduced a sense of urgency, endurance and distance to be covered. While the aim was not to cause the audience physical discomfort (and indeed, alternative transport by electric shuttle was available for those with limited mobility), this section of the performance embodied our thematic concern with the relationship between mobility and political progress. 3   From the unpublished script of CauseWay: The story of the Alloway Suffragettes, Bianchi, 2014.

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Writing about CauseWay, Phil Smith suggests that the performance ‘hurt [heritage] where it is strongest’ through its ‘indictment of the skewed and exclusory dominant narratives’ of the museum (2018, pp. 138, 137). This approach is understood in terms of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’, as the multiple narratives of the performance and the site worked against each other, generating a dialectical engagement with the heritage industry and the exclusions and omissions through which it operates. This epic method relied on critical distance from the established Burns’ story and rendered the site ‘existentially contingent’ by mobilising other stories and histories that jostled for recognition within a bounded location. As Doreen Massey points out, ‘[I]n certain cultural quarters, the mobility of women does indeed seem to pose a threat to a settled patriarchal order’ (1994, p.  11). Massey therefore suggests that in these contexts, ‘one gender-disturbing message might be—in terms of both identity and space—keep moving!’ (p.  11). Feminist geographers have since considered the experience of those for whom movement may not always be possible. Forms of mobility are required that do not conform to the ‘masculinist, able-bodied, fit and generally white frame of reference’ that dominates many types of fieldwork (Bracken & Mawdsley, 2004, p. 281). In this project, physical movement was required of the audience: both a fictional and a spatial journey took place, even though the intended catharsis of the explosion was never to be realised. While accessibility was carefully considered, as a promenade performance, the event may have excluded some audience members with limited mobility. For those who were able to attend, the quality of movement through the site was slow, intermittent and interspersed with story and conversation. This chapter is concerned with the journey form, which was central to our performative engagement with the site. As researchers, performers and audience members, we followed a path together and explored the possibility of political progress. Through their movement through the site, spectators were transformed into active witnesses (P. Smith, 2018, p. 41). Over the course of a residency of several months, this project enacted a mobile relationship with an ostensibly static heritage site, opening up a space of multiple narratives and possible reimaginings. As an intervention into the heritage industry, performance fieldwork is offered as a peripheral practice that has the potential to change the ways that we encounter and engage with hidden or suppressed spatial histories.

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Performing Heritage Concluding her co-edited book on Gender and Heritage, Wera Grahn looks to curated museum exhibitions with an explicit focus on gender or intersectional perspectives as the pinnacle of gender integration in the heritage sector (2018, p. 263). While this can undoubtedly have emancipatory potential, as Grahn claims, it is also significant that in the introduction to the same book, her co-editor Ross Wilson asserts the importance of liminality to such a project. For Wilson, ‘it is the location of the periphery where the emergence of alternative, dissident and transforming ideas are created and can then effect the operation of power and authority at the core’ (2018, p. 7). Our fieldwork at RBBM embraces this liminal status at a museum that might be classified by Grahn only at the lower level of ‘addition’—a grafting on of women’s stories to the permanent Burns exhibition, which is often attempted without critical engagement with the inequality that perpetuates this marginal status. At RBBM, the cultural focus on Burns’ achievements and legacy is understandable and it is important to note that in commissioning projects such as ours, there was a considered effort to work against this tendency at the museum. However, it is perhaps inevitable that in prioritising one story, others are forgotten. As Bianchi points out, ‘[W]here women are represented in the RBBM they are portrayed only in relation to men, generally as lovers or mothers and given at most a paragraph in the main display’ (2015, pp. 56–57). In this way, the museum constructs an androcentric narrative of the site. Women’s stories and experiences are alluded to, mentioned in passing, but always superseded by the dominant figure of Burns and relegated to footnotes in his story. Performance fieldwork can be particularly efficacious in this context, as its peripherality allows movement between and around the ‘core’ of a site, troubling dominant narratives and subverting exclusory spaces. The fieldwork discussed in this chapter therefore employs a relatively interventionist approach, in comparison with the ‘light touch’ experimentation of the previous chapter on Ecology, for example. This difference, which is also notable in the subsequent accounts of fieldwork in this collection (the chapters on Clubbing and Deep Time contrast in similar ways), demonstrates the fundamental importance of sensitivity to the existing uses and relational composition of the selected field sites. In heavily managed, curated and landscaped sites such as RBBM, use and function may be overdetermined. In this case, fieldwork has the capacity to uncover or

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enact suppressed or hidden voices and presences. This is a very different situation to a rewilding initiative like Bamff Beaver Project, where a delicate process is underway to return the decision-making process to its non-­human inhabitants, who are remaking the landscape. While the morethan-human assemblages of Alloway and the surrounding area would be an entirely suitable focus of this work, in this case the concern is with the human relationships that comprise the site—the historical omissions and gendered obfuscations that uphold the dominant androcentrism of the Burns heritage industry. Working with performance in this exclusory social and cultural environment, there is a political justification for intervening directly in the relational space of a field site in a way that would not be appropriate in more eco-centric contexts. As mentioned, dramatising the story of the Alloway Suffragettes was initially suggested by the Museum’s director. Throughout the process we were then supported by the Learning Manager and his team. The National Trust for Scotland had a strong desire to open up a space for women’s stories and was supportive of our intentions to work beyond the established narratives of the site. They engaged with our research questions, listened to our arguments and facilitated our creative process. As a result, if our project could be considered subversive, it was not entirely counter to the aspirations, or even the remit, of the official custodians of the site. The degree to which our low-key residency and a small-scale performance project could prompt any real or lasting change is debateable. Nonetheless, by temporarily shifting the focus of RBBM’s spatial stories, we aimed to trouble the dominant history of the site by foregrounding an overlooked event, enacting the Suffragettes’ story in and amongst the exhibition of Burns’ memorabilia and the curated landscape of the village. Rather than imposing yet another narrative on top of the existing configuration of the site—silencing Burns’ voice or destroying his legacy (as Moorhead and Parker may have wished a century earlier)—our aim was to connect to what Massey refers to as a ‘simultaneity’ of spatial stories (Massey, 2005, p. 9): bringing Moorhead and Parker into a dialogue with Burns and performing an ever-shifting ‘constellation of trajectories’—an ongoing interrelatedness of mobile people, objects and ideas, which constitute the field site (p. 151). Importantly, much of the scholarship on heritage now recognises the important role that performance can play in either upholding or subverting fixed identities and dominant narratives. Following Coleman and Crang (2002), Urry and Sheller recognise the role of performance within

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a matrix of ‘multiple networked mobilities of capital, persons, objects, signs, and information’ (2004, p. 6). It is significant that the subtitle of Gender and Heritage highlights the main themes of Performance, Place and Politics, and many of the contributing authors consider the ways in which heritage sites perform and thereby establish ethical positions, creating certain absences and presences, which ultimately determine visitor experiences and perceptions. With an understanding of heritage as ‘up for grabs’, performance has played out at purportedly static, or even sacred, sites with an assumed licence or remit to challenge, subvert and reconstitute space. Many performance practitioners working in this field have explored ways to disrupt dominant or ‘official’ narratives and histories. For example, Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd assemble a collection of case studies that ask us ‘to reflect again on the relationships between “our” pasts and presents, truth and fiction (and the fragility of memory), authority and authorship, subject and object, the personal and collective’ (2012, p. 7). Relatedly, Smith’s Counter-Tourism (2012) offers an assortment of playful tactics for ‘mis-directing’ or ‘mis-guiding’ the intended uses of heritage sites and revealing their concealed or ignored histories. These tactics, whilst productive on their own, can also be used as the building blocks for larger-scale performative interventions into heritage sites. Smith’s own counter-touristic projects include his series of performances at A La Ronde—an eighteenth-century National Trust property in Devon. This work consists of ‘fragments of theatricality, visual performance, narration and ironical use of the conventions of guiding, visitor ambulation and address’ (P. Smith, 2011, p. 537). These textures of performance informed the development of our fieldwork at RBBM, which drew on these ideas to conceive of heritage as inherently and necessarily changeable and multiple (or, in Smith’s words, ‘existentially contingent’ (2018, p. 138)). It should be acknowledged that in focussing on the androcentrism of RBBM, other exclusory dynamics and marginalised identities remain unchallenged. Grahn advocates an intersectional approach, which recognises that ‘gender acts and works together with other social categories, such as class, ethnicity, sexual preferences, dis/ability, age, etc.’ (2018, p. 256). This is a limitation of our research, which attempted to closely follow the Suffragettes and was guided by their cause. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that in 1918, only 40% of women got the vote and that working class women in particular continued to be disenfranchised. The research discussed in this chapter can be further developed

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and conceptualised by turning to other struggles and strategies across a range of heritage sites. For example, Antoinette Jackson explores how Black people have defined leisure on their own terms through the construction of ‘vibrant spaces’ (2020, p. 76). Jackson relates instances when African Americans have ‘imagined something different and beyond the limitations imposed by segregation, and then created and lived in it’ (pp. 76–77). Within the predominantly male and white hierarchies of the British heritage industry, more inclusive intersectional practices can be imagined and brought into being. Acknowledging and entering into this unequal terrain, performance fieldwork can learn from such progressive and creative strategies of reimagining and reclaiming space through a range of excluded and marginalised perspectives. What we do and how we move and act in heritage sites are now understood to be part of their identity and ongoing formation, rather than a corollary to pre-existing uses, routes and narratives (Coleman & Crang, 2002). Massey’s understanding of places as constituted through dynamic and open interrelations between elements stands in contradistinction to traditional sedentarist approaches to heritage, in which Urry and Sheller identify ‘an ontology of separate events, where places and indeed cultures are presumed to be relatively fixed and given’ (2004, p. 5). However, heritage sites, as with the other field sites represented in this book, ‘are not fixed and unchanging but depend in part upon what happens to be practiced within them’ (p.  5). This is heritage as embodied and identity-­ forming, rather than received through the communication of unidirectional messages of established (and in many cases, often patriarchal meanings) (L. Smith, 2006, pp. 66–73, 2020). It is this space of potentiality in which performance fieldwork might make a meaningful intervention. The following section introduces mobility as a key feature of our work, primarily as it plays out within the bounded location of a specific site (Candea, 2007), but also extending to the various journeys to and from the field.

Performances of Mobility In attempting to consolidate, document and reflect on this fieldwork, this chapter addresses an assemblage of personal, political and historical journeys, spanning 100 years and connecting a city (Glasgow), a town (Ayr), a village (Alloway) and two buildings (the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum and Burns’ cottage). We have travelled by foot, bike, train and car through this storied landscape and found new audiences and

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collaborators along the way. This interconnected web of relational journeys—performed and remembered—reflects a dynamic approach to exploring this field site. Following my haphazard cycle from Glasgow and archival research into the journey taken by Parker and Moorhead a century earlier, we turned to mobility as a productive strategy to create ‘vibrant spaces’ within the museum estate. Continually moving around the site allowed us to retain a peripheral status, weaving our performances around the established infrastructure of the museum, identifying tensions and discrepancies and prompting immediate creative responses as we worked. With principles of counter-tourism and gender-integrated heritage in mind, we wanted to develop new methods and sensibilities to move alongside, travel with and follow potentially intransigent subjects. Throughout our fieldwork, mobile methods were used to prompt and promote the constant reconfiguration of the site. As Bianchi argues, ‘[O]ur understanding of a space can never be complete until attempts are made to uncover, document and represent the individuals and/or groups that have contributed to its formation’ (2015, p. 68). This requires an active engagement with a site—the work of uncovering, documenting and representing—and recognition that the formation of space is an ongoing process, which may never be complete or completable. The documents and future journeys that this project sets in motion (including this chapter) are part of this process. The main focus of the following exegesis is on the explicitly mobile components of the promenade performance of CauseWay itself, as well as addressing the importance of immobility as a counterpoint to the political progression of the Suffragettes’ cause. As an ‘output’ of performance fieldwork, the public performance differs from those examples in this book where a less interventionist approach was employed. CauseWay proclaimed its presence: it brought around 100 paying audience members to the site; the production was previewed in national press and television; and it was programmed, marketed and produced by the National Trust for Scotland. The performance could be understood as the culmination of the fieldwork at the site, but it is also an important part of the methodology. As with the numerous exploratory journeys and performances conducted at RBBM as part of our fieldwork, the production has now become part of the relational space of the site as it generates insights into marginalised histories and prompts new imaginaries, which may still be playing out in various ways. Focussing on the production rather than our small-scale

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experiments in the preceding months risks devaluing the subtler and less overtly theatrical aspects of our work. However, this approach allows the story of Parker and Moorhead’s journey to take centre stage, so to speak. It also makes a claim for larger-scale theatrical events as part of the repertoire of strategies, tactics and projects that comprise the methodological ‘toolbox’ of the performance fieldworker. Where the heritage industry or other key stakeholders have overdetermined a site and propagated a dominant identity at the expense of excluded or marginalised communities, there may be a justification for such larger-­ scale interventions. This overdetermination is what Laurajane Smith (2006) refers to as ‘authorised heritage discourse’, which can be challenged through alternative narratives and performances. This performance fieldwork employs a range of ‘theatrical’ methods such as characterisation and playwriting to this end. It demonstrates how a flexible and reflexive approach to fictionalising the field site can ensure that counternarratives can be enacted in order to reimagine and reconfigure heritage. Importantly, this can be achieved without imposing external creative processes at the expense of a multiple and dynamic environment. In this project, the use of a mobile performance practice is key to negotiating this space. Petra Kuppers’ question about who has access to theatrical expression is important here (2017, p. 73). Recognising that certain forms of mobile performance may be exclusory to certain groups, including disabled people, it may still be possible to contribute a specific intervention to an assemblage of different stories, events and exhibitions in ways that expand rather than confine access to a heritage site. Our work began at a wooden seating area in the museum gardens, appropriately laid out like a mini-amphitheatre. We returned frequently to this location during the residency, often playing with the narratives and discourses that were encountered at the museum, experimenting with the movement between fictionalised accounts, stories and myths, and the facts and information that we were accumulating throughout our time there. We initially played with the form of the guided tour, exploring its potential to perform overlapping and potentially conflicting spatial stories in order to explore the multiplicity and continual construction of the site (Overend, 2012). These improvised guides were a way of sharing facts and information that we had discovered through our individual research, but they also allowed us to question the status of these official narratives, bringing them into dialogue with speculative fictions about the historic and contemporary site.

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In the performance, the seating area retained a prominent function as it became a place for the audience to assemble, and for Broughton and Reid to informally greet its individual members and to ensure that they understood and were comfortable with the upcoming promenade route. The performance began in the register of the official tours that we had experienced and improvised with (‘welcome to the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum’). This allowed us to establish the conventions that we wanted to move away from, but the expected narrative of the ‘Birthplace’ was soon ironically and anachronistically undercut: FRANCES: A bit of a misnomer as this is not, in fact, Robert Burns’ Birthplace … the open plan look wasn’t actually all that popular in 1759—thatched roofs, internal stables and cholera were all much more en vogue at that time. ETHEL: Indeed, this is not the exact location of our national bard’s birth—that’s a wee bit along the road, and we’ll be visiting it soon enough. No, this is a place of celebration of his legacy. Only today, unlike the swathes of tourists and visitors coming in search of the man behind the words—and then maybe a nice cup of tea and scone—we’re not here for him. During this opening section, Broughton and Reid introduced Moorhead and Parker and alluded to the story of their journey to Alloway. As they did so, they briefly assumed the roles of the Suffragettes, amongst other characters including members of the Scottish League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. Jumping between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in and out of various roles (including those of the actors themselves), the performance text established a multiplicity of narratives—a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far'—and literally set these stories in motion (Massey, 2005, p. 9). Throughout our fieldwork, we experimented with Simon Persighetti’s model of the ‘actor as signpost’. This provided us with a mechanism to move between ‘character’ and ‘site’, pointing ‘outwards through associations to the immediate and transitory environment’ (P.  Smith, 2009, p. 164). A range of strategies were employed to this end: opportunities for informal dialogue between museum visitors or audience members and performers along the route; moments of critical ‘transparency’, when the performers highlighted the immediacy of the site over their own narrative objectives (pp. 162–163); and the use of ‘camouflage’ in the ways that the

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Suffragette story was situated within the existing narratives of Burns’ heritage (in our appropriation of the dynamics of the museum, the relationship of our performance text to its site was therefore one in which form ‘mimics rather than illuminates the site’ [p. 163]). At the same time, unlike the ‘misguided tours’ and walking performances of Persighetti, Phil Smith and their performance group, Wrights & Sites, CauseWay consciously stayed with its characters for longer. However, at key points in the performance, the actors used dramatic gesture to point to ‘an inner or interpretive self’ (pp. 163–164). Bianchi has termed this method ‘flexible characterisation’, an approach to heritage in which ‘the performer offers moments of their own experiences alongside those of their “character”’ (2020, p. 365). Flexible characterisation involves a fluidity of performance styles that does not neglect authenticity of neglected past lives, but involves a sensitivity to the site as an open, evolving entity. Smith puts this more directly, by suggesting that through this tactic of ‘acting in quotation marks’ the performer ‘betrays or outrages their site [as] their narrative or projection of character or persona exposes the same contingency in the apparent material solidity of the location as in their own actions’ (2018, p. 136–137). Our concern with movement therefore extends beyond the physical relationship to the site, as even the adopted roles of the performers are shown to be dynamic and changeable, open to being reimagined and reconstituted throughout the event. When I cycled from Glasgow ‘in pursuit’ of Parker and Moorhead, I experienced something of the discomfort and endurance that was required to cover this distance. At the same time, the route was short enough to imagine that adrenaline would have propelled the Suffragettes forward, as they closed in on the cottage and the planned explosive end to their journey. Did they discuss the plan en route or did they cycle on in terrified silence, individually rehearsing the steps they would take and wondering at the repercussions to come? Working in Alloway with Broughton and Reid over the coming months, we answered some of these questions through improvisation—a series of acting exercises that allowed us to create our own version of events and to develop a reflexive approach to our creation of a possible Parker and Moorhead, which was maintained throughout the process, including in the public performances. Flexible characterisation was important here as it allowed us to put these fictions to work, with the performers ‘reflecting on their own portrayal and on the constraints of the performance they inhabited’ (P.  Smith, 2018, p.  137). In this way, we were able to move between speculative improvisation of actions and

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conversations along the route, and critical commentary and reflection on the choices that were being made. When we made discoveries on inferences through this method, these were never given the authoritative status of fixed characterisation. Rather, as Smith remarks, they were held open to scrutiny and presented reflexively. In this project, nothing stayed still for long. Our main mode of transport around the museum estate, which was also used in the public performance, was by modern Pashley bicycles (Fig. 3.3). As our performance bridged the time between the original journey in 1914 and the present, this faux retro style suited our purpose—hints of a vintage design but with contemporary detail. The audience groups, which were usually around 20 people, followed on foot accompanied by McGeechan with his guitar. Unexpectedly, we frequently collected audience members as we travelled, as members of the public encountered the walking audience and cycling performers and decided to join the group. More often than not, we ended with a larger audience than we started with. Working in a busy public museum, there were numerous occasions throughout our residency when the theatricality of our explorations—the use of costume and song, for example—drew visitors to our group, where we would engage in conversation and explain our project, taking every opportunity to tell the story of Parker and Moorhead’s journey. At the same time, we were careful to respect established spatial relationships and worked hard to avoid imposing our presence on unsuspecting or non-consenting members of the public. The visibility of much of our fieldwork was intended as an invitation to engage, rather than an unwelcome imposition. Throughout our fieldwork, Moorhead and Parker became ghosts, slipping away just as the narrative appeared to hold them. Our mode of transport—the bikes—was key to this dynamic. In the performance, they allowed Broughton and Reid to travel faster than the audience; able to speed off ahead of the group. As I have previously suggested, cycling is ‘fast enough to feel a tangible sense of progress at any given moment; but slow enough to feel a corporeal connection to the landscape’ (Bissell & Overend, 2015, p. 491). Perhaps it was this sense of progress—the exhilaration and emancipation of speeding away from home—that made the bicycle so attractive to fin de siècle women seeking to travel beyond the restrictive social norms of the nineteenth century. Feminist writers such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton defied vehement opposition to women cycling and engaged with the newly popularised bicycle as ‘a revolutionary social invention that opened new avenues of pragmatic

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Fig. 3.3  Pamela Reid performing CauseWay outside the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum

and spiritual independence’ (Strange & Brown, 2002, p.  611). In her articles for The American Wheelman, Stanton (1895) argued that ‘the bicycle will inspire women with more courage, self-respect and self-­reliance and make the next generation more vigorous of mind and of body’. Moorhead and Parker may have been familiar with this literature and, influenced by the cycling pioneers of early feminism, their mode of transport may have been consciously symbolic as well as practical. In this case, it was bikes that took the Suffragettes to their final destination. Smith has cautioned against the ‘smuggling of extraneous character narrative into site-based performance’ (2009, p. 161). While our own narrative was not entirely extraneous to the site and while it was never permitted to ‘settle’ within the space, we were nonetheless exploring the potential of empathic engagement with psychological characters. This required a careful balancing act between sensitivity, openness and responsiveness, and development of Bianchi’s dramatic narrative over the course of the performance. Smith sets up a dichotomy between the ‘the experimenter in motion’ and ‘the impersonator on a bounded site’, and prioritises the

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experience of ‘taking the journey rather than representing it within bounded space’ (pp. 159, 164). This notion of boundedness (presumably fully manifested in the carefully stage-managed space of a theatre building) is seemingly counter to the aspirations of a field practice that responds to space in all its ever-changing complexity. However, while the term is not used in exactly the same way, Matei Candea’s (2007) defence of the bounded field site is applicable here, as it suggests the potential for processes of selection and limitation to actually draw attention to the inherent inconsistencies and multiplicities of the field. As discussed in the introduction to this book, rather than essentialising sites, ‘bounding’ can create the conditions for an encounter with ‘the teeming multiplicity of an unfamiliar context’ (p. 173). As this model suggests, experimentation and mobility, and impersonation and boundedness, are not mutually exclusive. While Smith has often rejected the use of impersonation and realism in this context, we were concerned with claiming a place for character-based narrative, bringing psychological drama into a formative dialogue with the experimental and mobile textures of our fieldwork. While the performance included healthy doses of irony (as in the opening scene above), it also allowed space for an empathic engagement with the characters of Moorhead and Parker and it is in this mode that the opening section concluded: FRANCES: I actually reckon that our rallies and our demonstrations and our posters don’t go far enough. Because they seem to be making bugger all of a difference. ETHEL: They don’t seem to be opening anyone’s eyes, or at least not the right eyes. FRANCES: We’re not getting enough attention for our cause, and if we can’t get the right sort of attention, well then you know what we need to do. ETHEL: What? FRANCES: We need to go. At this point, the central journey of the performance ensued as the performers left the seating area and made their way towards the museum, prompting the audience to follow. Physically moving on at this point was important: it allowed us to immediately disrupt the exposition of the psychological drama: ‘We need to go’ pre-empted the leitmotif, ‘keep moving’, that recurred from this

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point forward. Here, mobility was employed as a Brechtian device, creating a critical distance between actors and characters, and disrupting the audience’s potentially passive reception of psychological narrative. The journey between the museum building and Burns Cottage followed the route of the museum’s ‘Poet’s Path’. This section of the performance used a mobile structure that moved between dramatic narrative, guided tour, song and walk. Broughton and Reid would cycle away from the audience group, indicating a direction of travel and setting the audience in pursuit. Broughton would stop and wait for the audience to catch up, while Reid cycled on ahead to the next stopping point on the route. This provided several points for those members of the audience who may have benefitted from the opportunity to stop and rest. At all points, the museum’s electric shuttle bus was on stand by for anyone who needed it. After a scripted performance, Broughton would then cycle away from the audience, passing Reid who awaited the arrival of the audience to deliver the next ‘instalment’ of text, before waiting at the next stopping point. In this mode, the audience travelled along the path, engaging with the story of Moorhead and Parker’s historical journey at the same time as they made their own. The coexistence of chronologies—‘two distinct lines of historical development’ (Bourriaud, 2009, p. 123)—shaped this journey as both the audience and the Suffragettes gradually made progress towards the site of the intended attack. The points when the audience’s route intersected with the performers’ operated, then, as a temporal conflation. They were realised as stopping places, where the actors directly addressed the audience as a brief scripted performance took place. The onward trajectory of the performance then continued as the performers cycled away from the audience group, moving on to the next stop before converging outside the cottage.

Performances of Immobility Interspersing our mobile fieldwork, there were many periods of lingering, settling and resting. One location in which we spent a great deal of this time was the old barn in Burns Cottage. Here, we worked with McGeechan to set many of Burns’ best-known poems to music, including new compositions and alternative arrangements of traditional tunes. Frequently, visitors to the museum would enter this public space and listen to or join in with our song, engaging in conversation about the site and our project and contributing anecdotes and reflections about the museum and the

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story of the Suffragettes, of which the majority were unaware. Through these convivial performances and conversations, the space became a locus for the creation of an inclusive and open heritage of the site, which directly informed the development of the performance text. At the end of the promenade route, the performers-in-character identified the building as the target for their attack, and the audience were invited to enter. As they gathered inside the cottage, Broughton began by ‘mak[ing] one thing extremely clear—Robert Burns was NOT a feminist’. At this point, additional musicians joined McGeechan and the actors, and the performance incorporated a number of verses from Burns’ songs, which the audience were invited to join in singing. The lyrics resonated with Moorhead and Parker’s story, and Broughton and Reid used them as prompts to make connections between Burns in the eighteenth century, the Suffragettes in the twentieth century and the audience in the twenty-­ first century: (sung) Green grow the rashes, O; Green grow the rashes, O; The sweetest hours that e’er I spend, Are spent amung the lasses, O.

ETHEL: Her prentice hand she tried on man, and then she made the lasses, O. FRANCES: That’s just romanticism, though, it’s not a declaration of feminist sympathy. This section of the performance allowed a departure from the narrative progression of the Suffragettes’ journey, bringing the audience and performers together inside the cottage to reflect on the multiple stories that comprise the space. This was a break from the promenade mode and allowed a period of co-presence, which used a relational aesthetic to re-­ focus in the ‘here and now’ of the site (Bourriaud, 2002). Temporarily coming together in song encouraged a shifting of perspectives; a looking out to the heritage industry and the site of the museum, preventing the psychological drama from dominating the encounter. From this point forward audience movement was limited to a short distance between the side of the cottage, the edge of the adjoining field and the final location—rows

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of seating arranged in the Education Pavilion. Our physical reduction of mobility reflected a thematic concern with immobility in the final stage of the performance, which developed as subsequent events were recounted. Appropriately, it was the more sedentary aspects of our fieldwork that led to this part of our enquiry. Bianchi spent hours engaged in archival research in Ayr Library and with the assistance of an enthusiastic librarian, discovered a number of historical documents, which were invaluable to our developing understanding of the events as they transpired. It seems that following their journey to Burns Cottage, Moorhead and Parker were separated. Moorhead’s identity has never actually been confirmed as she struggled free from Wyllie’s hold and fled into the night. She would, we presume, have returned alone by bike. In CauseWay, Broughton offered a fictionalised account of Moorhead’s return journey, portraying her horror as she discovered what had happened to her friend. While Moorhead escaped, Parker was rendered immobile against her will, and her subsequent experiences are a troubling example of individual female movement being controlled and constrained by brutal patriarchal institutions. No stranger to imprisonment, Parker (using the alias Janet Arthur) was convicted in Ayr court on 9 July 1914 and initially remained in Ayr before her transfer to Perth Prison. During her court appearance, Parker refused to enter the dock and remained fiercely defiant, unwilling to accept the jurisdiction of the court and shouting lines from Burns’ Scots Wha Hae, exclaiming ‘You Scotsmen used to be proud of Bruce. Now you have taken to torturing women’ (Glasgow Herald 1914; cf. National Records of Scotland, n.d.). Evidently, the authorities did not respond favourably to this behaviour. After her release, under her pseudonym, Parker wrote an account of her treatment in Votes for Women, the journal of the Women’s Social and Political Union (Arthur, 1914). This essay directly informed the ‘plot’ of the final section of CauseWay. The text vividly portrays Parker’s incarceration and torture, including enforced rectal feeding during her hunger strike. It includes her ruminations on the institutionalisation of such violence, often committed by women under the instruction of male doctors and prison guards. Parker’s harrowing account includes numerous references to enforced immobility. She recounts how her captors ‘knelt on my chest’ and ‘sat down heavily on my knees’. She was also ‘held down’ and spent her time ‘lying in my cell’. Not only does this language contrast sharply to the ‘new avenues’ and ‘independence’ of the women’s cycling revolution; it also offers an important context for the events that preceded it. The

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imprisonment and torture of Suffragettes was widespread at this time, and Parker’s motives for the attempted bombing may have been a direct response to this situation. The map of the site in the official leaflets handed out to visitors includes a brief allusion to this. This is the only reference to Parker that we found at the Museum: Did you know? A suffragette nicknamed Fanny Parker was so enraged by Scotland’s mistreatment of female prisoners that she tried to blow up the cottage in 1914.

There is an uncomfortable process at work here: the way in which the heritage industry dilutes injustice and abuse, and re-packages suffering into easily digestible crumbs of history. But, as Smith reminds us, ‘the heritage business is like the moon: it has a dark side’ (2012, p.  31). Performance fieldwork offers a way of accessing the other side of heritage sites such as RBBM, constituting an active, critical and questioning approach to our shared history. Our research creatively challenged the focus of this bucolic village museum by developing a sustained, sited relationship with the Suffragette’s story—frequently reduced to a brief anecdote appended to the dominant narrative of Burns’ biography and poetry. In this way, heritage can be repurposed as ‘a show of resistance and also a site of power’ (Jackson, 2020, p. 1). For as Smith points out, ‘[B]ehind those simple-sounding stories in the Visitor Guide […] there lies a multitude of wonders, absurdities and outrages’ (2012, p. 31). Our fieldwork was counter-touristic in this sense, as it aspired to bring visitors into a physical encounter with the undercurrent of dark narratives hidden within this site, as captured in Parker’s account of her imprisonment. In the performance, our dramaturgical exploration of immobility, capture and incarceration therefore provided an important shift in the mobile structure of the performance, which aimed to prevent the performance being folded back into the established heritage of the site: the ‘lively and informative’ stories of the Burns exhibition (Simpson and Brown Architects, n.d.). Although it has been supposed that Moorhead and Parker’s experiences ‘can only have hardened their militancy’, in the end, the implications of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo soon began to eclipse the Suffragettes’ cause (Leneman, 1991, p.  208). As a result, Parker’s case was never brought to trial as all Suffragette prisoners were granted amnesty after war was declared the following month (National Records of Scotland, n.d.). While Parker’s imminent incarceration

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provided the context for the closing section of CauseWay, an earlier scene explored Moorhead and Parker’s reunion after Parker’s release. Chronologically, this was the final moment in the story and it captured the Suffragettes’ resolve to keep fighting regardless. The final section of the performance skipped back in time to Parker’s initial court appearance—a narrative disordering that contributed to our epic dramaturgy. It also bookended the mobility of the promenade route, as the audience were invited to sit down. This was important in terms of accessibility, as those who may have struggled with the walked part of the performance now had an opportunity to rest. This signified an end to their own journey as well as Parker’s. Reid, standing alone to address the audience, delivered a closing monologue to an immobile audience. While much of the preceding script had used character to tell the story, this section enacted a collapsing of past into present, blurring the lines between character, actor and playwright, and addressing the audience in the present. It started ‘my name is Janet Arthur’, and finished with a ‘call to arms’, which directly implicated ourselves and our audience: In everything that I do, I believe—no, I know with all my heart that we move towards a world where bigotry and hatred and misogyny will be a thing of the past. And that’s why I stand before you today, pleading guilty of my acts in the fight for equality—because, if we do not fight for it, constantly and with every fibre of our being, then we will never achieve it.

The irony was clear: we have not arrived yet and bigotry, hatred and misogyny are firmly rooted in our present. But Moorhead and Parker’s story shows us that the journey is the important thing: to fight against inequality and to refuse to be contained and rendered immobile by the politics of fear. To ‘keep moving’ is a political strategy, and in this project we explored an appropriate cultural form that can contribute to a reimagining and reframing of our shared heritage.

Conclusion In attempting to re-create Moorhead and Parker’s journey, and to document and analyse the resulting journeys and performances, this project aimed to find a way of working that responds to a specific type of field site. A model for performance fieldwork has been explored that enacts a mobile relationship to its environment. This is a performance practice that refuses

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to stay still, continues to initiate new conversations and adapts to new contexts. In this way, performance has been used to respond to Massey’s dynamic, relational concept of space. Performance fieldwork is employed to keep heritage, stories, sites and relationships moving. The CauseWay project also informs an approach that has applications beyond heritage sites. A number of key issues emerge, which inform the development of a flexible and adaptable methodology that is necessarily determined by its context. This chapter suggests that performance fieldwork can be theatrical, interventionist and mobile. The Introduction to this book subscribes to the notion that all fieldwork is a type of ‘performing art’, to use Cosgrove and Daniels’ (1989) phrase. CauseWay takes this premise to the level of public performance, adopting the reflexive dramaturgy of epic theatre to draw attention to the continual performative construction of the heritage site. The period of our residency at RBBM involved a series of small-scale creative experiments and journeys around the site. While these played out in a similar mode to the fieldwork activities at Bamff Estate, as discussed in Chap. 2, in this case they were conducted with a prearranged endpoint in mind: the development of a public performance for the National Trust for Scotland. This chapter has conceived of the production of CauseWay: The Story of the Alloway Suffragettes as an important part of our fieldwork at the site. Larger-scale projects such as this have the potential to disrupt established spatial identity, in this instance challenging the androcentrism of the Burns Museum and remobilising an alternative critical history of the field site. It is important to note, however, that a theatrical production in a cultural venue such as a theatre or a museum (or a nightclub, as in the following chapter) may have significantly different implications to a larger-scale performance in, for instance, a wildland site, where fragile ecological relationships are being conserved or protected, and public performances are not already part of the ’repertoire’ of the site (Wilkie, 2002). A public performance is developed at RBBM because it is considered appropriate and effective in this specific cultural context, but this will not always be the case. Fieldwork will always make an intervention in its site, as it becomes part of the relational space through which it is constituted. These are temporary activities, which are often small-scale and ‘light touch’ in their relationship with the landscape or environment. However, when the relational space itself is constructed to perform an essentialist identity—Ayrshire as ‘Burns Country’, for example—then the performances of fieldwork have a potentially disruptive or subversive function. In this case study, the

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androcentrism of RBBM was challenged. This is upheld through the dominant narratives of Burns’ life and legacy. Our fieldwork aimed to directly counter this established identity through the enactment of an alternative feminist history. Performance has long embraced activism and radical politics, but in the case of site-based performance, there is a risk that political strategies are imposed on a site rather than emerging from an engagement with it. CauseWay suggests the value of performance fieldwork in this context, as the multiplicity of spatial identity is opened up and mobilised in order to develop sited alternatives to dominant or sedentary narratives and histories. The key contribution of this project to the ongoing development of a methodology for performance fieldwork is through its use of mobility. Mobility is at once the subject and method of this enquiry. Our performance practice explored feminist travel in the early twentieth century and uncovered the neglected history of Moorhead and Parker’s cycle to Alloway. Engaging with this historic event, we created countless journeys of our own: my initial bike ride from Glasgow, which established a concern with the practice of moving on; the long period of walking and cycling around the village with Bianchi and the performers as we conducted our fieldwork; and the promenade route taken by the audience that comprised the main part of the CauseWay performance. These journeys established an agile and adaptable approach to the site, which was mirrored in the dramaturgy of the performance, as the actors employed flexible characterisation and moved critically between personae. In the chapters that follow (and the one that preceded), mobility is developed as a central concern. In fact, all of the case studies in this book are constituted through movement—journeys to, from and within the field sites. It is important to recognise that this approach has an exclusory potential as not all researchers, collaborators or audience members are able to access field sites in the same way. However, mobility can be enacted in different ways and at different scales and does not necessitate the ‘heroic’ masculinist ideal that is so prevalent in field studies (Bracken & Mawdsley, 2004). This work demonstrates that within a bounded field site exists a ‘teeming multiplicity’ of performances, trajectories, imaginaries, conceptualisations, histories and ecologies (Candea, 2007, p. 173). In this chapter, as with others in this book, a mobile methodology allows researchers to move within and as part of the field sites, revealing existing relationships and imagining new possibilities.

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References Arthur, J. (1914). Another Prison Infamy: Inhuman Treatment of an Unconvicted Prisoner in Perth—Rectum Feeding Again Employed. In: National Records of Scotland, Reference HH16/43/6. Bianchi, V. (2015). The Path to CauseWay: Developing a Feminist Site-specific Performance Practice at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. Platform, 9(2), 55–78. Bianchi, V. (2020). Flexible Characterization: Herstorical Performance in Heritage Sites. New Theatre Quarterly, 36(4), 355–368. Bissell, L., & Overend, D. (2015). Regular Routes: Deep Mapping a Performative Counterpractice for the Daily Commute. Humanities, 4(3), 476. Bissell, L., & Overend, D. (2021). Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010–2020. Triarchy. Bly, N. (1896). Champion of Her Sex: Miss Susan B. Anthony Tells the Story of Her Remarkable Life to “Nellie Bly”. The World. Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Les Presses du Réel. Bourriaud, N. (2009). The Radicant. Lucas & Sternberg. Bracken, L., & Mawdsley, E. (2004). ‘Muddy Glee’: Rounding out the Picture of Women and Physical Geography Fieldwork. Area, 36(3), 280–286. Candea, M. (2007). Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(1), 167–184. Coleman, S., & Crang, M. (2002). Tourism: Between Place and Performance. Berghahn Books. Cosgrove, D., & Daniels, S. (1989). Fieldwork as Theatre: A Week's Performance in Venice and its Region. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 13(2), 169–182. Crabman, & Signpost. (2011). A Sardine Street Box of Tricks. Triarchy Press. Glasgow Herald. (1914). Alloway Outrage: Attempt to Blow up Burns’s Cottage: Suffragist in Custody. http://digital.nls.uk/scotlandspages/timeline/1914.html Grahn, W. (2018). The Politics of Heritage: How to Achieve Change. In W. Grahn & R. J. Wilson (Eds.), Gender and Heritage: Performance, Place and Politics (pp. 255–268). Routledge. Jackson, A., & Kidd, J. (2012). Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation. Manchester University Press. Jackson, A.  T. (2020). Heritage, Tourism, and Race: The Other Side of Leisure. Routledge. Kuppers, P. (2017). Theatre & Disability. Bloomsbury. Leneman, L. (1991). A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffragette Movement in Scotland. Mercat Press. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Polity.

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Massey, D. (2005). For Space. SAGE Publications. National Records of Scotland. (n.d.). The case of Fanny Parker alias Janet Arthur. In: Scottish Archives for Schools. Overend, D. (2012). Performing Sites: Illusion and Authenticity in the Spatial Stories of the Guided Tour. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 12(1), 44–54. Simpson and Brown Architects. (n.d.). Robert Burns Birthplace Museum Project Sheet. Retrieved 14 June 2018 from http://www.simpsonandbrown.co.uk/ files/content/69_project_sheet.pdf Smith, L. (2006). Uses of Heritage. Routledge. Smith, L. (2020). Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. Routledge. Smith, P. (2009). Actors as Signposts: A Model for Site-based and Ambulatory Performances. New Theatre Quarterly, 25(2), 159–171. Smith, P. (2010). Mythogeography. Triarchy Press. Smith, P. (2011). ‘Gardens Always Mean Something Else’: Turning Knotty Performance and Paranoid Research on their Head at A la Ronde. Cultural Geographies, 18(4), 537–546. Smith, P. (2012). Counter-Tourism: The Handbook. Triarchy Press. Smith, P. (2018). Making Site-specific Theatre and Performance: A Handbook. Macmillan International Higher Education. Stanton, E.  C. (1895). 'Wonderful New Style …': The Era of the Bicycle. The American Wheelman. Strange, L., & Brown, R. (2002). The Bicycle, Women's Rights, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Women's Studies, 31(5), 609–626. Urry, J., & Sheller, M. (2004). Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. Routledge. Wilkie, F. (2002). Kinds of Place at Bore Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Rules of Spatial Behaviour. New Theatre Quarterly, 18(3), 243–260. Wilson, R. J. (2018). The Tyranny of the Normal and the Importance of Being Liminal. In W. Grahn & R. J. Wilson (Eds.), Gender and Heritage: Performance, Place and Politics (pp. 3–14). Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Clubbing: Relational Performance at Death Disco

Field 55.8582, -4.2588 The Arches (former arts centre), Argyle Street, Glasgow Located underneath the railway lines of Glasgow Central, seven brick arches were constructed between 1902 and 1905 as part of a large-scale extension to the station. As a result of Glasgow’s winning bid as the European City of Culture in 1990, this dark, underused, industrial space was repurposed as a cultural centre. The Arches soon became a renowned venue for arts and entertainment events (Innes & Bratchpiece, 2021). During this time, the space changed rapidly from corporate event to theatre performance to club night, often in just one day. Over 300 events took place each year and hundreds of thousands of people came through the doors. The venue was home to both the Arches Theatre Company and several large-scale club nights, including Death Disco—the focus of this chapter. The Arches closed its doors as a club and arts centre in 2015 and the space has since been used for a variety of corporate and hospitality events. (continued)

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Openings Between 2007 and 2010, I was employed as a research associate at the Arches. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Award Scheme, in collaboration with the University of Glasgow, the project aimed to develop a model by which artists can work in and with multi-use cultural venues. It suggested ways in which artists working ‘in residence’ can make work that uses, makes evident and contributes to what Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) describes as the ‘space of relations’ that exists within every site. Over the course of this long-term residency, I worked with a group of performers and designers to conduct a series of performance experiments in response to the various spaces and functions of the building, including the club. The extended timescale of this research and the resources and funding that were available offered a valuable opportunity for a sustained immersion in the everyday life of the venue and new possibilities for artistic collaborations, publications and public events. Enquiry My performance experiments at the Arches aimed to interrogate Bourriaud’s model of relational aesthetics through the development of critical performance interventions, conceived as an emerging ‘relational performance practice’. This research turned to the night club to investigate a range of relationships and experiences— including antagonisms, limitations and negotiations—which are not always comfortably aligned with the sphere of relations constructed by artistic processes. This is an enquiry into dynamic spatial practices, including alternation between observing or spectating as part of a wider group, and becoming part of a collective aesthetic—forming individual relationships with a performance and its environment. Following the previous chapter, which focussed on the contested space of a heritage museum in a rural village, the night club is explored here as a unique urban environment that is created through an assemblage of human bodies within a bounded space. (continued)

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(continued)

Approach Working with a small team of performers and designers, a series of performance experiments were developed for the club. These responded to and incorporated the day-to-day interactions and activities that constituted the relational space of the Arches. As we conducted this research, we attended to the flow of clubbers through the space, to the structure of this specific club night and to wider theories and practices of clubbing. Building an understanding of the club in this way informed a series of small-­scale theatrical interventions designed to prompt new experiences and behaviours within the club space. This included the deployment of overtly theatrical characters and activities that invited clubbers into new relationships with the space and the clubbing crowd. A gradual accumulation of these activities eventually led to a programmed event, which involved several performers and interacted with hundreds of clubbers. This work set out to incorporate complex and potentially conflicting relationships into an emerging performance practice. Outputs Midland Street (2009) was a one-off performance for the monthly electro club night at the Arches. The performance attempted to move outside the boundaries of the theatre programme as well as the studio space, entering the dynamic relational realm of the club. An analysis of this project was originally included in my doctoral thesis and subsequently published as an article in New Theatre Quarterly (Overend, 2011b, 2012). This chapter offers an updated version of this original article, which repositions my experiments in ‘relational performance practice’ as an important precursor to more recent applications of performance fieldwork. (continued)

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(continued)

This fieldwork emerges from an engagement with the clubbing experience itself, which is understood as a fluctuation between immersion in the collective subculture of the club and individual autonomy (Malbon, 1999). It responds to continually shifting practices of those encountering and becoming part of such collective identities, which have long been an underexamined aspect of youth cultures (Schiermer et al., 2021). This suggests an active and micro-political role for individual participants, who position themselves in relation to the wider collective. A parallel is drawn between the clubbing crowd and the relational theatre audience, both of whom form contingent communities of practice. Retrospectively, identifying this project as an early manifestation of performance fieldwork, it is clear that the research was testing the ‘edges’ of performance research as it played out within the constantly shifting social and spatial relationships of the field site.

Clubbing Collectives Over the three years of my residency at the Arches, I took visitors on guided tours through offices, rehearsal rooms and backstage areas; I invited dance groups and a brass band into the derelict space underneath the building; and I handed over technical equipment to the audience, inviting them to do whatever they liked with it (Overend, 2011a, b). Using a variety of methods and focussing on different aspects of the venue, my research explored ways in which performance practice can be developed in response to a specific cultural site. This chapter focusses on a major phase of this work: a series of performance experiments conducted for Death Disco, the Arches’ monthly electro club night. Using cars parked outside the club, a chaotic poker game and an array of overtly theatrical characters—including a clown and a pack of urban animals—this project was the first time that I ventured beyond the boundaries of the theatre programme and the performance studio, entering another relational realm that was central to the cultural identity of the venue. Throughout this project, I employed what I now recognise as performance fieldwork, in order to engage with the relational space of a cultural

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centre. This chapter suggests how a practice-based methodology can respond to the complex and dynamic socio-spatial environment of a night club, responding to and generating shifting modes of engagement, from observation to participation, and involving fluctuation between individual and collective experience. Andrew Wiskowski’s theorisation of Aesthetic Collectives identifies a ‘relational and experiential balance’ in the performance of large groupings of people, between the shifting modes of individuality, sociality and collectivity (2022, p.  17). Examining the spatial practices of the clubbing crowd and reflecting on performance fieldwork at a night club, this chapter explores this ‘balance’ as it plays out through a range of different modes of engagement and relationships between our performance practice, the clubbing space and the clubbers who created it. The variety of performance interventions that comprised this work prompts a shifting and multifaceted experience, which informs an understanding of the ‘audience’ of performance fieldwork. Wiskowski’s model recalls the critical insights and critiques generated by Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2002), which offered something of a conceptual provocation for my fieldwork at the Arches. In the late 1990s, Bourriaud articulated a growing trend in contemporary art to use social relationships as a formal strategy. Rather than the object-based art of paintings and sculptures, for example, many artists were using meetings, encounters and events as the primary component of their work. Bourriaud refers to the social dimensions of the space in which we live and argues that this social realm can function both as an artistic form and as an ‘artwork venue’ (2002, p.  44). In this model, an understanding of the social space is problematically limited to the frequently closed, exclusory operation of the art gallery. Conversely, venues like the Arches must address what might be called relational contamination or spillage—here, it is impossible to effectively contain an artistic event or to ‘protect’ it from external encounters and disruptions. At the Arches, this is symbolised by the constant rumble of trains passing overhead. The most successful performances and events at the venue recognised this and found novel ways to incorporate disruptions and interventions into their aesthetic. While the Arches is by no means an open, democratic space (and has become even less so since its closure as a publicly subsidised arts centre), it nonetheless presents a bounded context for a practice-based interrogation of the relationality of performance in an environment that is predominantly constituted through interactions between people.

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Despite (or because of) its popularity, and its ambitious claims of ‘re-­ launching the modern emancipation plan’ (p. 16), relational aesthetics is not without its critics. In the years following my fieldwork at the Arches, the idea has continued to exert its influence in the artworld, prompting a range of departures and reapplications. This has included a feminist critique of relational art’s reliance on under-valued labour (Reckitt, 2013), and an examination of cultural difference in Renate Dohmen’s (2016) imagined encounters between the ‘relational’ artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tamil women, the Shipibo-Conibo of Eastern Peru and a fictional female artist. The most influential of these critiques remains that of Claire Bishop (2004), who takes issue with the assumed democracy of relational aesthetics, arguing that the concept rests ‘too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as imminent togetherness’ (p. 67). Bishop’s key criticism of ‘relational’ art is its predication ‘on the exclusion of those who hinder or prevent its realisation’ (p. 68). Bourriaud repeatedly uses the term ‘micro-utopia’ to describe a model for a better future realised within the confines of the gallery: a project that is characterised by its concern to ‘give everyone their chance’ (2002, pp. 31, 58). There is a danger of utopianism in this model (as opposed to ‘micro-utopianism’ (p. 31)), which is unreconcilable with the ‘existing real’ that such work aims to operate within (p. 13). Claims of emancipatory potential become particularly problematic when attention is turned to the institutional, cultural and social boundaries of the environment that relational art takes place within; the exclusions and antagonisms that are obscured by aspirations of ‘link(ing) individuals and human groups together’ (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 43; see Martin, 2007). Informed by critical perspectives on relational aesthetics, my fieldwork at the Arches set out to explore how performance can acknowledge and incorporate tensions and limits at its edges. This was an opportunity to develop a relational practice in the multiple spaces of the Arches, responding and contributing to the social and spatial processes through which a cultural site is constituted. This approach aims to engage with the limitations and affordances of both performance and its site, and to understand the interrelations between them. Revisiting this project with the framework of performance fieldwork foregrounds an emerging concern with the degree to which performance systems are determined by their wider environments, and with the various relationships that are revealed and

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activated by these processes. As will become clear, it is frequently through antagonism—negotiation of various conflicts and challenges—that the complexities of the field site are illuminated. In order to understand these processes as they play out at Death Disco, this chapter turns to clubbing theory as well as more general research in youth collectives. This includes engaging with queer perspectives on club aesthetics and ‘marginal spaces’ (Gorman, 2020), while also recognising the exclusory processes through which subcultural spaces often operate (Casey, 2007). These under-theorised cultural practices involve ‘concrete others being present around us’ and rely on ‘being engaged in collective practices with them’ (Schiermer et al., 2021, p. 19). The theory and practice of clubbing serves as a valuable way into understanding this experience, which Ben Malbon identifies as a fluctuation between resistance and submission, inclusion and exclusion, involvement and separation (1999, p. 19). Clubbing spaces might be understood as ‘micro-utopias’, to use Bourriaud’s term, but the alternative practices through which they are constituted have a particular history of resistant collective action. Rather than seeing clubbing as a hedonistic space that is completely separated from everyday life (a common trope in early clubbing theory),1 it can be more usefully conceptualised as a dynamic process, with the clubber moving between connection and separation from each other and their wider environment. Clubbing has lent its form to a number of performance works since my residency came to an end, which have either taken place in club nights—as in the companies and venues, Duckie and Shunt—or, in the case of scripted performances such as Kieran Hurley’s Beats (2013) and Naughty Corner’s Raves are Us (2019), have brought the clubbing experience into the theatre, exploring the space between these different cultural forms (Overend, 2019). Sarah Gorman’s (2020) analysis of intersectional queer clubbing performances by Rachael Young, Lucy McCormick and Project O identifies a ‘spatial subversion’ of the division between performance and audience, which employs intimate performances, loud music and collective movement to ‘queer’ conventional theatre space. In these examples, a ‘marginal space’ is 1  For example, Antonio Melechi (1993) (p.37) calls clubbing a ‘fantasy of liberation’, and Jean Baudrillard argued that nothing was a better signifier of the ‘complete disappearance of a culture of meaning and aesthetic sensibility [than] a spinning of strobe lights and gyroscopes streaking the space whose moving pedestal is created by the crowd’ (1982, p. 5).

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created, which works against the differentiated positioning of audience and performers in normative, ‘mainstream’ theatre. In performances such as Nightclubbing, Young’s Afrofuturist ‘visual poem’, moments of collective performance of the audience are key part of a reflexive ‘club aesthetic’. For Wiskowski, when audiences perform as aesthetic collectives in this way, they are brought together into a self-conscious reimagining of the potentials of inhabiting spaces in new ways, which often involve reclaiming agency in spaces from which they have previously been excluded or marginalised. Relatedly, Jacques Rancière’s (2011) more politically oriented theory of aesthetic communities suggests that the agency of the collective within the construct of an artwork can emancipate the spectator from the power relations of those artists who seek to control experience and reception of meaning. Turning attention to the shifting modes of engagement of those encountering performance in clubbing environments provides an opportunity to investigate the experience of the individual within the temporary social grouping of the club, at the same time as recognising the formation of subcultural communities engendered by the clubbing event. Clubbing is often regarded as autotelic—as having no overt political agenda. However, much clubbing theory has identified a ‘micro-political’ set of practices, which operate through the creation of ‘alternative spaces’ rather than large-scale, unified acts of resistance (Hall & Jefferson, 1993a). More recently, Bjørn Schiermer et al. have suggested that ‘admission into such an intensive and embodied space’ may be ‘the very essence of subcultural experience’ (2021, p.  12). This is a politics located in experiential collectivity, rather than overt acts of resistance. In this context, collectives are conceived in the way in which Félix Guattari (2005) advocates—as positive social forces, which hold the potential for unified objectives and working together. Susan Thornton’s (1995) distinction between ‘affiliation’ and ‘conformism’ is also relevant here, as it specifically recognises clubbers as agential within spaces that are too often (dis)regarded as synonymous with hedonistic abandonment. If a clubbing or audience experience based on active choice and temporary affiliation is acknowledged and avowed, performance fieldwork has the potential to develop an open and relational communal practice that offers an alternative to the ‘closed’ gallery spaces of relational aesthetics. This provides an important ‘building block’ for the emerging methodology of performance fieldwork, which follows Hawkins in striving for a ‘responsive openness’ (2021, p. 45), but without precluding more active interventions into field sites.

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Midland Street My research focus on clubbing practices coincided with a policy promoted by the Arches’ music programming team to encourage ‘theatricality’ at Death Disco. Funding was available for initiatives that brought performance directly into the club, and this project was therefore developed in collaboration with a number of local artists who had proposed work for the event. My initial proposal to the programmers was that I would work with a small team of performers, writers, dancers and designers to create performances for a small fleet of cars parked outside the club, thereby creating a temporary gallery for the queue of clubbers on Midland Street, which runs perpendicular to the Arches to the south of the building, underneath the bridge supporting the railway line crossing the River Clyde. Death Disco was billed as the Arches’ ‘alternative, open-minded’ club night ‘for the straight, gay and not-sure-yets’. The club night was self-­ consciously theatrical with clubbers regularly wearing neon face-paint, wigs and elaborate costumes. The event was therefore an exemplary location for what Dewi Jaimangal-Jones et al. (2015) refer to as the performance of identity within the commodified space of the club venue. This proclaimed openness to diverse sexualities signalled a spatial politics of becoming and belonging. However, as Mark E. Casey points out in his discussion of inclusions and exclusions from queer urban scenes in the North of England, emphases on ‘youthfulness’ and desirability of the ‘young, beautiful and able-bodied’ in such spaces are often driven by commercial interest and determined through societal prejudice against those who do not conform to the constructed aesthetic of the club (2007, p. 135). The popularity of this event ‘is not necessarily an indicator of an increase in choice and tolerance’ and may in fact represent a movement towards exclusivity in queer culture (p.  135). While the club night was selected for its performative qualities, it was important to consider which types of identity were permissible in this space and how far those performances were contained within the commercialised structures of the clubbing environment. This fieldwork began with a period of small-scale experiments in the club space and was subsequently developed into a one-off performance event in three parts. The project relied heavily on interactions with clubbers. Because our performance interventions took place in and around a nightclub, they were always happening concurrently with a range of other activities and dance spaces. The ways in which clubbers would engage with

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the performance were therefore unpredictable and the outcome could only be discovered in the moment. This lack of control was embraced as an ideal condition for relational performance, which departed from Bourriaud’s carefully ‘stage managed’ encounters. However, as I will go on to discuss, our approach created a tension between the performance event and the club night. The event generated several conflicts within the established processes of the venue, including interactions with the security staff. These incidents offer some valuable lessons for the development of a performance fieldwork methodology, which aspires towards an ethical and sensitive relationship to its environment. The first of our performative interventions took place in four cars parked outside the venue on Midland Street and in the smoking area on the adjoining Midland Lane. A cast of overtly theatrical characters including a clown played by James Oakley, a bride played by Rose Ruane and an aristocrat played by Ed Cartwright were positioned in cars on Midland Street as clubbers entered the building; and Mhairi McGhee, Louise Emslie, David Crompi and Karen Fishwick, as a pack of urban animal-like clubbers, occupied a car parked inside the cordoned-off smoking area. Using theatricality in such an overt way initially resulted from the music team’s programming policies, but it also provided a way for staff and clubbers to recognise our performances within the already theatrical clubbing environment, sharing ‘competence’, immediately identifying that a performance was taking place and choosing whether or not they wanted to be involved in it. For Wiskowski, performance relies on spectatorship of artistically ‘constructed behaviour’ (2022, p. 3). Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks also understand performance as a section of behaviour marked as separate from everyday life, relying upon ‘the shared competence of all the participants to identify and to mark off a strip of behaviour […] as being performative’ (2001, p.  28). In my previous fieldwork at the Arches, because participants engaged with the site as a theatre audience, the smallest details of the venue and its relationships were framed and identified as part of the event—the graffiti on the walls, the technicians and bar staff setting up for the club and so on. In contrast, creating theatre for Death Disco presented a challenge: how to mark this ‘strip of behaviour’ as distinct from the rest of the club, while maintaining a relational performance practice based on affiliation rather than conformism. The use of cars on Midland Street was partly due to its literal function as a roadway underneath a railway line. Cars symbolise journeys and

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movement, and the road and railway are spaces of constant movings-on: journeys past the Arches. The performances in the cars were durational installations, which were developed for clubbers to pass by, encountering the characters and interacting with them before moving on into the club. The particular choice of characters and the nature of the performances differed from car to car as I worked individually with the performers to develop their own routines and actions: Oakley sat in an open-top Triumph Spitfire eating bananas, throwing the skins onto the floor and shooting bubbles from a gun at the clubbers as they passed; Cartwright wore a top hat and tails and sat in a Morris Minor handing out chocolate money, reading the Financial Times and drinking cognac; Ruane sat in the passenger seat of a wedding car (a Mercedes C-Class with ribbons on the bonnet and white fur inside) playing a recorded text from the car stereo and throwing confetti from the window; and McGhee, Emslie, Crompi and Fishwick danced on and around a battered old Renault. In the second intervention, the characters from the cars constructed a ‘chill out’ area behind a muslin screen. Over the course of half an hour, they arranged this space, taking furniture from a pile and setting up seating areas and a poker table on which they began to play. While the animal characters set up the space, Cartwright sat in a leather armchair reading, Ruane drank constantly and Oakley cycled round the space and mopped up fake snow as it fell behind the screen along with bubbles that floated round the arch throughout. The environment that we created using these set pieces was intended to elicit a playfulness that would encourage interaction and draw clubbers into the space. While Gorman’s (2020) discussion of queer female theatre makers drawing on clubbing aesthetics identifies ‘alternative club spaces’ within the mainstream theatre, this part of Midland Street conversely created a marginal theatre space within a large-scale clubbing environment. Performers engaged in unruly play-­based activities in a space that was separate from but connected to the main spaces of the club, where diverse identities and sexualities were temporarily brought together into an aesthetic collective. While the research team comprised both queer and non-queer collaborators, this fieldwork was not directly concerned with the performance of queer identities. Nonetheless, as with the work of Young and her contemporaries, the chill out area could be understood as an alternative space, which invited gentle subversion of the established spatial codes and configurations of Death Disco. The third part of the event involved integration of the theatrical ‘cast’ into the existing relational space of the club. It began as Oakley ripped the

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screen down, opening up the space for use by the clubbers and allowing the performers out into the rest of the club. A convivial atmosphere was created very quickly as clubbers entered the space and actively engaged with the event—dancing in the snow, chatting to the performers and playing poker. Later, Oakley and Ruane disappeared into the club to dance, and at this stage in the night, clubbers high-fived the clown, borrowed his hat or tweaked his nose, sat and chatted to the aristocrat, danced with the bride and chased the animals. Gradually, as the night went on, the performance gave way to the main DJs, and the space in Arch 6 became a more chaotic and less popular part of the club. The majority of people who used the space at the beginning of the night moved on, leaving the debris of drink and poker behind them. The club night finished at 3 am, but our performance interventions had gradually wound down some time before that. Our research set out to understand and explore the specific ways in which performance operates within the clubbing environment. The spatial practices of those clubbers and staff members who engaged with the event clearly defined the space, transforming an abandoned corner of the club— populated only by theatrical characters—into a busy party scene with drinking, dancing and poker. As with any relational artwork, a context had been established in advance, as the performers set up the poker table and seating areas. However, the openness and unpredictability of the interactions of the clubbers with each other, the performers, the staff and the space were central to this experience. In this way, the empty brick arches of the field site were transformed into a social space by the people who used it.

Clubbing and Performativity In his discussion of performance and popular music cultures, Simon Frith explains how clubbers create their own environment through spatial practices such as dancing: Space becomes movement as dancehall, club, and warehouse are shaped by the dancing bodies that fill them; when silence falls, the setting disappears. The dancers are performers, programmed by the deejay; the music stops, play time—the scene—is over. (1996, p. 156)

Two important points are raised in this passage: first, the interconnectedness of the physically located site (‘dancehall’, ‘warehouse’) and spatial

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practices (‘movement’, ‘dancing’) is presented as significantly blurred (the word ‘club’ can apply to both). Second, Frith introduces the importance of performativity to the clubbing experience. More recent clubbing theory has further explored performance in this context. For example, Jaimangal-­ Jones et  al. argue that clubbers ‘experiment with alternative identities’ through performances in costume on the stage of the club in the dance music scene (2015, p. 612). Performance is adopted here at the level of theatrical metaphor, but it is understood as central to the experience of clubbing, which allows clubbers to ‘negotiate and traverse various credible roles’. Just as any understanding of a theatre audience must remain sensitive to ‘multiple contingencies of subjective response, context, and environment’ (Freshwater, 2009, p. 5), it is important to recognise that any individual clubber can change their position and their identity in complex and contradictory relationships with each other and their environment. Clubbing crowds, like theatre audiences, cannot be understood through dichotomies, including those of performance and spectatorship. Theatre is a commonly used metaphor in theorisations of clubbing, particularly those which explore the ‘queer world-making’ of clubbing cultures (Buckland, 2010). Here, performance is considered as ‘a conscious, active way of fashioning the self and the environment, cognitively and physically, through embodied social practices’ (p. 19). Fiona Buckland recognises the multiplicity of identities in club culture but highlights those gestures and habits that consciously resist normative constructions of urban life. In these formulations, performance is not a distinct section of behaviour within the club event, in the sense in which Pearson and Shanks define it; the clubbing crowd is not an aesthetic collective as Wiskowski uses the term. This is because there is no external vantage point from which to spectate. The club is created by those who are part of it, and all possible ways of being and acting are both contained within and constitutive of the clubbing environment. Immediately prior to the removal of the muslin screen, which opened up the performance space to the clubbing crowd, Oakley, playing the part of a clown, instigated a shadowing dance as he came to the front of the performance space and began to interact with one of the clubbers through the screen. For a few minutes they danced together—mirroring each other’s movements and moving across the width of the space. From the main dance arch, it was possible to faintly make out the clown at the other side. The crowd of clubbers who had gathered in the area to find out what was going on stood back and watched this dance—clown and clubber engaged

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in an impromptu mirroring game. The individual relationship between one clubber and one performer thus became framed as a performance for the other clubbers. In this example, an activated spectatorship was just one of many potential modes of engagement. To use a Freudian term, if the performances at Death Disco offered instances of ‘oceanic’ (if not ‘ecstatic’) relationality, perhaps they did so through a more experiential, participatory experience than a reflexive aestheticisation of the crowd. As with the crowd at a nightclub, a theatre audience has to be understood as engaging with relational performance through a variety of modes, including one-to-one interaction and communal spectatorship, either of which may involve oceanic surrender to the experience of the club or objective reflection on the event. Malbon discusses ‘oceanic moments’ of clubbing as providing ‘powerful sensations of personal and group identity formation, amendment and consolidation’ (1999, p.  106). However, whereas the oceanic or ecstatic experience of clubbing is usually discussed as emerging from the relationships of the community—occasionally under the influence of drugs—similar moments in the theatregoing experience generally rely in some way on the on-stage performance. Wiskowski’s model does not move beyond this dichotomy, as the representational quality of artistically constructed collectives (as opposed to the ‘every day’ gatherings of protests or parades, or one might add clubbing) endows collective experiences with a specific quality of spectatorship, through which individuals not only become part of aesthetic collectives but also invite deliberative and considered perspectives on these practices. For Pearson and Shanks, when a ‘grouping of activities and objects’ is identified as being performative, participants will ‘expect, search for and indeed generate meaning in everything they see’ (2001, p.  28). Every single element of a performance will therefore be ascribed meaning and ‘however utilitarian, prosaic or banal, nothing will be neutral or simply decorative’. This theory presents the performance space as ‘saturated’ by meaning. However, Pearson and Shanks are uncharacteristically structuralist in this understanding of performance and their theory does not seem to account for the relational aesthetic of this shadowing dance. At this point in the performance, the clubber dancing with Oakley was not necessarily searching for meaning in the encounter. It is also possible that she was experiencing the event as a moment of unexpected conviviality, which would soon be folded back into the wider relational experience of the club.

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In these interventions, clubbers’ diverse relationships with the performance and its spaces were not discrete, but blurred into each other, shifting and redefining themselves all the time. The same person might have walked past the cars on Midland Street, unsure about what was happening, before entering the club and watching the performance behind the screen, intrigued enough to enter the space after it was pulled down, watching the poker game and dancing in the bubbles, then followed Oakley, dressed as a clown, into the main arches and danced with him. In all of these moments, the choices made were not only determined by the environment; they also contributed to the aesthetic of the performance and, in so doing, constructed the theatrical space of the club. This process can be understood by Edward Soja’s concept of the ‘socio-­ spatial dialectic’, which conceives of social and spatial relationships as interdependent (1980, p. 211). This complex relationship is characterised by a ‘mix of opposition, unity and contradiction’, and cannot be reduced to a cause-and-effect dichotomy (p. 208). Space and sociality in the clubbing environment are not simply interconnected or blurred, as Frith shows them to be; they are ‘dialectically intertwined and inseparable’ (p. 209). This is true of all socio-spatial relationships, but in the club it becomes particularly evident as lights, music and dancing bodies perform the spaces of the club at the same time as being controlled and contained within them. In her discussion of the queer world-making of club culture, Buckland also turns to Soja to understand how these dynamics, which play out in time as well as space, are often characterised by tensions. For Buckland, the movement of queer lifeworlds arises from the ongoing negotiation of space, time and sociality in the modern city (2010, pp.  18–19). Focussing on the urban environments of New  York City, Buckland argues that strategies and tactics of performance are used ‘to construct affirming environments of existence [within] the matrices of the tensions, oppositions, unity, excitations, and contradictions’ of the theatre of the everyday city (p. 19). The socio-spatial dialectic, as used by Soja, is an argument against political and ideological control. Soja uses the concept to develop Henri Lefebvre’s (1976) analysis of the ways in which advanced capitalism operates by occupying and producing space. It is important to remember, therefore, that in the clubbing environment, as with any socially produced space, there are systems of control in operation, which determine who is included and admitted to certain spaces and communities. In the

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following section, these systems are explored as they came to define the ways in which our fieldwork could develop. These experiences offer an important reminder that the ‘responsive openness’ (Hawkins, 2021) of creative fieldwork is frequently delimited by the regulations, rules, codes and conventions that are already in place at a chosen site.

Limitations and Antagonism The question of who is included and excluded from Death Disco was not directly addressed in this fieldwork, which was concerned with processes of performance taking place within the club, rather than exploring the wider political boundaries of this subcultural space. In this fieldwork, these boundaries remain uncontested, but this is a key issue in theories of youth collectives, which recognise that club cultures are predicated on notions of ‘us and them’, predetermining access and acceptance through implicit codes around age, sexuality, race and class (Casey, 2007; MacRae, 2004). Despite the inclusive ethos of Death Disco, it is undoubtedly the case that some of these divisions remained firmly in place. This is a major contextual factor that this project would have benefitted from addressing. Future fieldwork in this area of clubbing performances would be valuable. In the event, it was more practical, operational factors that led to unintentionally conflictual relations in moments when our performance fieldwork was determined by the protocols and systems in place to control the club. Interventions of security staff, health and safety regulations, and processes of opening and closing access to different spaces in the Arches, set the boundaries within which the event played out, as much as our own interventions into the club. On a number of occasions, a clear tension manifested itself between the rigid operational requirements of the club and the relational aesthetic of the performance. For example, shortly after the performance had started in the smoking area, where the animals were dancing on top of an old Renault, metal barriers were put in place between the performers and the clubbers, preventing any form of physical interaction. Later on, as Oakley ripped down the muslin screen, a crowd of clubbers surged forward into the space, sitting on the chairs and standing around the poker table to watch the game. Immediately four security staff held back the crowd and moved the majority out of the space again while the technicians removed the floor light and secured the bar which had supported the muslin. Once the area was safe the space was once again filled with clubbers, but noticeably slower and more reluctant this time.

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The ‘rules’ of behaviour in the theatre and the club differed significantly. While useful comparisons can be made between the two forms, it is also important to recognise that there are many different, and occasionally conflicting, codes and conventions in operation in each context. It is perhaps these differences that draw queer theatre artists like those discussed by Gorman (2020) towards a form that operates through an alternative repertoire. Fiona Wilkie refers to the ‘repertoire’ of any site as ‘a set of choices (culturally, traditionally, personally or physically defined) available to people in a particular place’ (2002, p. 250). Our experience of any place is determined to some degree by a repertoire of ‘spatial rules’, a set of ‘codes and conventions’ that determine our behaviour. The ‘rules’ of clubbing are different to those of theatre and this has revealed itself in a number of ways during this project, but not always in ways that might have been expected. Due to the perceived or actual hedonistic nature of clubbing, the safety requirements, licencing law and the avoidance of criminal behaviour at the club nights were far more pressing issues than other events at the Arches. Compared to theatre audiences there were hundreds, even thousands, more people (the maximum capacity was 3000), and the sale of alcohol was far greater. As a result, without the necessary security measures, the club could not have existed. Security staff were therefore as integral to the event as the clubbers themselves. Despite an acute awareness of the specific nature of a clubbing environment, in many ways our research did not sit well within the behavioural ‘repertoire’ of the club. Death Disco proved an extremely challenging environment in which to practice performance fieldwork. First, strictly enforced regulations meant constantly adjusting the content of the performance. Second, last-minute decisions made in relation to ticket sales meant that the spaces we would be using were not confirmed until the last minute, literally. Third, technical support and equipment availability was extremely low due to the Arches LIVE Festival occurring at the same time. Fourth, poor ticket sales meant that there were not as many clubbers as we had hoped, resulting in little queuing on Midland Street and fewer clubbers entering the arch with the performers. As a result of all these difficulties, most of my own time was spent ironing out problems and negotiating with the Arches staff about what we were allowed to do. This was a frustrating experience, apparently for both parties. Members of the creative team reported a similar sense of resistance to the performance from the club and its staff as we developed it. This feeling was corroborated by the research assistants who focussed their discussion

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very closely on the security team who they felt were ‘heavy-handed’, ‘irritable’ and ‘on edge’.2 This is not to single out the security team, since this was part of a wider issue that incorporates technical support, space allocation, funding and much more. These practical constraints pose significant challenges for a performance methodology that aims to open up a space for relationships and to limit a priori decisions. Perhaps some of the tensions that we experienced could be understood as arising from the fact that the performance was attempting to open up a space of relations, while the club was attempting to control it. Debates in early clubbing theory about control and resistance help to elucidate the spatial politics of this event (Hall & Jefferson, 1993b [1975]; McRobbie, 1994). The idea of clubbers performing space through different practices, such as dancing, has been taken to imply a level of control over space. Clubbing has been described as removed in some way from everyday life: representing a ‘freedom’ from the modern ‘habitus’ (Jackson, 2004), offering ‘other-worldly environments in which to escape’ (Thornton, 1995, p. 21) and operating as a ‘heterotopia’ (St John, 2006, p. 17; cf. Gorman, 2020). This separation of the clubbing environment has been seen by many as a positive condition of ‘subcultural autonomy’ that allows ‘subordinate social groups to control and define their own cultural space’ (Thornton, 1995, p.  25). Early theorists contended that subcultures ‘win space for the young: cultural space in the neighbourhood and institutions’, which can be marked as separate from the other spaces of society (Clarke et al., [1975] 1993, p. 46). Performance fieldwork might employ the same rhetoric. The idea of participants—whether researchers or ‘audiences’—forming relationships with the performance and their environment implies a level of control over the space and the artwork. However, this notion is problematic. For Thornton, the idea of clubbers winning space is an illusion created by promoters and marketers: To a large extent, places are ‘won’ when social groups are recognised as profitable markets. Venue owners hire club organisers (or club organisers hire venues) to target, promote and advertise to both ‘rebellious’ and  All quotations from research assistants are taken from the transcripts of a group discussion with five research assistants who were employed to attend the event and reflect on the experience, October 2009. 2

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‘conforming’ youth. Crucially, in the case of dance clubs and raves, their marketing has been most successful when youth feel they have ‘won’ it for themselves. (1995, p. 25)

This passage illustrates the complex relationship between contracted consumerism and micro-political utopian sensibility. If resistance can be marketed and sold, then surely its efficacy is diminished. In reality, clubs are generally set up by clubbers and the relationship between production and reception is complex. This problematises my earlier assertion (that our fieldwork was attempting to open up a space of relations, and Death Disco was attempting to control it). In fact, the security team and many of the other measures that affected our performance were part of the relational realm of the club long before our intervention, and were necessary for the existence of the entire event. Without these measures there would be no club, and because the arts programme was funded to a very high degree by the proceeds from the club nights, without the club there would have been no Arches. In fact, it was the loss of the licence for the late-night club events that ultimately led to the closure of the venue in 2015. The power-resistance debate in clubbing theory can be understood relatively. At one level, clubbing is a cultural practice that provides an opportunity to resist the power structures of capitalist society through subversive communal practice. From another perspective, the club itself constitutes a control system, with its own rigid power structures and its hidden rules about which communities—queer or otherwise—are perceived as desirable in these spaces (Casey, 2007). Within this commodified system, resistance can be found at the level of practices of individual clubbers, which can operate on a micro-political level. This is what Angela McRobbie discusses as the ‘mundane, micrological level of everyday practices and choices’ (1994, p.  162), rather than the elevated status of an aesthetic event. It is therefore important to acknowledge the operation of shifting power relations, making the subversive strategies and tactics of performance prone to reappropriation by the power systems against which they operate (Buckland, 2010; cf. De Certeau, 1984). Bishop argues that ‘it is no longer enough to say that activating the viewer tout court is a democratic act’ (2004, p. 78). Recognising a shifting locus of power, the political potential of performance fieldwork should be understood relatively: on the one hand the intervention or experiment itself might be considered progressive in its sensitive engagement with its

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wider environment, and its concern to ‘give everyone their chance’ (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 58); on the other hand, the selection of field sites, recruitment of collaborators and planning of activities can also close down relations and fix space. With relativity in mind, it is important that like Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, a fieldwork methodology is not assumed to be a valuable intervention in an existing relational space, without considering its relationships on a case-by-case basis.

Conclusion Recalling Soja’s socio-spatial dialectic, in which ‘people make places and places make people’ (Borden et al., 2001, p. 5), the relationships of these performances have been understood as part of a dialectical process, both constitutive of and determined by the wider environment of Death Disco. In performance fieldwork, these processes all define the work, and to interact with the space and the people within it is therefore to become a part of a relational aesthetic. However, bearing in mind Bishop’s criticism of Bourriaud’s model, along with queer perspectives on club cultures, it has been important to acknowledge that field sites are maintained through exclusions of certain individuals and communities. This situation—meaning both site and circumstance—of performance fieldwork has a significant bearing on the relationships that it generates, whether intentionally or not. In this project, the processes of inclusion and exclusion at Death Disco were not directly addressed. Nevertheless, the ‘repertoire’ of the site was revealed through the limitations and demands of institutional protocol. By encountering and negotiating tensions in the clubbing environment, this project serves as a valuable case study into developing performance practice within the relational space of an already existing cultural environment. These concerns have informed the development of a performance methodology in a variety of different contexts, explored in the other chapters in this book. This project at Death Disco—with all its challenges and frustrations—demonstrates the potential of performance fieldwork to reveal and perform a site in all its complexity and to enter into and work within its relational space. Focussing on the practices and relationships of the collective as opposed to the structures and content of a performance text is an important analytical approach for performance studies, which has influenced my subsequent projects. As an early example of performance fieldwork, this project aimed to open up a performative space that people could choose to engage

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with or not. This fieldwork explored ways in which a relational performance practice might adopt such a strategy, using the fluctuating experience of the clubbing crowd in order to find ways of practicing a Guattarian ‘eco-logical’ approach. In this way, this performance fieldwork attempted to provide a context for a contingent, conditional collective experience, which temporarily aligned its individual members without attempting to resolve their differences or limit their individual agency. Developing performance for the club meant that the ‘audiences’ that came together for brief moments would always have the freedom to separate themselves from the social construct of the performative encounter within the wider environment of the club. This project at Death Disco was one of the few instances during my residency at the Arches that took place outside the theatre programme. Bringing an overtly theatrical performance practice into a relationship with another important cultural system operating within the venue was an opportunity to explore the implications of bringing two sets of codes, conventions and rules into a dialogue with each other. The project revealed a complex set of fluctuating modes of engagement with the club and the performances that occurred within it. These performances were open to alternation between participation and observation, and between individual and collective experience. Identifying this fluctuating audience experience has been central to the development of a model for performance fieldwork, which attempts to create the tools to engage with and respond to a wide range of complex and dynamic relationships, now recognised as constitutive of, rather than incidental to, all field sites.

References Baudrillard, J. (1982). The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence. October, 20, 3–13. Bishop, C. (2004). Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. October(110), 51–79. Borden, I., Kerr, J., Rendell, J., & Pivaro, A. (2001). The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space. MIT Press. Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Les Presses du Réel. Buckland, F. (2010). Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-making. Wesleyan University Press. Casey, M. E. (2007). The Queer Unwanted and Their Undesirable ‘Otherness’. In K.  Browne, J.  Lim, & G.  Brown (Eds.), Geographies of Sexualities: Theories, Practices and Politics (pp. 125–136). Ashgate.

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Clarke, J., Hall, S., Jefferson, T., & Roberts, B.. [1975]. (1993). Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview. In S. Hall & T. Jefferson (Eds.), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (pp. 9–74). Routledge. De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press. Dohmen, R. (2016). Encounters Beyond the Gallery: Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference. I.B. Tauris. Freshwater, H. (2009). Theatre and Audience. Palgrave Macmillan. Frith, S. (1996). Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Harvard University Press. Gorman, S. (2020). Nightclubbing: Queer heterotopia and club culture. In Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure (pp. 108–136). Routledge. Guattari, F. (2005). The Three Ecologies. Continuum. Hall, S., & Jefferson, T. (1993a). Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. Routledge. Hall, S., & Jefferson, T. (1993b. [1975]). Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. Routledge. Hawkins, H. (2021). Geography, Art, Research: Artistic Research in the GeoHumanities. Routledge. Hurley, K. (2013). Beats. Oberon. Innes, K., & Bratchpiece, D. (2021). Brickwork: A Biography of the Arches. Salamander Street. Jackson, P. (2004). Inside Clubbing: Sensual Experiments in the Art of Being Human. Berg. Jaimangal-Jones, D., Pritchard, A., & Morgan, N. (2015). Exploring Dress, Identity and Performance in Contemporary Dance Music Culture. Leisure Studies, 34(5), 603–620. Lefebvre, H. (1976). The Survival of Capitalism. St Martin’s Press. MacRae, R. (2004). Notions of ‘Us and Them’: Markers of Stratification in Clubbing Lifestyles. Journal of Youth Studies, 7(1), 55–71. Malbon, B. (1999). Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy, Vitality. Routledge. Martin, S. (2007). Critique of Relational Aesthetics. Third Text, 21(4), 369–386. McRobbie, A. (1994). Postmodernism and Popular Culture. Routledge. Melechi, A. (1993). The Ecstasy of Disappearance. In S. Redhead (Ed.), Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture (pp. 29–40). Avebury. Overend, D. (2011a). A Work on Progress: Documentation and Exegesis. Journal for Artistic Research, 1. Overend, D. (2011b). Underneath the Arches: Developing a Relational Theatre Practice in Response to a Specific Cultural Site. University of Glasgow. Overend, D. (2012). Clubbing Audiences: Relational Theatre Practice at ‘Death Disco’. New Theatre Quarterly, 28(1), 67–79.

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Overend, D. (2019). Rantin and Raving: Kieran Hurley’s Aesthetic Communities. Contemporary Theatre Review. Pearson, M., & Shanks, M. (2001). Theatre / Archaeology: Disciplinary Dialogues. Routledge. Rancière, J. (2011). Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community. In The Emancipated Spectator (pp. 51–82). Verso. Reckitt, H. (2013). Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics. In A.  Dimitrakaki & L.  Perry (Eds.), Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions (pp.  131–156). Liverpool University Press. Schiermer, B., Gook, B., & Cuzzocrea, V. (2021). Youth Collectivities: Cultures and Objects. Routledge. Soja, E.  W. (1980). The Socio-Spatial Dialectic. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70(2), 207–225. St John, G. (2006). Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An overview. Culture and Religion, 7(1), 1–25. Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Polity Press. Wilkie, F. (2002). Kinds of Place at Bore Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Rules of Spatial Behaviour. New Theatre Quarterly, 18(3), 243–260. Wiskowski, A. (2022). Aesthetic Collectives: On the Nature of Collectivity in Cultural Performance. Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Mobility: Performative Counterpractice for Regular Routes

Field 55.8780, -4.2746 to 55.4582, -4.6153 Return journey from Glasgow to Ayr by car 55.8683, -4.2788 to 51.4289, -0.5622 Return journey from Glasgow to Egham by aeroplane This exploration of the performance of commuting takes place along field routes rather than remaining within bounded field sites. The work emerged from two periods of regular travel. First, between 2010 and 2016, I lectured in Performance at the Ayr campus of the University of the West of Scotland (UWS). From my home in the West End of Glasgow, I regularly drove the 36.5-mile route back and forth along the M77, with urban areas bookending my journey through the Ayrshire countryside. Second, from 2016, I lectured in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), in the Surrey town of Egham. After a brief period living in Berkshire, I moved back to Glasgow in early 2017. For two years, I became a ‘super-commuter’ (continued)

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(D. Bissell et al., 2017), flying between Glasgow International and Heathrow Airport on a British Airways service. These routes were travelled over and over again—the first through the roadscapes of Glasgow and Ayrshire; the second across tens of thousands of miles of airspace as I was flown repeatedly between Scotland and England. Openings An interest in commuting developed in 2013 when my collaborator Laura Bissell and I were struggling to find time to work together on a new project. Our shared interest in the performance of mobilities led us to accompany each other on our journeys from work to home, during which we reflected on the importance of travel to our professional lives. At that time, I was driving regularly to Ayr. Laura had a more elaborate journey from her home on the Cowal Peninsula—across the Firth of Clyde by ferry, and then by train to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) in Central Glasgow. Our ability to travel to and from our places of work in this way was recognised ambivalently as a privilege that was also a burden. Our travel was made possible by our network capital —our ability to navigate the systems and processes of contemporary mobilities (Urry, 2007). But it was also experienced as challenging, uncomfortable and time-consuming. We set out to develop performative experiments in this section of our working days, creatively reimagining our commuting journeys as spaces for transformation and resistance. Enquiry The project began with the conviction that commuting is not necessarily a frustrating, passive or boring experience, in which the commuter ‘patiently suffer[s] the anomic tedium of the monotonous or disrupted journey’ (Edensor, 2011, p.  189). (continued)

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(continued)

We set out to enact a series of playful disruptions in our regular journeys in order to reimagine our daily commutes as spaces of creative, or even transgressive, possibility. We were particularly interested in the ways in which journeys are performed in this context. However, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2022 has placed this enquiry in a radical new context, in which travel has been significantly disrupted (Thomas et  al., 2021). This chapter therefore reframes these field experiments against the backdrop of the pandemic and the potential futures of commuting practices. Following Tim Cresswell’s (2021) call for a revaluation of mobility for a post-COVID-19 world, I ask how the transformative and resistant practices of these pre-pandemic commuting experiments might offer a model for creative and relational journeys that are required for us to ‘move on’ from the challenges of the last few years. Approach The first stage of our fieldwork was to experiment with alternative modes of transport including by foot, bike and boat. As part of this project, Laura and I created a series of mobile experiments, including a postcard project on the Dunoon to Gourock ferry route. We also proposed a series of strategies for commuting performance and we encouraged others to experiment on their routes to and from work. This concern with commuting and performance was expanded when I began my unplanned but arguably necessary commute by air. Responding to the etymology of commute as a process of exchange, I undertook a small-scale experiment in weaving together the two sides of my journey. Each time I travelled, I took a personal object from one place to another, slowly displacing Glasgow into Egham and vice versa. Building on the mobile methods of previous chapters in conservation sites and cultural venues, this fieldwork turns its attention to quotidian journeys, leading to a reflection on the potential for performance interventions in mobility systems. (continued)

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(continued)

Outputs The first time that Laura and I shared this work was in 2014 for a co-authored keynote talk at a British Sociological Association Regional Postgraduate Event at Glasgow Caledonian University. This talk was published in the Scottish Journal of Performance (Bissell & Overend, 2014). The piece was then developed into an article for a special issue of Humanities on ‘deep mapping’ (Bissell & Overend, 2015). This chapter returns to my original Ayrshire commutes discussed in these essays. It also develops them through a critical reflection on my subsequent object journeys between Glasgow and Egham. This chapter looks back at a series of journeys from a post-COVID-19 perspective, reflecting on the revaluation of mobility following a period of reassessment and reinvention brought about by the ‘anthropause’ of the pandemic (Rutz et al., 2020). It does this by remobilising the strategies and insights that arose from preCOVID creative experiments in commuting. As mobility is problematised in the context of a global pandemic, there is a renewed need for experimental and relational mobile practices that work against dominant narratives of pathologisation (Cresswell, 2021). Taking place before the enforced immobility of national lockdowns, the performative counterpractice of these commuting experiments suggests a new approach to mobilities that moves us into a post-COVID future of exchange and displacement.

Commuting, Creativity and COVID-19 This chapter develops the concern of the previous case studies with mobility at conservation, heritage and clubbing sites to consider performed journeys at a more quotidian level. The fieldwork that it refers to took place between 2014 and 2018 and responded to regular commutes in the United Kingdom between my home in Glasgow and my places of work, initially at the University of the West of Scotland’s Ayr campus, and later at the University of London’s Royal Holloway, in the Surrey town of

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Egham. During these years, I spent a significant amount of my time away from my friends and family in cars, taxis, buses, trains and aeroplanes. It was a period of intense mobility afforded by a high degree of capital in my ability to negotiate travel networks, plan journeys and adjust to unexpected interruptions and diversions. It was also physically and emotionally exhausting, environmentally irresponsible and ultimately unsustainable. Since the beginning of 2019, I have worked at the University of Edinburgh, to which I initially commuted by train several times a week. However, I am looking back at this time of frenetic travel from the alternative perspective of my home office, where I worked almost exclusively for over a year during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020–2021. In the entire year from March 2020, I visited Edinburgh just once. This meant that like many others, the entirety of my work life shifted online—pre-recorded lectures, online tutorials, virtual meetings with colleagues and asynchronous working groups. While I had complained about it often enough, I began to miss the train journey to work. As the end of lockdown approached, the prospect of resuming the journey prompted a mix of emotions and critical reflections, which inform the following discussion of my pre-COVID commutes. As Noel B. Salazar points out, from a mobility studies perspective, the lockdown has revealed the importance of existential (im)mobilities in many people’s lives (2021, p.  31). In this moment of crisis, binaries between, for instance, mobility and immobility are revealed to be ‘intricately interwoven’ in complex dynamic practices. This suggests the value of a ‘molecular’ approach in which movements are encountered in a process of becoming (Merriman, 2019). This is to understand mobility not only as perceptible physical displacements, but ‘as translational and relational processes, becomings, affective forces, and as events which enact connections’ (p.  70). In recent years, these are the qualities of which mobility has been divested, as reactive and restrictive norms have emerged in response to social distancing, reductions in office working and mandates to ‘Go Straight Home’ after essential travel. Christian Rutz et  al. have coined the term ‘anthropause’ to refer to the ‘considerable global slowing of modern human activities, notably travel’ that has resulted from the global lockdowns (2020, p. 1156). This pause in regular daily travel to and from work is an opportunity to take stock, to reassess these qualities as they play out in our everyday journeys and thereby to revalue mobility for a post-COVID world.

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Revaluation of travel was one of the key rationales for the influential ‘turn’ to mobilities that took place in the social sciences in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007). The shift from a ‘sedentary metaphysics’ of rooted, bounded cultures was instigated, along with others, by John Urry, who argued for the need to place ‘networks, mobility and horizontal fluidity’ at the centre of cross-­ disciplinary thinking about contemporary society (2000, p.  3). As Tim Cresswell (2021) points out, reassessing the ostensibly ‘dead time’ of travel was an important part of this project. A sedentarist perspective cast activities such as commuting as by-products of important time spent elsewhere (e.g., homes and workplaces). This perspective reduced travel to ‘derived demand’ from our spatial separation of daily activities (such as home and work), rather than something with intrinsic value (Mokhtarian, 2005). The mobility paradigm revisited these assumptions, prompting a revaluation of the mobile part of everyday life as meaningful, productive and generative. Against the backdrop of a philosophical revaluing of mobile entities and activities, such quotidian practices of networking and connectivity across physical space were reframed as integral to life in the twenty-first century, rather than the unavoidable waste product of contemporary working lives. In 2020, as COVID-19 began to spread around the world, mobility was again recast, this time as a conduit for infection (Shrestha et al., 2020). Cresswell acknowledges the validity of this position (after all, ‘viruses thrive in highly mobile worlds where individual bodies move between populations’ (2021, p. 51)). However, he also identifies a pathologisation of mobility that risks devaluing the more positive reformulations that have arisen in response to the pandemic. One version of this resulted from the racist rhetoric around the Chinese (or Wuhan) virus, propagated by the Trump administration and others (Su et al., 2020). Border closures and restrictions to global travel (generally to countries perceived as originators or spreaders of the virus) were impulsive reactions. Measures were often instigated regardless of evidence of limited efficacy, and without the public health measures that would have contained the virus at a local level. Conversely, Leftist commentators decried the forces of capitalist globalisation that had facilitated the emergence and the spread of the virus through international networks. Cresswell generally sides with those who consider SARS to be an inevitable result of global mobility patterns connected to the patchy Anthropocene: ‘the encroachment of agribusiness into landscapes that were formerly richer and more diverse ecosystems’ (p. 58).

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He nonetheless points out that mobility is now frequently perceived negatively and often prevented in order to limit its pathological effects, potentially at the expense of the more positive and progressive aspects of connecting across space. This leads to the question of how mobility might be revalued in a post-COVID-19 world. The commuting experiments discussed in this chapter were directly concerned with the revaluation of ‘dead time’ that contributed to the pre-­ COVID mobilities paradigm. Revisiting these journeys in the context of the pandemic is an opportunity to reposition mobility as a potentially valuable dimension of both global and local recovery. As with the initial ‘turn’ to mobility, the role of everyday, routine journeys features in academic and media responses to restricted mobility. These accounts retrospectively recognise the value of regular return journeys to work, often noting the creativity and productivity that such travel time facilitates—far from the ostensibly lost or wasted time of commuting. This has been recognised by mobilities scholars for some time (Watts & Lyons, 2010). Moving within, and potentially against, the large-scale international networks of globalisation, there is potential for ‘a new constellation of movements meanings and practices’ that prioritise the pleasures and opportunities of travel, as well as its potential for collective good and lived equity (Cresswell, p. 62). It is significant that Cresswell turns to Brian Massumi (2018) to evoke the spirit of ‘creative adventure’ that might work against perceptions of mobility as transgressive and pathological. Creative approaches to mobilities research have been taken up in diverse artistic disciplines, including performance (Groot Nibbelink, 2019; Wilkie, 2015), as well as film (Cresswell & Dixon, 2002), photography and dance (Cresswell, 2006) and literature (Pearce, 2016). As Kaya Barry points out, there are ‘a wide assortment of processual, material and mediated explorations’ that can enact new transdisciplinary trajectories (2020, p. 316). These are characterised by a flexible and adaptable process, often leading to unexpected and unplanned outcomes and insights. The aim of creative methods for Barry is ‘to access mobile situations through a variety of affective and sensory registers, which often empirical methods alone cannot necessary activate’ (p. 319). For Urry, these methods can capture ‘the atmosphere or “feeling” of particular kinds of movement’ (2007, p. 41). This work can also evoke the sensibilities of travel, which can sometimes be neglected using the conventional methods of social sciences. Urry’s call for ‘re-creation’ implies the centrality of both artistic response and documentation to this project.

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Performance fieldwork offers a particular contribution to a creative revaluing of mobility. Working against prescribed modes of travel, a performative approach enacts an intervention within routine patterns of mobility. This potential is observed by Fiona Wilkie, who notes that ‘performance not only responds to but can also produce mobilities, reshaping existing models and engendering new, alternative possibilities for movement’ (2015, p. 2). These possibilities do not have to conform to masculinist, ableist and ‘heroic’ ideals, which are routinely assumed in field research (Bracken & Mawdsley, 2004). Discussing walking arts practices, Heddon and Porter (2017a) note that an ableist bias is particularly prevalent in a field that places so much emphasis on placing one foot after another (cf. Hallett & Smith, 2017). But as Liz Crow—one of their co-­ researchers who uses a wheelchair—has observed, ‘walking’ also represents ‘moving through space, connecting with natural and social environments, relationships, meditation, relaxation, pleasure, mental health, tactility, and more’ (Heddon & Porter, 2017b, p. 19). These are features of mobile performance research that can be developed by and for people who experience and move within field sites in a variety of different ways. This search for experimental and creative modes of movement recalls Rosi Braidotti’s (2011) Nomadic Subjects. Braidotti advocates ‘nomadic shifts’: ‘a performative metaphor that allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction, experience and knowledge’ (p. 27). In these shifts, our everyday practices are opened up to the creative processes of becoming, offering an ‘acute awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries’ and ‘the intense desire to go trespassing, transgressing’ (p. 66). In this chapter, transgression is understood in relation to both the performance of power systems and social behaviours. It is used in two distinct but related ways: first, in Cresswell’s usage, during the pandemic mobile actors were perceived as transgressing the new norms of enforced stasis, established to prevent infection; second, following Massey and Braidotti, as a micro-political strategy, transgressive mobility has the potential to disrupt unequal power relations such as patriarchal control of space. Understanding and working with the relativity of concepts is central to performance fieldwork as, in line with the argument of Chap. 4, interventions are not assumed to be inherently valuable to a field site, but are considered and carefully developed on a case-by-case basis. In the pre-­ COVID context of our commuting experiments, transgressive mobility is

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used to work against prescribed spatial patterns. However, travelling through post-pandemic landscapes brings new risks and responsibilities that need to be identified and approached with care to prevent more damaging and negative transgressions to those rules and regulations that might genuinely protect us and those who may be more vulnerable. It must be acknowledged that the commuting practices that are discussed in this chapter are afforded by a high degree of network capital. The question of ‘who travels and why’ cannot be ignored (Cresswell, 1997, p. 361). For example, many disabled people are excluded from the ‘normalising' discourses around contemporary mobility, which prioritise the ‘mobile body’ at the expense of those whose movement and mobility patterns do not conform to purportedly ‘legitimate’ modes of travel (Imrie, 2000). Furthermore, to frame these ‘creative adventures’ as somehow nomadic risks ‘gloss[ing] over the real differences in power that exist between the theorist and the source domain of the metaphors of mobility’ (Cresswell, 1997, pp. 378–379). With this in mind, claims of transgression might be problematic and have to be understood in the context of network inequalities. Braidotti’s concept of nomadism as ‘a myth, or a political fiction’ is valuable here, as it ‘allows us to think through and move across established categories and levels of experience’ without maintaining the ‘uncritical reproduction of sameness’ that obscures diverse bodies in material relation to advanced capitalism (2011, pp. 26, 26). The journeys discussed in this chapter are autoethnographic and offer a very specific insight into two relatively privileged performance-researchers’ attempts to reframe our own regular journeys. Their wider value is to demonstrate strategies for performance fieldwork in commuting practices, which have potential to be taken up by others and applied in different contexts. How can we enact creative interventions into the contemporary mobility system? This chapter suggests that this would take place within the constantly reconfiguring relationships between molar and molecular movements: a distinction made by Peter Merriman between demarcated state apparatuses and the countless unruly movements with the potential to ‘traverse, cross-cut and continually undermine’ the prescribed and perceived status of mobilities (2019, p. 67). This fieldwork demonstrates the potential of performance in this context, as an artform that can render obscured dynamics perceptible, contributing to an assemblage of molecular actions that are relational, affective and connective. As we move beyond the lockdowns of the last years and collectively move on from the

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pandemic, enacting transformative actions within the demarcated regular routes of everyday commutes is understood as a resistant practice that can contribute to a revaluing of mobility.

Traversing the ‘Mundane Roadscape’ For over five years, my ‘mundane roadscape’ was the M77 between Glasgow and Ayr (Edensor, 2003). I drove back and forth several times a week and, like many regular commuters, I had started to feel disconnected from the route and the landscape that I sped through so often. These journeys had become functional and I lacked a meaningful connection to the route, which I was beginning to view negatively as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than a time and space to explore. In 2013, a new collaboration with Laura Bissell led me to reflect that there may be much more to this repetitive journey. At the time, Laura was also struggling with her more convoluted and time-consuming commute, which involved a 10-min drive from her home in Innellan on the Cowal Peninsular, a 25-minute ferry crossing of the Clyde Estuary from the ferry port at Dunoon, a 44-minute train journey from Gourock to Glasgow Central and a 10-minute walk up Hope Street to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Reflecting on this challenging round trip almost a decade later, Laura remarks on the frustrations and limitations of this situation, with ‘so much time spent in transit, in between places, coming or going, on the move’ (Bissell, 2021, p.  70). At the time, we were both attempting to move against the restrictions and demands of our travel time by recognising or creating space for adventure within our routine journeys. For Massumi, adventure implies a continual process of moving on, of relocating value from fixed states to a ‘self-driving processual turnover’ (2018, p. 99). Ostensibly, the commute does not lend itself to this political and aesthetic aspiration: there are designated endpoints to every journey that will be returned to again and again. Commuting might be seen as the opposite of nomadic mobility. Nomads move across deserts, tundras and steppes—vast, open spaces without predetermined paths or fixed destinations. These spaces are ‘smooth’, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in contrast to the ‘striated’ spaces of contemporary urban life: the ferry routes, trainlines and roadscapes that contain and regulate our mobile lives. However, for Deleuze and Guattari, smooth spaces can be created within the most striated urban landscapes. In these spaces, ‘life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new places,

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switches adversaries’ (1988, p. 500). Nomadology therefore offers possibilities for creative adventure within the highly regulated and systematised spaces of commuting practices. Laura and I set out to explore the possibility of a nomadic relationship with our commutes, developing a performative counterpractice that would work against the fixed and striated routes and spaces that we routinely moved within. While this might not liberate us from the more negative aspects of transport systems and networks, a nomadic approach to commuting had the potential to open up smooth spaces within them. This counterpractice is experimental, playful and performed at a molecular level. Like the clubbing performances of Chap. 4, it is composed of a series of ‘movements and affects [that] are frequently mundane and banal, taking hold of individual bodies and being apprehended and expressed as feelings, moods, atmospheres and emotions’ (Merriman, 2019, p. 78). As with the relationship of the clubbers with the organisation of the club, the process of our journeys acquires its micro-political potential in the ways in which it moves within and against the molar structures of the roads, energy infrastructures, timetables and so on, which are themselves unfixed by their molecular performances in everyday interactions and relationships with those who use them and create them. Our fieldwork takes the form of a series of creative adventures, which explored different modes and rhythms of mobility within our regular commuting journeys. This research has three distinct phases: Journeys, Interventions and Prompts. Journeys: Our fieldwork began with a series of ‘alternative commutes’ in which we replaced our usual modes of travel for those that were slower, lower carbon and which offered a different quality of movement through the landscape. Laura swam, boated and walked across the Clyde Estuary and the 27 miles of roads between Gourock and Glasgow. I replaced my drive through the Ayrshire countryside with a three-day walk and a one-­ day cycle, both of which took me on routes that weaved around the motorway, traversing numerous B-roads (including the A77 that ran alongside the M77 at a slower pace), rivers, fields, moors, golf courses, commuter towns and rural villages, many of which I was previously unaware or had never visited. These were forms of mobility available to us as able-bodied researchers, but we recognise that others may not be able to move in these ways. By sharing our personal experiments, we do not mean to ignore the unevenness of mobilities. The aim is rather to explore alternative ways of moving, which challenge us to think differently about the everyday routes that we otherwise take for granted and which we

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routinely experience as safe and accessible. This was an opportunity to move against the prescribed patterns of contemporary mobilities by slowing down, attuning to the environment and connecting to the landscape and its more-than-human inhabitants in ways that are sometimes challenging but always offer new possibilities for movement. Our various written reflections on these journeys reveal an embodied connection with the routes to which we had previously felt desensitised. There is a strong sense of the landscape performing its agency: Laura reflects on the logistical struggle and physical challenge of swimming across a major shipping route and notes the exertion of the long walk through suburban Glasgow; I narrate a pathetic scramble over a wire fence to escape a highland cow, during which I cut my finger—a ‘corporeal document of this encounter’; and cycling to Ayr, I find myself at the mercy of the elements: Before long, the bike and I fell into our stride. I […] breathed in the cold spring air and propelled myself forward into the route. Sometime later, just north of Moscow (yes, there is an Ayrshire village called Moscow!) hail stones the size of grapes began to shoot from the sky as the weather turned savage—reddening my exposed legs and soaking me in freezing rainwater. I searched in vain for a shelter and eventually found an old barn where I sheltered for a few minutes. As I waited, I realised that the muddy ground was swarming with insects crawling out of the deluge into the safety of the manmade structure. I weighed one discomfort against the other and decided to plough on through the downpour (I could hardly get any wetter). (Bissell & Overend, 2015, p. 491)

Despite the discomfort that we both experienced, a sense of joy and exhilaration prevails as we are affected by the elements and the terrain in ways that commuting is typically designed to resist. When environmental factors do impact on commutes, this is usually experienced as an intrusion or a frustration to our plans (Bissell, 2021, pp. 68–69). However, in these reimagined routes, we cultivated an openness to the environment that took us beyond routine mobility to new discoveries, insights and experiences. Importantly, the agency that this afforded us was not at the expense of more-than-human forces and energies, but rather suggested co-­ possibility of converging trajectories and habitations. These are the sensibilities and responsibilities that ‘efficient’ and utilitarian commuting routinely disavows.

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COVID-19 has had a significant impact on public attitudes to commuting. International evidence indicates that shared transport is perceived more negatively than before the pandemic and that many commuters are intending to increase their car use—travelling in protective ‘bubbles’ rather than the more communal and convivial spaces of trains, buses and ferries (Thomas et al., 2021). For many who are at higher risk of and from infection, the pandemic has led to major shifts in everyday mobilities that have endured beyond the official lockdowns (Dadashzadeh et al., 2022). Furthermore, it is clear that for many disabled people, the ability to travel has been adversely affected by the pandemic in ways that have lasted well beyond the peak of the virus. While the increased opportunity to work from home has brought certain benefits, this also has the potential for an enforced stasis, through which disabled people are coerced ‘into a state (and status) of nonimpaired carnality’ (Imrie, 2000, p. 1652). The opportunities for regular, everyday mobility have been drastically reduced for many. While some have found their ability to travel to be restricted, the pandemic has also prompted numerous disconcerting hyper-mobilities, many of which have persisted beyond the period of national lockdowns. This includes the phenomenon of ‘ghost flights’: empty jumbo jets flying across the Atlantic in order for airlines to protect their slots on prime sky routes (Carrington & Duncan, 2022; Haanappel, 2020). As Friedlingstein et al. (2020) demonstrate, the pandemic—along with fossil fuel emissions, global warming and impacts on the world’s carbon sinks—has brought about unprecedented changes in the human and biophysical environments. Following a significant fall in international travel, and other forms of fossil fuel burning in the early stages of the pandemic, pollution levels fell drastically (Adey et al., 2021, p. 1). However, on a broader scale global emissions have continued to rise. In this context, many are still staying put, adjusting working practices and avoiding travel in order to work from home. This has significant ecological and economic implications, but it is also experienced by some as a crisis in relationality (Nikolaeva et al., 2022). The pathologisation of mobility has reimagined the affective qualities of travel as conduits for infection. A revaluation might start here, rebuilding the imaginaries of travel as spaces of environmental connectivity, rather than pathways for pathogens, and as social interstices, rather than zones of transmission.

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While our experimental commutes suggested alternative possibilities at an individual level, they were also limited in their ability to connect with others along the way. Mindful of the emerging field of mobility justice, we walked (and cycled, swam and boated) through unequal land and seascapes (Sheller, 2020). This phase of the project attuned us to the complex social-ecological dynamics of these routes and demonstrated the effects of mobility systems on various urban and rural communities and ecosystems. However, while our journeys engendered a more active, embodied connection with the landscape, in many respects we remained disconnected to others who used these routes in different ways, many of whom would not have been able to move in the same ways and to the same degree. The efficacy of these journeys was primarily as an individual psychological and emotional recalibration. However, Braidotti’s performative metaphor is not simply a thought experiment. It is concerned with creating new encounters and interactions: fostering a relational practice that opens up the world to new voices and lived experiences. Taking inspiration from the feminist project of Braidotti’s nomadic subjects, we therefore set out to make more direct, relational interventions in our regular routes, enacting an ethics of connectivity in response to the disconnecting systems of contemporary mobility. Interventions:  The next stage of the project involved a series of artistic interventions, which aimed to develop a relational performance practice for these specific routes. This included a bus tour of South Ayrshire, exhibitions of documents and artefacts from our journeys at the Lighthouse Gallery in Glasgow and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and a series of ‘route-specific performance’ workshops at the University of the West of Scotland. Working with designer Rachel O'Neill, Laura also created a collection of postcards which were distributed to passengers on the Dunoon to Gourock ferry route. Travelling between Dunoon and Glasgow on the Waverley Ferry—a much-loved sea-going paddle steamer—Laura had described the journey as an ‘excursion’ rather than a ‘commute’. The Waverley trades on nostalgic imagery of a golden age of steam travel on the Clyde and evokes family daytrips to the west coast, in days prior to the popularity of cheap air travel to European holiday destinations. For Laura, this journey on a historic mode of transport offered a new perspective on this well-used shipping area, with its military and industrial stories intertwining with memories of leisure cruises and ferry passage. In contrast, the functional ferry route between Dunoon and Gourock (operated by Argyll

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Ferries—a sub-branch of Caledonian MacBrayne) transported passengers across the water several times a day. Laura set out to work with and further understand the experiences of this diverse commuting community, of which she was now a part. The series of postcards that were created referenced 1950s posters on display at the Gourock train station, evoking the early days of the paddle steamer on the Clyde (Figs. 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3). Commuters on this ferry route responded enthusiastically to the invitation, relishing the opportunity to write, draw and map their experiences and hopes about their journey. Responses were then analysed thematically and revealed a complex picture of embodied travel and emotional exchanges between the peninsular and the connected mainland. A common theme was a sense of release or shedding off burdens as the ferry moved towards Dunoon. One respondent drew a balloon on the peninsular, contrasted by a ball and chain at the Gourock side. In this example, there was no trajectory, but rather a stark ‘cut line’ between the two sides. Others evoked movement from ‘changes and challenges’ to ‘hope and dreams’: a trajectory of escape and release. Several written responses included reference to change—‘changes in the light, the landscape, the tides and the people’. Commuters also responded to the suggestion of the route as an excursion, recalling childhood holidays and imagining what the route may still have to offer. One card speculated on the possibility of a whale sighting, noting that this would change the journey forever. Others commented directly on the transport infrastructure, reflecting on the delays, ticket pricing, young people’s travel and an imagined walkway across the estuary. It became clear that this journey meant very different things to different people and that it played an important part in the lives of those who regularly travelled the route. This collection of postcards offered commuters a moment of reflection within their journeys. By momentarily stepping outside the established patterns and rhythms of the ferry route, respondents were invited to engage creatively with their mobile practices and to reimagine the possibilities of their journeys. This phase of the project used creative arts practice as a method ‘for co-creating new configurations and trajectories of mobile research’ (Barry, 2020, p.  316). By directly engaging with the community of commuters on this route, the postcard project generated poetic, visual and cartographic responses that highlighted a wide range of experiences, emotions and motivations. The ‘deep map’ that emerged offered an important reminder that not everyone travels for the same reasons or with the same agency, access and network capability. This phase of

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Fig. 5.1  Poster by Rachel O’Neill for Everyday Commuting Excursions

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Figs. 5.2 and 5.3  Postcard (front and back) by Rachel O’Neill for Everyday Commuting Excursions

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our fieldwork began to move our practice outwards into the world, creating new routes and alternative ways of interacting and participating. This is where performance fieldwork, like other forms of artistic research, can create ‘unexpected, spontaneous and unforeseen moments of reflection, collaboration or production’ (p. 321). In the third phase of our collaborative project, we aimed to keep these routes open. Prompts:  Following a year undertaking these ‘creative adventures’, Laura and I developed the following prompts for others to undertake performative commuting experiments (Bissell & Overend, 2015, p. 495): (1) Alter the pace of your commute to take from dawn until dusk, or for a full weekend, week, month or year. (2) Perform your commute in the hours of darkness. (3) Undertake your commute on an obsolete/historic mode of transport. (4) Spend the night at your place of work and commute in the opposite direction as you travel home the following morning. (5) Take your friends and family with you. (6) Create a guided tour for your route. (7) Leave extra time for unplanned detours and unexpected encounters. (8) Plan an alternative route and take this every day for a week. (9) Research the history of your route and re-enact previous travellers’ experiences. (10) Record every human exchange along the way—every nod, wave and conversation. In the various return journeys taken during this fieldwork, Laura and I travelled alone and sometimes together, undertaking many of these tasks as we explored our regular routes from various different perspectives, and at alternative paces and rhythms. However, as with Phil Smith’s mythogeographical actions and notations, these prompts are intended ‘to be given life by their readers’, rather than as a document of our own creative adventures (2010, pp.  9, 144–175). They include small-scale tactics, which can be practiced quickly and covertly with limited resources; more overt strategies that might take place over longer periods of time, or enact more direct and co-created shifts to mobile lives; and also larger-scale projects that might require funding or significant volunteer contributions in defined locations and routes, or over sustained time periods. This collection of performed actions is intended to encourage an ongoing

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process of creative travel, which keeps regular, repeated routes open to new configurations and imaginative departures. At this contemporary moment, as we emerge from the severe lockdowns of the last few years, there is a real opportunity for performance-based revaluation of everyday mobile practices. The COVID-19 pandemic has further striated the spaces of contemporary mobilities, closing down opportunities for divergences and detours within established routes. This has locked commuters into detached and functional progression through space, limiting the time that is spent between a reduced range of fixed locations. In some cases, it has precluded everyday travel altogether, forcing some disabled people into newly confined domestic spaces while an ableist culture returns to ‘business as usual’. In this context, the desire to reconnect and recover requires resistant spatial practices that open up new pathways and ways of moving within and beyond them. These do not have to be exclusive in their assumptions of a normative travelling body. Rather, they can play out across scales and modes of mobility, challenging dominant models through the performance of alternative movements and trajectories. This is where the tactics, strategies and projects of our commuting experiments might now be applied within post-COVID mobility systems. They offer ways of breaking out of striated space and restoring a sense of creativity and adventure within a diversity of everyday lives. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘[M]ovements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space’ (1988, p.  500). Importantly, this does not have to require high levels of network capital, but can be practiced at a range of scales, both individually and collectively. In our post-COVID lives, when the mobile and immobile interrelate in such complex ways, these practices can bring us into a direct relationship with multiple divided subjects, processes of partial identification and the perpetual flux of community. For Braidotti, such nomadic practices offer an opportunity ‘to identify lines of flight, that is to say, a creative alternative space of becoming that would fall not between the mobile/immobile, but within both of these categories’ (2011, p. 7). This linking of ‘lines of flight’ with creative becoming informs the next phase of fieldwork that I undertook, as my commute shifted its mode, scale and purpose. This leads to a different type of artistic practice that played out in the private, emotional space of a super-commuter.

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Object Journeys For artists and practice-based researchers working in the dynamic field of mobilities, journeys and movements are both created and documented. The distinction between these modes is not straightforward. For example, Wilkie points out a common thematic concern with mobility in modern drama, but she also refers to the ways in which ‘various movements—of the performers and of the characters—then circulate […] as documents (for example, playscript, photograph, video, and web presence)’ (2015, p. 9). Performance fieldwork can function as a creative approach to the representation and imagination of mobilities, but it also generates its own traces, which are set in motion in a variety of ways. The documents of my commuting project include the following: 1. A goldfinch feather found at Knepp Castle Estate in West Sussex. 2. A plastic toy pterodactyl gifted to me by my daughter. 3. A section of silver birch branch from my childhood home in Derbyshire. 4. A ticket for a train journey from Glasgow Central to London Euston on 16 June 2017. 5. A tennis ball used for drama workshops at Royal Holloway. 6. A fabric badge embroidered with the logo from Dee Heddon and Misha Myers’ Walking Library (see Heddon & Myers, 2017). 7. A mollusc shell taken from the beach at Millport on Great Cumbrae island in the Firth of Clyde. 8. A laminated image of a woolly mammoth, created by Danielle Schreve for a Quaternary Drift in Central London (see Chap. 6). 9. A plastic crown used in my students’ production of Macbeth. 10. A piece of slate from the wall of a cottage in the Lake District. These objects, and many others, have travelled with me over significant distances, from various places around the United Kingdom and on return flights between Glasgow and Heathrow. The rocks, animals, plants and plastics from which they were created have travelled much further. A makeshift archive is spread out on the table in front of me as I write. I spend some time trying to work out how to proceed and conclude that in this instance an autoethnographic approach is required. Gayle Letherby acknowledges that ‘auto/biographical “voices” within academia remain predominantly white, educated, and middle-class and Western’ (2010,

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Fig. 5.4  Pterodactyl en route between Glasgow and Heathrow

p. 158). As I meet all of these categories, I aim to use performance fieldwork to problematise a coherent and fixed subject position. I therefore adopt a new materialist approach, which works against an individualist, anthropocentric positioning. I selected these objects for their thing-power, their non-reducibility to the context in which I had placed them (Bennett, 2010, p. 5). The aim is to bring my own mobile practices into a formative relationship with multiple political, subjective and more-than-human agencies along the route (Fig. 5.4). In 2016, I accepted a new post at the University of London’s Royal Holloway and moved with my young family to a rented accommodation in Ascot, East Berkshire. Shortly after the move, my wife and I separated and decided to move back to Glasgow. I arranged a flexible working

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pattern, rented an additional property in Scotland and embarked on a long-­distance commute between the two homes. This required an early Wednesday morning flight to Heathrow airport, three days of work on campus and a return flight late on Friday. In Glasgow, I would spend the long weekend with my daughter, who attended nursery while I worked from home on Tuesdays. At the earliest opportunity, I moved out of the Ascot accommodation and began to stay for two nights each week in hotels or B&Bs in the area of the university. This continued for two years, at which point I gave up permanent employment and moved once again, to the University of Edinburgh. At Edinburgh, I initially taught English Literature on a fixed-term contract, before moving to the School of Education, where I am based at the time of writing. During those years at RHUL, I had unwittingly become a super-­ commuter, complicit in the ‘ever-changing, frenetic networking’ of a new hyper-mobile class, beholden to the availability and accessibility of regular flights, train journeys, taxi rides and all the micro- and macro-­technological devices and systems that were required to make all this work (Elliott & Urry, 2010, pp. 22, 23). My experience of these journeys involved a mixture of sensations and emotions. On the one hand, this was a lonely, stressful, exhausting and costly situation; on the other, my commute was not without its pleasures and opportunities. Laura Watts and Glenn Lyons suggest that travel engenders an ‘ambiguity of place’, a ‘liminality’ that can foster ‘a valued sense of creativity, possibility and transition’ (2010, pp. 104, 118). My time spent in quiet corners of departure lounges and working at fold down tables on the back of aeroplane seats was surprisingly productive. While the flow of sustained academic writing was difficult to establish, I found that much of my lesson planning and email correspondence could be completed in the short breaks between the various stages of passage through the airports. Despite the high number of flights taken in those years, I also enjoyed moments of meditative calmness amongst the busy journeys of an anonymous commuting community, and even felt elation as the plane ascended to cruising altitude and the view opened up to shifting cloudscapes and landscapes below. I am aware that this is not everybody’s experience of flying, but it was mine: a tiny moment of magic on every flight that was never diminished through repetition. Ultimately, however, for all the benefits that I could recognise or cultivate, I keenly felt the separation that my commute now brought about. I was grateful to be able to do it but regretful that I had to.

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This context of personal upheaval and emotional hardship is important for two reasons: first, it goes some way towards alleviating the strong sense of ecological guilt that I harbour for the hundreds of flights that I took during this period. It is undoubtedly the case that I continued my super-­ commute to protect my career at a time when everything else in my life felt highly precarious. There were other options available to me and I could have decided to return to Scotland at a much earlier stage, albeit at the expense of my development as an early career academic. However, the decision was a difficult one, and for a number of reasons, I felt compelled to continue to travel between these places until I was in a better position to contemplate another career move. Second, I am not the detached, abstracted academic in these journeys. This project begins with my own embodied account of mobility. This personal, experiential perspective is a key contribution of performance fieldwork, as the creative interventions into commuting routes emerge from lived experience. This is important because it has the potential to counter post-COVID devaluation of travel by enacting relational interventions in specific field routes. This project involved a simple repeated action, which generated profound emotional affordances. The process began with the selection of the object, which was determined by the following questions and criteria: –– What is the personal significance of the object? –– What are its spatio-temporal qualities? –– Is this object ‘vibrant’ in the sense in which Jane Bennett uses the term? Does it have ‘trajectories, propensities, or tendencies’ of its own? (2010, p. viii). –– Does this object have its own agency? What is its capacity to exceed its existing function? –– Is this object suitable for air travel? Does it want to come with me? Having selected the object, I would travel with it to the other end of my commuting route. At key points of transition, including clearing security gates, the objects were concealed in my hand luggage; at all other times I carried them by hand to our joint destination. The object would then be replaced: a new home would be found for it, which may be somewhere in my flat or office, as a gift to a friend or colleague or in some cases—when the object was organic—in a natural environment such as a beach or a hole in a wood or field. I also kept several of the objects as a lasting record of these trips. These are currently stored in an old laptop

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bag in my wardrobe, so that they might yet travel to other places. This process was repeated in both directions for almost a full year. I also created metadata for each object, including details of its journey and a short, written description, which I logged in an A5 notebook that travelled with me at all times. Of all of the objects in this project, the notebook is the one that has travelled the furthest. For Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy, writing on the performance of things, physical objects can be encountered ‘not as inert human possessions but instead as actants, with particular frequencies, energies, and potentials to affect human and nonhuman worlds’ (2014, p. 2). The concept of actant is offered by Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour (1992) to emphasise the potential for non-human objects to enact change in their environments. These were the qualities that I searched for as I selected these objects. Attuning to the vibrancy of things, I considered their potential to affect me and others along the route. In doing so, I remained conscious of my responsibility as a privileged long-distance commuter. This personal, small-scale experiment in object exchange could not reduce the environmental impact of my journeys. There have been plenty of calls for academics to reduce high carbon emissions, of which air travel is often the main cause (Quinton, 2020). This is also something I have considered personally as a touring theatre director (Overend, 2015). I acknowledge that my decision to travel by air frequently and repeatedly during this period was problematic in this regard. Personal and environmental concerns were in tension, creating a ‘value-action gap’ (Barr, 2006; Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002). I then became interested in this space as an ‘environmental lacuna’ for experiment and investigation (Heron & Kershaw, 2018, p. 22). When we follow Graham Harman (2018) and orient ontologies towards objects, who is it that is doing the orienting? In this case, my selection and transportation of these objects was based on my own criteria, resulting from a desire to bring two places closer together by weaving a personal narrative through a series of aerial exchanges. Object orientation may best be understood as a process in this case. Recalibrating my experience of long-distance commuting, towards the everyday objects that had come together in my places of home and work, was an attempt to move against the more negative implications of this regular route, without making any claims to negate them. This does not mean to ignore them: at a personal and environmental level, these objects often directed attention to the problems and frustrations of the route. The carbon emissions that the flights were generating was a key concern that determined my choices and

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prompted my critical reflections. In their playful, creative transportation, these objects also opened up my experience of the route to more-than-­ human performances. Travelling with objects was a way of ‘stepping into the unknown’ of a transdisciplinary space of which I was now a part (Heron & Kershaw, 2018, p. 22). Bennett calls for ‘everyday tactics for cultivating an ability to discern the vitality of matter’ (2010, p. 119). Mine were those of exchange and displacement. During our experiments with alternative transport, Laura had drawn my attention to the etymology of commute, derived from the Latin commutare—to change or transform. This offered a way of understanding commuting as a process of exchange. Repeatedly travelling back and forth along the same routes, we set out to enact change in our own lives. But the places that we travel between and the route that takes us there are also transformed by the commute, for better or worse: towns become commuter towns, whole areas become commuter belts and well-­ travelled roads like the A77 become motorways like the M77. I wanted to explore how this process of exchange might be taken up creatively, mobilising alternative agencies within these field sites and routes. When Laura and I created our journeys, interventions and prompts for our West of Scotland commutes, the outcome was a sense of renewed engagement with the landscape and a stronger relationship with the people and places that we encountered. The methods that we developed focussed on our moving bodies, sometimes requiring endurance and physical discomfort to complete the tasks that we had set ourselves. This resulted in a greater sensitivity and openness to more-than-human environments. However, the bodily experience of the human commuter—in this case the healthy, able-bodied fieldworker—remained at the centre of the experience. Through the simple action of exchanging objects between places, I wanted to work against this tendency, travelling with objects that exerted their own forces and energies. I became a conduit for their transportation from one place to another. This was before the pandemic and the role of commuters as transporters of infection was not yet so widely acknowledged (although other viruses were increasingly jumping between countries in this way). Retrospectively, I understand this aerial exchange project not only as an attempt to weave two places together (as was my primary motivation at the time), but also as a way of asserting the value of commuting routes as vectors of connectivity. My transportation of these objects suggested that commuting does not only function as a conduit for infection, but also for multiple other valuable exchanges.

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The web of connectivity is evident in the example of the silver birch branch. This was the heaviest of the objects that I transported and it weighted enough to take my hand luggage marginally over the permitted limit, which was thankfully not noticed by airport security. On this very material level, it therefore asserted its presence, slowing down my movements, affecting my pace and position as I moved through the different stages of my journey and adding a sense of anxiety about its safe passage through the departure gate. Transporting organic matter through the airport also staged an intervention in the glass and steel structures of the terminals. For me, this birch had profound historical significance—both at a personal, human scale, and in its connection to deeper timescales. First, it was part of a branch that had been removed from a tree in my parents’ garden following a storm. I spent much of my childhood climbing up and swinging from the silver birches that grew in a small coppice at the top of the hill behind the house. Once, I lost my footing and fell over twenty feet through the branches, cutting my arms and legs but somehow avoiding serious injury. It is entirely possible that this section of branch broke my fall. Second, I had recently learned that the distinct patterns and fissures that intersected the birch evidenced a far older story of ancient herbivores. As the environmentalist George Monbiot (2015) explains, these would break off if a large animal attempted to remove a strip, thereby preserving the integrity of the tree. Unbeknownst to me, the trees of my childhood garden held the secrets of the elephants and mammoths that once roamed Britain. Carrying this section of branch with me through airport security at Heathrow mobilised these converging narratives of childhood geography and quaternary history. The branch seemed to vibrate as a vibrant thing, as its incongruous presence in this anthropocentric context drew the attention of fellow passengers and airport staff, occasionally leading to brief conversations about its purpose. This is an aspect of the project that I would like to have taken further, as the objects seemed to offer a productive disruption to the mobility of others. As a small-scale personal action, the relational affordances of the objects were not fully explored at the time. Perhaps, adding to the prompts offered above, this project will influence others to commute with objects, and its relational affects will continue along new trajectories:

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(11) Transport an object between your home and work. At the other end, find a new place for it and exchange it with another object. Complete this action repeatedly, gradually weaving together the places of your commute. This action constantly generates new associations, as each object has its own distinct resonances and qualities. The plastic toy pterodactyl connected me to deep pasts and futures as I reflected how this symbol of past extinctions will outlast me, becoming a ‘future fossil’ (Farrier, 2020). As a gift from my young daughter, it also had significant sentimental value. Wings outstretched, it is poised and open to the world. I imagined it taking off and soaring around the vaulted concourse. All of these objects— feather, ticket, ball, badge, shell, mammoth, crown and slate—had multiple qualities that exceeded their current role as passengers on my commute. For the year that I performed this repeated action, I travelled with numerous objects of different sizes, weights and materials. They had one thing in common: they had become part of my life in some way, as gifts, found objects, tools, toys and ornaments. I was the common factor in their temporary assemblage as passengers in this performance fieldwork. As such, a level of normative anthropocentrism remains a defining condition of these object journeys. But the new materialists suggest that the vitality of the objects is not reducible to the perceptions, interpretations and ontologies of their human interlocutors. Transporting these objects therefore facilitated a compromised autoethnography through which the personal and emotional centre of these journeys was dispersed. The impact of these flights was in no way negated through this dispersal, but within the space between my environmental values and my everyday actions, I was able to enact alternative possibilities for movement. Mobilising non-human objects as vibrant actants on these routes offered everyday encounters with lively matter that, in Bennett’s words, ‘highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests’ (2010, p. 122). It is significant that Bennett’s thesis ends with ‘the self and its interests’. The interpretive and experiential frames of human subjectivity remain an ongoing negotiation in this work. But crucially, these can be reshaped: transformed through the creative adventures of this fieldwork and opened up to new ecological and material agencies along the way.

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Conclusion The pre-pandemic utilitarian approach to commuting, which conceives of travel as problem to be mitigated, has been intensified by COVID-19. The pandemic has exacerbated the devaluation of commuting as not only a means to an end, but also as a spatial practice that directly correlates with infection, hospitalisation and death. The role of mobility in enabling the spread of this virus cannot be ignored. This correlation is demonstrable and it has reshaped global commuting practices. Working from home has significantly increased and it seems unlikely that a return to full-time office work will be part of the ‘new normal’ of life after the pandemic. The practice of commuting is necessarily adapting to new conditions and concerns. However, this cannot be at the expense of the benefits and opportunities that are afforded by our everyday journeys. These include a meaningful connection to the landscape—formative relationships with the people and places that we routinely travel past or through, the pleasures and opportunities that moving bodies provide, the potential for co-creation and connection that can be found in mobile communities and an openness to more-than-human agencies that travel with us and determine our passage. Engaging with these affordances in creative and experimental ways is one way of revaluing mobility. Through its inherent movement (its evolution in time and space), performance is able to reveal the oscillating, fluctuating process of becoming of a mobile world. This takes place on multiple scales and at various rhythms and paces, resisting the easy binaries between static and mobile, micro and macro (Merriman, 2019). The tactics, strategies and projects presented in this chapter mobilise these capacities. Together, these journeys, interventions and prompts are adaptable to new contexts and applications. Although they all took place in a pre-pandemic world, in this chapter I have reframed and repositioned them in response to Cresswell’s (2021) call for a revaluation of post-COVID mobilities. Ultimately, this performance fieldwork along commuting routes might bring some ‘fuzziness to a world some would like to hold as certain, as fixed, as sedentary’ (Cresswell, 2011, p. 248). As the world moves on from or continues to respond to the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, mobility should not only be questioned and mitigated as a dangerous conduit for infection; it can also be performed as a conduit for creative, progressive and eco-conscious futures.

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CHAPTER 6

Deep Time: Future Pasts at Gully Cave

Field 51.2341, -2.6810 Gully Cave, Ebbor Gorge National Nature Reserve, Somerset Gully Cave is located in a Natural England reserve leased from the National Trust. The site is a rich resource for Palaeolithic animal bones including wild pony, auroch, arctic fox and wolf. The cave is the most important site of its kind in Britain and one of the most significant in western Europe. It contains a rich fossil sequence recording faunal responses to abrupt climate change over 45,000 years. Access to the specific site is restricted as a relatively inaccessible place of scientific significance. However, the cave is located in a popular tourist area, which productively offsets its palaeoecological insights with the surreal juxtaposition of the Wookey Hole attractions. Around a network of accessible caverns and the adjoining historic paper mill, various incongruous objects and experiences are gathered. These include a vintage penny arcade and house of mirrors, a cheese store and a circus school. The distortions of the mirror maze reflect this bewildering cultural assemblage—multiple ‘shallow’ timescales set against the geological past of the surrounding landscape. (continued)

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(continued)

Openings The key collaborator in this project is Quaternary scientist, Professor Danielle Schreve (Royal Holloway, University of London [RHUL]). Schreve’s involvement with the research informs a concern with expanded temporal scales, primarily through her expertise in the fossil mammal record from the last 2.6 million years. We first worked together in 2017 as colleagues at RHUL, when we co-led performance fieldwork at Knepp Wildland Project in West Sussex, along with geographer Jamie Lorimer (as mentioned in Chap. 2). A shared interest in rewilding then led us to explore the hidden presences of extinct wildlife in Central London. This led to an invitation to visit the excavation site at Ebbor Gorge. Schreve has been working at Gully Cave since 2006, excavating Pleistocene deposits such as animal and bird bone as well as finding evidence of flint tools. She has worked with artists several times at the site (e.g., see Harris, 2017; Parrott & Hawkins, 2021). This fieldwork is a continuation of a shared interest in art-science collaboration. Enquiry This project takes a deep time perspective on the cultivation of new sensitivities to more-than-human life in the Anthropocene. These emerge through creative responses to the temporalities of Gully Cave, through which the site is encountered as an archive of fossilised lifeworlds, with the potential to function as a rich and generative portal to future imaginings. The ‘future pasts’ that we encounter at Gully Cave and the Wookey Hole attractions bring plastic ground sheets, gaudy Christmas lights and other objects into this subterranean ecology. A key focus is the relationship between the practice of performance and the materiality of the site. A concern emerges with the potential for performance fieldwork to respond in various ways to the interconnected agencies of a deep time landscape. A significant challenge emerges from this aspiration: how can the fleeting ephemerality of performance be reconciled with, and (continued)

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articulated within, the vast expanse of time? This fieldwork sets out to develop deep time imaginaries that mobilise past habitations and presences in the current ecological moment. Approach The fieldwork took place over two days at Gully Cave in November 2021. During the trip, we learned to be affected by the subterranean environment and the evidence of past inhabitations that have been uncovered there. During our visit to the cave, the research team were guided by Schreve, who introduced the excavation project and brought the field site to imaginative life with reference to a collection of excavated fossils. Our creative response to the complexity of the site then gradually emerged through a series of structured writing and drawing exercises, leading to the creation of a multi-authored text. We were also accompanied by filmmakers Catherine Dunn and Jack Reed, with whom we collaborated on the creation of a short film that aimed to capture the performances of the site and our activities during the trip. This was the first time that filmmaking had been used in my fieldwork and it was an opportunity to experiment with multiple timescales in ways that complemented and occasionally worked against the situated responsiveness to landscape that had been established in previous projects. Outputs This project began with a co-written article in Cultural Geographies, which explored interdisciplinary approaches to deep time in the context of a busy urban environment (Overend et al., 2019). This extends an enquiry that emerged from our fieldwork at Knepp Castle Estate (Overend, 2021; Overend & Lorimer, 2018). The fieldwork at Gully Cave resulted in a short film, Deep Time and Future Pasts at Gully Cave, which not only documents, but is also a key part of, our performance research at the site. The film was screened in 2022 at the Scottish Society of Artists’ Annual Exhibition within an installation by Mike Inglis, created from recycled objects. (continued)

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(continued)

The chapter begins with a discussion of deep time, which is informed by our previous fieldwork in Central London. It explores conceptualisations of expanded timescales, including in nonWestern contexts: the more-than-human agencies of co-existing temporalities (Bawaka Country et  al., 2016). The chapter also considers literary and artistic explorations of deep time, which inform our fieldwork at Ebbor Gorge. Our practices include film making, creative writing and performance scores, which explore the site through multiple voices, shifting scales and alternative rhythms. Following recent interest in the ‘portals’ afforded by the dramatic shifts in contemporary life engendered by the pandemic lockdowns of 2020–2021 (Roy, 2020; Searle et  al., 2021), the chapter proposes a model for ‘performance portals’, which enact creative and imaginative strategies to connect beyond the present moment to deep pasts and futures.

Quaternary Drift In March 2018, Danielle Schreve, Jamie Lorimer and I were joined by several others for a ‘Quaternary drift’ in Central London (Overend et al., 2019). We had devised a creative walk that played on the double meaning of the word drift: first, as a translation of the dérive of Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI)—a politicised form of urban wandering; and second, as an old-fashioned word for Ice Age glacial deposits. Our stated aim was ‘to employ Situationist-informed tactics to animate palaeoecological knowledge in the resistant, opaque and frenetic environment of a dense urban centre’ (p. 454). The project was a triangulation of three disciplinary perspectives: Schreve is a Quaternary scientist with a detailed knowledge of the fossil record of this area; Lorimer is an environmental geographer with a particular interest in human-animal relations in the Anthropocene; and I brought methods from performance studies and theatre directing to facilitate a creative experiment in an urban field site. We were in search of the signs of vanished ecologies. Using masks and modelling clay, we attempted to playfully reanimate past inhabitations in the contemporary city. This would help us to develop an ‘eco-politics of

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Fig. 6.1  Jamie Lorimer as hippopotamus in Trafalgar Square

co-­existence’. We would encounter various types of faunal presence— physical, spectral, metaphorical—in the hope that we might learn something about how to live together in a more-than-human world (Fig. 6.1). The London drift brought a group of artists and geographers into contact with an expert’s understanding of the deep time of this area. Schreve’s knowledge of the fossil record—including the remains of hippopotamus, extinct straight-tusked elephant, rhinoceros and lion—and the shifting topography of the Thames embankment framed a journey through the city that went far further than many of us had ever previously ventured. Often the walkers would simply stop and listen, enraptured by this street-­ side lesson in the Quaternary history of the area. Importantly, however, the unidirectional impartation of facts and information was only one of

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many modes of participation. Collectively, we sought out and documented the spectacular ephemera of contemporary animal representations, made models of extinct species and repositioned them in the urban landscape and discovered microworlds in mosses and barks. These activities allowed us to lead from the periphery, following Phil Smith’s (n.d.) advice to ‘let the group develop its own instincts and make its own discoveries’. All participants—not least Schreve—recognised the value of radical openness to new perspectives, ideas and methods. We walked together and merged our movements, voices and actions into a complex group response to an expanded temporal scale. Our drift through the last Ice Age aimed to bring deep pasts and futures into the present moment in order to expand our understandings of inheritance and legacy. This concern with co-existing timescales resonates with recent cultural explorations of deep time, which cultivate an expanded temporal awareness in order ‘to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us’ (Macfarlane, 2019, p. 15; see also Farrier, 2020). It is informed by certain Indigenous ontologies, which do not experience time as a linear progression from past through present to the future, but rather perceive that ‘all times are always with us and contain all times’ (Barker & Pickerill, 2020, p. 650). As I turn to specific examples later in this chapter, I am mindful that the relationship between many Indigenous communities and their environment has been profoundly disrupted by settler colonisation (Whyte, 2018). As Potawatomi scholar-activist Kyle Whyte explains, communities are often ‘struggling for aspirations that are complex and dynamic and that seek to confront the realities of ecological destruction’ (p. 139). A deep time perspective needs to acknowledge the fact that modern Indigenous peoples might not ‘live off the land’ as their ancestors may have done, and that often this is a direct result of ecological violence. While we did not address this directly through our fieldwork, it was important to remember, following Kathryn Yusoff, that ‘no geology is neutral’ (2018, p. 108) and that deep time is accessed from differentiated positions. Our fieldwork set out to explore the following questions: if different timescales co-exist, albeit unevenly, then what relationships and responsibilities do we have to those more-than-human drifters (mammalian and glacial) that we encountered, and to those whom we did not, or could not? How can we live within and alongside deep pasts and futures in ways that might change how we casually and destructively inhabit the planet? Our Situationist-inspired drift did not necessarily provide answers to these

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questions, but in raising them it opened up new pathways and set us on a journey that would eventually lead to Gully Cave. The article that we co-authored embraces an uncertain jostling of perspectives, which has proven to be one of the most effective strategies for interdisciplinary collaboration in this fieldwork. It shifts from scientific to artistic registers, offers examples from contemporary performance practice and modern conservation alike and blurs and blends ideas into a fragmented assemblage of voices and experiences. In the expansive milieu of a capital city, this seemed like the only appropriate response. The city is loaded with meaning. The overdetermination of its spaces can obscure hidden presences and inhabitations. This can close down urban space for alternative practices to those prescribed by planners and policed by the state. Our attempt to look ‘between the cracks’ of the modern city was challenging in this context. Playing with this tension, we attempted, with difficulty, to take photographs without people—a nod to the 100,000-­ year absence of Neanderthals from Britain during the Last Interglacial. Our performative actions helped us to imagine past lives and to (re) perform some of the past lives that the fossil record had captured. Our constructed situation—the drift—offered a temporary relationship with London’s forgotten histories, brought some of its past inhabitants briefly into the present moment and prompted us to look into possible and certain futures. This was my first situated encounter with deep time and it instigated an ongoing interest in the potential for performance fieldwork to make interventions in time as well as space. This chapter shifts the locus of this enquiry to a very different type of field site. At first glance, Gully Cave is an empty hole in the side of a cliff. It is a markedly different environment to the bewildering material and cultural assemblages of a busy city centre. The cave does not proclaim its presence: it is hidden away at the end of an increasingly well-worn path that has led the excavation team back and forth through Ebbor Gorge and along a steep embankment for a number of weeks each summer, for almost two decades. When adventurous walkers or, in one case, opportunistic vandals have bypassed the ‘No Entry’ signs and found their way to the small opening in the rockface, it is unlikely that they had any notion of the significance of the site. Unlike the overdetermined urban centre, this place might initially be perceived as an underwhelming geological feature. And yet, once a deep time perspective is accessed, the cave reveals itself as a portal to up to 45,000 years of inhabitations.

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The cave is located high on the eastern flank of Ebbor Gorge and faces almost exactly due west, occupying a topographical position with far-­ reaching views over the immediate gorge and westwards across the flat floodplain of the River Axe towards Bridgewater Bay and the Bristol Channel. Since 2006, excavations have opened up the cave mouth (originally only 1  m wide by 0.8  m high) and recovered rich assemblages of palaeontological remains preserved within. Schreve’s team initially focused on the northern half of the cave fill, a red, limestone-rich deposit known as breccia, which accumulated in the cave through the inwashing of material down the gully above (after which the cave is named) and through a large fissure feature within the cave roof. The breccia was then capped by a densely cemented carbonate flowstone (stalagmite), sealing the deposits below. The breccia has proved to be spectacularly fossiliferous, yielding the remains of many tens of thousands of micromammals, as well as over 2500 larger mammal bones, teeth and fragments, and around 2000 bird bones. While the London drift suggested icons and symbols of faunal presences—suppressed to the point of re-emergence in the detritus of an advanced production economy—at Gully Cave, the contents of tens of thousands of years have systematically been emptied out, identified, dated, cleaned and displayed, as they were to us from the boot of Schreve’s car in a rainy carpark in the Mendips. These small-scale local excavations, and removals of tonnes of sediment and its fossils, were the last remaining traces of massive-scale global extinctions and migrations. Conversely, the near by Wookey Hole caves and attractions were encountered as an abject space, layered with simulacra rather than sediment. The myth of the ‘Witch of Wookey’ (reported by William of Worcester as long ago—or as recently—as 1470) was encountered at every turn, staged around the village in statues and souvenirs, and evoked by a crudely human-shaped (and dog-shaped) stalagmite in the opening chamber. On our short field trip in November 2021, the subterranean space was also decorated with festive paraphernalia: giant polar bears and santas obscuring the cave walls; garish multicoloured lighting preventing close attention to the geological features. This was the magnitude of layered mythology, temporal scale, cultural representation, material evidence and scientific method that we were confronted with at this site. The main focus of this chapter is on the deep time performances of Gully Cave, rather than the tourist site at Wookey Hole, but the two are always connected. They are literally so by way of a footpath. It is therefore

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possible to descend in a continuous movement through the gorge, from the elevated position of the excavation site to the life-size plastic dinosaurs and pirates, which guard the entrance to the tunnel, leading to the larger limestone chambers. Moreover, as a spatial inversion, one may illuminate the other. In the hollowing out of Schreve’s cave, a disconcerting lacuna is created as attention turns away from the site itself to the fragments of fossilised life buried within the extracted sediment. Conversely, at Wookey Hole, no such absence is permitted. Miles of cables connect numerous speakers and lights in every corner of the caves. These are powered by the burning of fossil fuels in and from other places, which might remind visitors that some things are best left in the ground, if only it were possible to pause and reflect. The speed at which the crowds of tourists are moved through Wookey Hole and the constant sensory stimulation disrupt a deep time encounter and superimpose the spectacular present on the deep past. Walking through Wookey Hole—with its pointy witch’s hat turrets and amplified ahistoric roars—the ascent to Gully Cave is situated on a continuum of deep time performance, which perhaps brings the muddled script of the Wookey Hole tour guide and Schreve’s scientifically informed narration of the excavation project closer together than they may at first appear. In fact, Gully Cave had developed its own mythology, most notably in the rock formation referred to as ‘Bob’s Teeth’, named after a hermit who used to live in the immediate vicinity of the cave, but who moved on when it was suggested to him that he might informally watch over the site. We experience both sites through story, gesture, script and persona, which all determine the ways in which alternative temporalities can be accessed and imagined. A situated encounter with the performative processes of this field site is a way of connecting the present moment to the deep pasts and futures that are always with us. As Franklin Ginn and his co-authors suggest, despite the ‘dizzying and daunting’ shock of the Anthropocene, confronting vast timescales can lead to ‘a renewed sense of hope for transformation or at least for recuperation and collaborative survival in a damaged but not yet dead world’ (2018, p. 216). Performance fieldwork can engender such feelings of dizziness, shock and hope, connecting us to those who are no longer with us and those who are yet to come. Along with its shadow site at Wookey Hole, Gully Cave brings geological processes, climactic change and palaeoecological expertise into a complex environmental assemblage. This chapter documents and reflects on a field study in which a collaborative performance practice is

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developed in response to multiple temporo-­spatial layers. It negotiates the challenge of fleeting responses to expanded temporalities by proposing performance as a portal with the potential to prompt shifting relationships and perceptions, rather than attempting to capture, recreate or represent deep time. As with previous fieldwork, this research begins with the materiality of the site, but this project is distinct in its engagement with absences, extinctions and disappearances from the landscape.

Deep Time Imaginaries For David Farrier, ‘one of the most striking and unsettling aspects of the Anthropocene is the newly poignant sense that our present is in fact accompanied by deep pasts and deep futures’ (2019, p. 6). This realisation—that our contemporary activities have profound effects that stretch well beyond our lifespans—is experienced by many as a rupture. Ginn et al. refer to ‘a profound moment of temporal dislocation’, brought about by ‘the very longterm effects of climate change, nuclear radiation, plastic pollutants, and more that, collectively, shatter modernity’s temporality and its countertemporalities’ (2018, p. 214). This is a challenge to established ways of being in the world. But as Yusoff (2018) argues, the conceptual totalisation that is brought about by the Anthropocene erases myriad histories of oppression and dispossession that constitute its multiple origin stories (hence, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None). It is no longer possible to separate conceptions of the deep past and future from the uneven lived experiences of the present moment, and its newly focussed sensitivities and responsibilities. The increasing recognition of co-temporalities in the Western imagination can be seen as a belated approach towards long-established Indigenous concepts of time. Challenging linear and singular models and considering the potential of alternative timescales, some non-Western ontologies are built on an understanding of time as ‘communicative, active, relational and agential’ (Barker & Pickerill, 2020, p. 650). There are many examples of traditional performance practices embodying such ontologies, pre-­ dating Western concepts of deep time. For example, the ‘more-than-­ human Indigenous and non-Indigenous research collective’ of Bawaka Country share understandings of time and weather in the northern Australian Yolŋu songspiral, known as Wukun or Gathering of the Clouds:

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Here, time is spiral, non-linear and affective. Wukun evokes and articulates a collectivity of past/present/future. [… T]his time of singing, of milkarri, brings all times to this point and this point to all times.1 […] Time is not something that is distant, or that continually expends itself, with the past receding into the distance and the future inevitably bearing down. (Bawaka Country et al., 2020)

This ‘collectivity of past/present/future’—the notion of bringing ‘all times to this point’—suggests an alternative to the sense of dislocation brought about by the current ecological crisis. In Western worldviews, there are countertemporalities: ruin, nostalgia, resistant rhythms (Ginn et al., 2018, pp. 213–214). Nevertheless, time is primarily experienced as progressive—an onward movement towards technological and economic development that purportedly moves humanity forward at the expense of older, slower times and at odds with layered, cyclical and iterative patterns or rhythms. At sites such as Gully Cave, co-temporalities are revealed through a material encounter with the fossil record. The deep past is accessible through geological processes, the excavation of sediment and the expert narrative that contextualises them. To spend time at this cave is to co-exist with vanished species, encountered through millennia of fossilisation. The temporalities that are accessible in sites such as this are not those of the Yolŋu women, which are deeply rooted in a culture with a long-established relationship to expanded timescales. But nor are they subsumed with the perpetual progress demanded by modernity. These might be the best places to begin to reimagine time and to enter into a temporal collectivity that includes our contemporary lives—our daily behaviours and activities that are so inextricably bound up in this expanded timescale—but places us in dialogue with real and imagined pasts and futures. The stuff of the field site (rocks, bones, tarpaulin, metal and more) could be instrumental in instigating the shifts and openings that are required. They might function as portals to other times, which can be accessed and activated through performance. Evoking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1988) ‘holey spaces’, Francesco Careri (2018) seeks the affordances of voids, ostensibly empty spaces within everyday systems and structures, which hold potential for creative disruptions and performances. The literally holey space of the 1  Milkarri is women’s singing of songspirals, a singing, keening chant, a soft tremulous voice redolent with emotion (Gay’wu Group of Women et al., 2019).

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Mendips’ geological voids have much to offer in this regard and have frequently been visited by artists in pursuit of alternative imaginaries (Borodale, 2018). It is perhaps inevitable that the current reckoning with deep time leads many to explore deep spaces, such as caves. Harriet Hawkins (2019) notes a recent Western interest in the subterranean, which counters a dominant vertical concern with space, climate and atmosphere. The underground offers a valuable site to generate new imaginaries that might meet the urgent need to ‘get to grips’ with changing ecological relations, understanding buried pasts and looking forward to new environmental futures. However, importantly, for Hawkins, despite ‘this direction of energies towards the subterranean and its associated materialities such as stone, soil and fuel, we have overlooked an important aspect: the underground’s imaginative force’ (p.  4). Hawkins identifies a clear place for artistic practice-­based research in a project of underground imaginations. Visiting Gully Cave herself, along with artist Flora Parrott, Hawkins encounters several folded fields coalescing (2021, p. 31). Schreve’s long-term excavation of the site is presented as an object of study through an artist-geographer collaboration, which results in a gallery-based relocation of the cave as Parrott transports elements of the field site into an artistic installation. This leads to reflections on the affordances of field sites and to insights offered by artistic processes. Hawkins is interested in what exactly artists do in the field. She encounters the cave as a site of productive constraints that shape the artistic process. As with this enquiry into artistic-­geographical intersections, performance research opens up a space for collaboration, for thinking together and for finding new imaginative modes for experiencing and experimenting with the unknown (Hopfinger & Bissell, 2022). One of the most popular examples of underground imaginations is the collection of diverse subterranean journeys of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (2019). For Macfarlane, ‘[T]o think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking’ (p. 15). Like many others, Macfarlane heads below ground in search of an alternative perspective, which is set into the rock, often just metres below the surface. Underland offers a literary arrival and departure. Before we head into the caves and tunnels of his chapters, there is a poetic evocation of the present moment: ‘Late summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass’ (p.  3). And then, ‘The passage is taken; the maze builds. Side-rifts curl off. Direction is

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difficult to keep. Space is behaving strangely—and so too is time’ (p. 4). Here, the subterranean functions as one of Michel Foucault’s (1984) heterotopias: ‘other spaces’ that are linked to the ‘real’ sites of the society in which we live, but also contradict them in some way. In accounts such as Macfarlane’s, caves and other underground spaces operate in this way. We step out of the rhythms of everyday life into the alternative temporalities— or ‘heterochronies’—of a different type of space, and this experience prompts us to recalibrate and to reimagine the world and our place within it. For Foucault, entry to heterotopias is regulated and according to certain conditions. This may be compulsory, like a prison, or involving contracts and rights, and requiring permissions. Imaginative descents into mines and catacombs, such as Macfarlane’s, are frequently afforded by specialist knowledge, network capital and access to the time, funding and resources that are necessary to travel beyond the everyday. Access to Gully Cave, also, requires special permissions. While its location is not a strictly guarded secret, the site is not advertised or signposted. If it can be located—by following a small trail off the main path through the gorge— there are danger signs and barriers blocking the way. At the opening of the cave, for many years a solid oak door was wedged in place to protect the specialist equipment inside. This makeshift solution was damaged in recent years when vandals managed to enter the cave, destroying some of the contents. Since then, a solid lockable metal gate has been installed. The inaccessibility of ‘other spaces’ means that heterotopias are often not publicly available. However, Robert Harvey (2017) draws attention to an alternative translation of the original Des Espaces Autres, as ‘Of Spaces, Otherwise’. This is to emphasise that the apartness of heterotopias from the everyday or the commonplace is an ontological separation as much as a topographical disconnection: that spaces otherwise are ‘inextricably, uncannily a part of us’ (p. 103). In other words, these sites are fundamental to who we are, and their existence has a bearing on our lives, wherever we might be physically located. Furthermore, heterotopia is not synonymous with heterochrony and the latter might be accessible through other means. At Ebbor Gorge, we used a range of methods to respond to the co-­ existence of alternative temporalities, placing our own practice within an expanded deep time landscape. This involved creative writing and drawing exercises, leading towards the creation of a short film, which was an important development of the approach to performance fieldwork in previous

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projects. Deep Time and Future Pasts at Gully Cave was filmed by Catherine Dunn and Jack Reed during our field trip, and edited in the weeks that followed. In this film, there is a great deal taking place off camera—unseen details of the landscape, avian onlookers, the cameras, microphones and videographers. Much of this finds its way into the film in various ways, but there are also omissions. For example, the abject space of the Wookey Hole cave and attractions does not feature in any discernible sense. Like this chapter, the tight focus on Gully Cave is a choice but this sometimes feels too rational and coherent. Occasionally, the field site pushes back against our visitation and cracks appear in the edifice. The film is an imperfect and incomplete digital fossil: it is a fragment of evidence that remains after the performances of the fieldwork have passed into (shallower) time. It preserves the ‘bones’ of the field trip, but the vital materiality of the experience has to be intuited or interpreted. The film is much more than the documentation of the trip: it also reperforms the site in various ways— only sometimes consciously—connecting our fieldwork to new trajectories and leaving its own traces. Placing our fieldwork at the centre of this enquiry risks emphasising our own insights and interpretations at the expense of non-human agency in all its uncanny and unsettling manifestations. At the same time, working within a deep time landscape might reveal and perform ‘spiral, non-linear and affective’ temporalities (Bawaka Country et  al., 2020). This would involve collective authorship—a shared author-ity—involving the geology of the site, the scientific research overseen by Schreve, our artist-­geographer collective and the various species that shared this space throughout time. This fieldwork formed, or entered into, a ‘holoent’ of entangled scientists, performance researchers and non-human beings (Haraway, 2016, p. 72). Approaching collaboration and co-authority in this way, we aimed to ensure that deep time remained an active component in our fieldwork (Fig. 6.2).

Breathing In During this trip, the space that is usually left open for artistic exploration and experimentation was filled—generously, voluminously—with Schreve’s deep knowledge of the site. We learnt about the various species that have been discovered here including reindeer, brown bear, woolly rhinoceros and spotted hyena, among many others. The behaviours of these animals were inferred from the tiniest of fragments, including a sliver

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Fig. 6.2  Phil Smith attends to something off camera as the group walk towards Gully Cave (On an earlier trip to Ebbor Gorge, two of our group—Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith—had encountered a strange ‘squeezing and stretching time’ after finding that a long descent through the gorge could not be reconciled with a surprisingly quick ascent. In their book The Pattern, they describe how an otherwise unexceptional landscape became extraordinary ‘in its affordance to a temporal spring-like flexibility’ (Billinghurst & Smith, 2020b, pp. 85–86). At the time, they did not know how close they were to the time machine of Gully Cave, which would offer even more extraordinary temporal affordances)

of struck flint, suggesting early human proximity, if not inhabitation. These insights were interpreted through our guide’s performance of the site. With rich descriptions of excavation techniques and fossil discoveries, Schreve used expansive gestures, moving fluidly between scales as close attention to a specific texture of a bone fragment gave way to evocations of vast climactic shifts and herds of migrating ruminants moving across the landscape. This performance of palaeoecological knowledge added to the ever-expanding layering of our experience of this field site. Intertwined with the arcane mythology and surreal features of Wookey Hole, the deep time landscape of Gully Cave is encountered as an assemblage that brings together the outward materiality of the site with various cultural references, multiple time loops, image reels and stories. Attending to these multiple layers through the creative dynamism of artistic approaches maintains this complexity and prompts new interpretations.

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The fossil record in this small space was astonishing and our brief insight into the excavations was difficult to reconcile with the vast expanse of time that had brought us to this point. Reflecting with Hawkins on their previous visit to Gully Cave, Parrott describes an encounter with ‘numbers so large and abstract that they dizzy the mind and suggest a shifting landscape entirely different from the one I consider to be permanent and stable’ (Parrott & Hawkins, 2021, p. 351). Experiencing a similar sense of temporal vertigo and concentrating our attention on the information that Schreve was sharing with us, real effort was required to keep ourselves grounded, to take in and understand the site and negotiate the complexity with which it confronted us. However, I began to wonder whether this effort may have been directed in the wrong way. Instead of attempting to rationalise the site, or to reconcile its various material and immaterial qualities, the best approach for the performance fieldworker may be to lean in to the imaginative shifts and conceptual complexity that is afforded by the overwhelming nature of the experience. This did not feel like the right time for our usual methods—our games and creative tasks—or indeed for any immediate attempt to generate performative responses in situ. This impression is echoed by Parrott, whose account of working at Gully Cave is strikingly similar to our own experience: On reflection, the value in the fieldwork was in being in the place and observing how an expert or guide navigates or understands that environment. Just the observation requires concentration and focus, and everything else I was doing in the landscape felt like a distraction. (p. 353)

Instead, for ourselves and Parrott alike, what was required was a phase of listening, of allowing ourselves to be led into this world and of staying open and receptive to the vitality of both the material and the immaterial. This might be understood as a decentring of human author-ity (Bawaka Country et al., 2015). To be clear, I am not suggesting that the careful attention to the more-than-human world that is practiced by Yolŋu is comparable to our short field trip to a previously unknown site. As discussed in the introduction to this book, in referencing Indigenous ontologies, my aim is to acknowledge and learn from a multiplicity of experiences and ways of knowing landscapes and environments. In this case, the Indigenous and non-Indigenous collective of Bawaka share their insights and practices in academic contexts and it is through this mode alone—not through direct knowledge or understanding—that I encounter this

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specific conceptualisation of time. Despite the limitations of this approach, my research methodology has been influenced by these ideas and worldviews, which suggest the possibility of opening up a research process to the agency of the land—or in the Aboriginal English term, to Country—a ‘vibrant and sentient understanding of space/place which becomes bounded through its interconnectivity’ (p.  270). This approach would start with attending, not with intervening or performing, but this would also require ‘relating to the world in a different way, understanding ourselves in a different way [and acting] in a different way, with a different kind of ethics’ (p. 275). At Gully Cave, this ethical-ecological performance also responds to the unsettling proximity of Wookey Hole. The anthropogenic aspects of the field site, with all their darkness and weirdness, are brought into dialogue with prehuman ecologies. In our fieldwork, the experience of listening—of taking in the landscape and attending to its ‘language’ and ‘Law’ (p.  273)—felt necessary and justified, but this required a new way of working. Reflecting on this situation on the walk back through the gorge, Helen Billinghurst usefully reminded me that ‘you have to breath in to breath out’. This became something of a refrain in my field notes on the event: We drew a long, collective breath That took in faunal remains, 40,000 years of sediment, Layered timescales, Rapidly shifting climates Levelling out To a fossilised archive of lifeworlds.

These words were written during a creative writing task, for which participants were prompted to respond to the site visit. This took place later that day when we gathered to reflect on the experience in the vicinity of Wells Cathedral (the gothic architecture of which might be seen as another attempt at focussing an encounter with alternative temporalities). Later, we layered multiple voices, weaving together the group’s poems, essays and other responses to the site. These texts were performed informally between the group in the noisy bar of the Wookey Hole Inn when we gathered for an evening meal. As we continued to work with these texts, the work developed to explore the technique of vocal layering, which built on a concern with multiple voices developed in our previous fieldwork at

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Knepp Wildland Project (Lorimer et al., 2018). In this context, however, the form seemed particularly suitable for an exploration of co-existing temporalities and an openness to ‘multiple and non-linear’ rhythms (Barker & Pickerill, 2020, p. 650). In the film, voices are brought together into a complex assemblage of overlapping and converging responses and descriptions. As with Sean Borodale’s (2018, 2019) sited poetics, this invites the viewer to actively engage with the site in a particular way, as a form of auditory excavation is required to locate individual voices within this co-authored performance text. In preparation for the writing task, Billinghurst led us in a drawing exercise that established layering as a key technique. This was an adaptation of the Surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse. Each player draws a top layer (usually a head) and the paper is then folded over leaving only a hint (e.g., the bottom of a neck), before it is passed on to the next player. This process continues until there are several versions composed of several layers—a series of collective drawings generated through improvisation and guesswork. This version of the game responded to the layering of sediment at Gully Cave and the more-than-human presences that we had spent the morning with. Caves were placed inside bodies, inverting the organic and the geological. Our creations were hybrid humanimal eco-­ spirits, strange mixtures of botanical, geological, anthropological and ecological shapes and features: impossible beings for an impossible age (Figs. 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5). The layering and fragmentation of the drawing exercise also informed the visual composition of the film. The human research team are featured in the majority of shots, but we are often moving out of the frame, or else only a part of our bodies is visible within the landscape. The film is therefore composed of decontextualised sections of exquisite corpses. The suggestion seems to be that totality is unobtainable. Deep time is composed of ‘hyperobjects’, which can only be accessed partially, but can have profound effects at a local level—the only way that we can directly interact with them (Morton, 2013). In this context, it is a human-operated camera that frames the pictures, but the vocal layering, the dynamic close-ups of body parts, leaves and other ecological objects and the concern with what is outside of, or beyond, the frame always work against an anthropocentric encounter with the landscape and the effect is of visitation rather than occupation. Gully Cave is accessed at a point in its vast temporal trajectory. Our introduction to the fossils, and Schreve’s performance of the quaternary

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history of the site, had directed our attention to the past, but we were also concerned with the future traces of this place. The wire mesh protecting the cave entrance from falling rocks, the blue tarpaulin ground sheets covering the cave floor and the heavy metal gate guarding the way into the small space beyond—these would all outlive the excavation work. Wookey Hole could then be understood as a museum of future fossils, displaying a confusing collection of disparate objects. Giant beasts, fairground rides, elaborate arcade machines and festive decorations will persist far into the deep future. What will archaeologists make of them? In my field notes, I wrote of ‘polymers with ponies’ and ‘canvas with corvus’—a reminder that anthropogenic materials were now part of the landscape along with pre-­ industrial and pre-hominin fragments and traces. Our approach to writing, drawing and filming was informed by this perspective. We consider the fragmented, layered and partial texts and media that were created during this field trip to be homologous to the material archive that constitutes the excavation site. This work will leave its own legacy, including the words on this page. In his study of ‘future fossils’, Farrier (2020) evokes a multiplicity of temporal trajectories, which are around us all the time and do not require the kind of regulation and permissions of Foucault’s model. He reminds us that we are surrounded by everyday objects—laptops, coffee cups and so on—that will leave traces that far outlast us, stretching into the deep future through the fossil record: Future fossils are not just a distant prospect to be left to the patient care of geological processes or the curiosity of generations yet to be born. They touch our lives hundreds of times every day, and we can see in them, if we choose, not only who we are but also who we could be. (Farrier, 2020, pp. 24–25)

This way of seeing the everyday materiality of the world shows that we are surrounded by deep pasts and futures all the time. Farrier’s writing draws our attention to these ubiquitous openings into alternative temporalities, and in so doing demonstrates the importance of imagination— of myth, story, narrative—in shifting the way we understand and engage with deep time. Yusoff also considers imaginings of geological relations, evoking the Black feminist praxis of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s ‘poethics’ to propose a ‘geo-poethics’ ‘that might actively announce a whole way of knowing, doing, existing, as an ethical mandate’ for decolonisation (2018,

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p. 104). This is to bring the material and the symbolic together to unsettle the colonialist narratives of the Anthropocene, which homogenise and generalise at the expense of particular lived experiences. We live amongst portals into distant pasts and possible futures. Portals often involve material encounters, which prompt an imaginative departure from a lived reality to connect in thoughtful, careful ways with worlds beyond our own. While Farrier demonstrates that these are everywhere, they are not always easily identified or accessed. The ‘anthropause’ afforded by the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed more-than-human ecologies that were previously obscured by the frenetic mobilities of the twenty-first century (Rutz et al., 2020). Among these are new insights into the ecological value of deep time encounters. This has led to a recent interest in portals as conceptual tools to move beyond and through the current environmental moment (Searle et al., 2021). Writing in the early days of the pandemic in India, Arundhati Roy (2020) condemns the inequalities exposed by Narendra Modi’s government’s response, but sees the pandemic as a gateway, which provides an opportunity to imagine and inhabit better worlds. It remains to be seen whether these portals can lead to different futures, but through the work of Farrier, Roy and others, the imaginative tools are now available to access them. Portals enable such imaginative departures into past and future worlds. They therefore offer a potential model for performance fieldwork in sites where deep time is so close at hand. Performance can respond to the dizzying expansion of deep time, which can be accessed on multiple levels, through a variety of shifting registers.

Staying with the Detail In a rainy carpark in the Mendips, Schreve opened her car boot to reveal a proxy cave. From boxes and bags, bubble wrapped and labelled, emerged fossils of all shapes and sizes; 45,000 years excavated over the last decade. We passed a section of hyena jaw round the group and I felt time warping as I waited for my turn. The coldness of the rock struck me with the force of millennia. I was holding the posterior part of a mandible bone, which had belonged to a spotted hyena—a major predator in northern Europe during the Pleistocene. Gully Cave was once a hyena den and bones and coprolites (fossilised dung) have been discovered around the area. The jaw bone was a portal with an unnerving capacity to disrupt the present moment. I imagined what it must have been like here: a foetid, gruesome

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death chamber—a non-human charnel house. I quickly passed the object down the line. In this way, the materiality of the site determined our fieldwork, as we attended to its features at various scales and with different rhythms. In many artistic and literary reckonings with deep time, there is a focus on the more-than-human agency of objects. In Farrier’s handling of a relatively young ice core, for example, the object glows with an ‘inward luminosity’ and is a ‘portal into an archive two miles deep’ (2020, p.  134). There is a dynamism and vitality to these objects that seem to exceed human frames of reference and power to comprehend. At Gully Cave, too, the objects that we encountered exerted unsettling and powerful effects and much of our work was determined by the dizzying and overwhelming influence of the breccia, the fossils and other ‘ecological objects’ (Eliot, 2013). Our use of film opened up new ways to attend to these details, as the following description conveys: The camera sits low to the side of a muddy footpath through Ebbor Gorge. In the centre of the frame is a single birch leaf—yellowed, spotted with dirt, and balanced precariously on the edge of a concrete step. Suddenly, in quick succession, five pairs of human feet pass by. The camera holds its ground as a range of footwear— from fashion trainers to heavy hiking boots—stomp across the frame, picking up more mud with each step and disrupting the arrangement of composting vegetation. At this scale, the procession is an event with the potential to radically alter the micro-topography of this part of the route. Yet, at the end of this ten second shot, the leaf remains in place, undisturbed by the passing of human interlopers. A moment before, in a voiceover, Laura Bissell asks whether ‘we are just scratching the surface of time?’. In an earlier shot, the camera has zoomed out, positioning the research team against the backdrop of the limestone cliff that houses the cave. Danielle is in the centre of the group, gesticulating as she narrates the comings and goings of various species and climates, reporting on the fossils her team have removed from the site, and storying the landscape from the Middle Devensian (around 45,000 years ago) to the early Holocene (10,000 years ago). Attention is focussed on the rockface and the small opening to the cave. The camera has slowly traced the lines and fissures in the limestone, and now the research team are seen doing the same. Then, heads duck under a natural archway, as several bodies emerge from the hole into the sunlight. They are taking in, travelling through, and moving beyond this place.

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Watching the film some weeks after the field trip, the site reperforms itself in new and revealing ways. Just as we did in Central London during the Quaternary Drift, we are observing microworlds here. Only the camera operator noticed the tiny moment of feet passing by on their way up a meandering path towards the cave. The film attends to it, though, in the same way that the group examined the intricacies of the fossils that Schreve showed us earlier in the day. In the ambulatory explorations of Mythogeography, Smith recommends ‘stay[ing] as obsessively close to the detail as you can’ (2012, p. 99). Influenced partly by the contested ideas of vital materialism and object-oriented ontology (Bennett, 2010; Harman, 2018), mythogeography has evolved in recent years from a reliance on place-narratives and performative strategies to a receptiveness to the material specificity of its sites, and a recognition that things have power and landscapes are agential (Billinghurst & Smith, 2020a; Smith, 2017). There is an overabundance of detail at any and every field site, and the aim is never to close down meaning. However, in deep time landscapes such as Ebbor Gorge, meanings and impressions loop and multiply in strange ways. Attending to this experience at subterranean sites such as Gully Cave can foster more widely applicable sensitivities to the layers of all sites. Working with film helped us to attend to multiple observations, sensations and impressions, and to begin to work creatively and imaginatively with, and through, the temporal, spatial and cultural layers. The aim was not to counteract the sense of bewildering scale that we encountered at the site, but rather to draw attention to it and to channel it in ways that opened up the experience to others, focussing a mythogeographical enquiry into deep time. Nonetheless, the film makes a series of choices about what to attend to and what to exclude. In some senses, it pursues a relatively narrow ecological focus. The research team are followed on their journey through the gorge towards the excavation site. This is a linear progression. The filmed footage is reminiscent of found footage left behind after some terrible event has occurred. There is a sense that the walkers are unaware of the overwhelming detail and unfathomable depths of time that we are about to fall into. In fact, the path took us back into Wookey Hole—the stranger, irrational aspects of the field trip that the film leaves off camera. The various records, experiences, fragments and traces left behind after performance can only offer a partial telling; the rest has to be subjectively,

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and creatively, reassembled (Pearson & Shanks, 2001). The specific choices that are made about focus and inclusion either enhance or omit certain aspects of a field trip. This can be a revealing process in itself. As in this reflection on the trip, the importance of the Wookey Hole experience is partly highlighted by its absence in the film text. Documentation is a performative process in this sense—generative rather than definitive. As with Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks’ ‘rescue archaeology’, our film does not attempt to directly reveal or replicate the events that took place, but rather reimagines or recontextualises them (p. 58). Film can become an important tool for the performance fieldworker. It offers an opportunity to look closer, and to look again, at a bounded section of the field site—placing the breccia under the microscope, so to speak, and continuing to work with its textures and stories. However, it also creates a distance from the materiality of the encounter, which reasserts itself in any reflection or analysis of the event. After visiting Gully Cave just once, this work can only offer a starting point that will inevitably be developed further in the months and years to come. Placing this chapter at the end of this book is a deliberate recognition of this situation, which serves to defer conclusions and to open up to more ‘shallow’ futures of performance research in this deep time landscape. The small research team that travelled to Ebbor Gorge in November 2021 continue to work together and to share ideas about further work at the site. For my own part, this project has raised more questions than it has answered. The range of creative actions and outputs that I have discussed here have suggested models for performance practice in deep time environments, which I reflect on in this chapter’s conclusion. However, these are yet to be fully explored, and their potential remains unknown. Other members of the team continue to work through their experience in the context of their own performance practice. Smith, for example, has suggested the possibility of following the trajectories of several of the species that inhabited the cave by developing a series of performance walks that embody hunting and grazing activities of reindeer, auroch and others, shaping a mythogeographical exploration of the paths around the gorge. There is now a strong desire to return to develop the experiments of our first field trip. The challenge is to reconcile the temporal removal that we experienced at the cave with the recognition of interconnectedness that is necessary for life in the Anthropocene.

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Conclusion: Breathing Out There is a common trope in deep time narratives, in which the everyday world is left behind through a dramaturgy of descent into subterranean spaces. A dramatic structure is apparent: first, there is a moment of arrival—an exposition that places us in the ‘here and now’ of a site, attending to the sensory landscape and preparing to move on to an ‘other space’; second, there is a descent into the darkness, which often involves physical exertion and psychological endurance, rewarded by arrival in the realm of the unknown and the unexpected; third, a revelatory experience through which the human actor is afforded a privileged access to an expanded temporal scale; and finally, a return to the everyday, with new perspectives on the place of humanity in the world and a recognition of the limitations of a worldview that remains focussed on the present moment at the expense of an understanding of legacy and inheritance. At Gully Cave, any expectations we may have had about a spectacular descent into an underground realm were soon set aside as we arrived at the unassuming opening in the limestone cliff. The relatively small space, which was only just large enough for the full research team to comfortably occupy, was always illuminated by the waning autumn sunlight, filled by the sound of the rain in the trees, and with a constant vantage point over the valley below. Nonetheless, a sense of departure into deep time was experienced. We spoke of travelling into the Quaternary, and the film mirrors the form of arrival and departure, albeit through a disjointed and disrupted ordering. We experienced the cave as something close to a Foucaultian heterotopia—a sort of ‘counter-site’ in which our habitual way of being in the world is ‘simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Foucault, 1984). However, in the Anthropocene, such other spaces acquire a different quality, due to the impossibility of separating specific locations from the hyperobjects of climate change, pollution, carbon, extinction and so on. This research was an opportunity to develop a deep time perspective at a specific field site, but as with the ‘patchy performances’ of Chap. 2, this emerges as a way of understanding wider ecological contexts and effects. There may now be potential to refocus this fieldwork to address the myriad colonialist and extractivist histories of deep time landscapes—the billion Black Anthropocenes identified by Yusoff (2018). Our fieldwork at Gully Cave has suggested some potential routes and strategies for performing deep time that might form the basis for future

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work in this area. This research sets out to perform a deep time encounter, in part to heighten perceptions that what happens here and now has direct and lasting connections to what happened, or might happen, there and then. It also aims to enact the relational, looping and multiple patterns that are suggested by non-Western temporalities. Our fieldwork employs performance as a way of instigating the temporal shifts that are necessary to enter into an alternative relationship with deep time. While the site itself remains relatively inaccessible, deep time landscapes are ubiquitous and exist at various scales, including at the most domestic and quotidian. These heterochronies can be instrumental in forming, developing and strengthening perceptions. But performance portals do not need to be limited by privilege and regulation: they can reveal themselves at any point, springing into being without warning, and suddenly we can co-exist with hyena and auroch, witness a future of enduring anthropogenic waste and see ourselves at a moving point in time, which contains all that has preceded it and all that will outlast us. As Lorimer says in his response to the field trip, Gully Cave offers us a ‘future past’ by showing us ‘old ecologies that might be re-enacted in the future’. Following Ursula K.  Heise, we might therefore understand the extinctions that were revealed to us at the site not as an endpoint to a 45,000 year story, ‘but as a possibility of new beginnings—not the end of nature so much as its continually changing futures’ (2016, p. 54). While we encountered the cave through an insight into the excavation of Pleistocene fossils, our performance fieldwork can be understood as an attempt to calibrate such past ecologies with the ruptures of the Anthropocene and the ongoing formation of possible futures that take us, for better or worse, beyond this point of shock and dislocation. Through our performance practice, we have set out to identify, generate and access portals that bring past and future worlds closer together through the prism of the current ecological moment. Subterranean sites such as Gully Cave offer a particular kind of encounter with past lives and climates, prompting a reimagination of the relationships between past, present and future ecologies. The potential of performance fieldwork in this context is to reposition human actors within expanded spatio-temporal landscapes, pointing beyond the immediacy of a sited action to connect us to deep time. This work can help to counter a sense of temporal dislocation by actively engaging with co-temporalities and a ‘collectivity of past/present/future’ that can keep multiple pathways open.

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References Barker, A. J., & Pickerill, J. (2020). Doings With the Land and Sea: Decolonising Geographies, Indigeneity, and Enacting Place-agency. Progress in Human Geography, 44(4), 640–662. Bawaka Country, Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., et al. (2015). Working with and Learning from Country: Decentring Human Authority. Cultural Geographies, 22(2), 269–283. Bawaka Country, Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., et al. (2016). Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space. Progress in Human Geography, 40(4), 455–475. Bawaka Country, Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., et al. (2020). Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous Understandings of Time and Climate Through Songspirals. Geoforum, 108, 295–304. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press. Billinghurst, H., & Smith, P. (2020a). Convivial Acts for an Ecosensual Labyrinth. World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, 76(5-7), 337–352. Billinghurst, H., & Smith, P. (2020b). The Pattern. Triarchy Press. Borodale, S. (2018). Asylum. Vintage. Borodale, S. (2019). Towards a Poetics of Field Theatre: Situated Acts of Poem-­ making in the Work of Ted Hughes. New Writing, 16(3), 265–280. Careri, F. (2018). Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. Culicidae Architectural Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum. Eliot, C. H. (2013). Ecological Objects for Environmental Ethics. In R. Rozzi, S.  T. A.  Pickett, C.  Palmer, J.  J. Armesto, & J.  B. Callicott (Eds.), Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Values, Philosophy, and Action (pp. 219–229). Springer. Farrier, D. (2019). Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. University of Minnesota Press. Farrier, D. (2020). Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. 4th Estate. Foucault, M. (1984). Of Other Spaces 1967: Heterotopias. Architecture / Mouvement / Continuité, 5, 46–49. Gay'wu Group of Women, Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., & Ganambarr-­ Stubbs, M. (2019). Songspirals: Sharing Women's Wisdom of Country through Songlines. Allen & Unwin. Ginn, F., Bastian, M., Farrier, D., & Kidwell, J. (2018). Introduction: Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time. Environmental Humanities, 10(1), 213–225.

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Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Harman, G. (2018). Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Penguin. Harris, S. (2017). Down in the Gully Cave… not far from Wells and Mendip Museum. Retrieved 3 June 2021 from https://musemakers.wordpress. com/2017/10/24/down-­i n-­t he-­g ully-­c ave-­n ot-­f ar-­f rom-­w ells-­a nd­mendip-­museum/ Harvey, R. (2017). Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics. Bloomsbury. Hawkins, H. (2019). Underground Imaginations, Environmental Crisis and Subterranean Cultural Geographies. Cultural Geographies, 27(1), 3–22. Hawkins, H. (2021). Geography, Art, Research: Artistic Research in the GeoHumanities. Routledge. Heise, U. K. (2016). Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. University of Chicago Press. Hopfinger, S., & Bissell, L. (2022). Performance Research and Pedagogy: Inviting in the Unknown. Media Practice and Education, 1–18. Lorimer, J., Narbed, S., Overend, D., Swingler, J., & Twynholm, S. (2018). The Six Wild Ways of the Oak. Audio text. Recorded at Knepp Castle Estate, West Sussex. https://soundcloud.com/user-­465055761/the-­six-­wild-­ways-­of-­the-­oak Macfarlane, R. (2019). Underland: A Deep Time Journey. Penguin. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press. Overend, D. (2021). Field works: Wild Experiments for Performance Research. Studies in Theatre and Performance. Overend, D., & Lorimer, J. (2018). Wild Performatives: Experiments in Rewilding at Knepp Wildland Project. GeoHumanities, 4(2), 527–542. Overend, D., Lorimer, J., & Schreve, D. (2019). The Bones Beneath the Streets: Drifting Through London’s Quaternary. Cultural Geographies, 27(3), 453–475. Parrott, F., & Hawkins, H. (2021). Conversations in Caves. Leonardo, 54(3), 350–354. Pearson, M., & Shanks, M. (2001). Theatre / Archaeology: Disciplinary Dialogues. Routledge. Roy, A. (2020). The Pandemic is a Portal. In AZADI: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction (pp. 203-214). Penguin. Rutz, C., Loretto, M.-C., Bates, A. E., Davidson, S. C., Duarte, C. M., Jetz, W., et  al. (2020). COVID-19 Lockdown Allows Researchers to Quantify the Effects of Human Activity on Wildlife. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 4(9), 1156–1159. Searle, A., Turnbull, J., & Lorimer, J. (2021). After the Anthropause: Lockdown Lessons for More-than-Human Geographies. The Geographical Journal, 187(1), 69–77. Smith, P. (2012). Counter-Tourism: the Handbook. Triarchy Press.

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Smith, P. (2017). Two Walks with Objects. Humanities, 6, 3. Smith, P. (n.d.). Starter Kit: Five Steps to a Drift or Dérive. Retrieved 9 Dec 2021 from https://www.mythogeography.com/starter-­kit.html Whyte, K. (2018). Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice. Environment and Society, 9(1), 125–144. Yusoff, K. (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Encounter, Intervention and Co-becoming

In the introduction, I noted the relative absence of references to ‘fieldwork’ in theatre and performance studies. This was not to say that fieldwork practices have been entirely distinguishable from many of the methods and processes of site-specific theatre makers and performance researchers. It is rather that the generic traditions of the former and the disciplinary agnosticism of the latter have prevented the methodology of performance fieldwork from taking root and fulfilling its potential to productively engage with landscapes and environments. This book has gathered together some of the creative tactics and reflexive strategies of my own performance research projects of over a decade. These chapters offer a diverse selection of practice-based creative experiments, brought together through the methodological framework of performance fieldwork. For most of these projects, this is a retrospective labelling, which results in a disparate collection of sites, methods, styles and outputs. In this conclusion, I therefore identify some commonalities and shared concerns, suggesting a loose model for future adaptations and applications. This remains a consciously inconclusive conclusion, however, as the dynamism and diversity of different contexts necessitates a constantly evolving approach. Performance fieldwork is a methodology that enacts its own performances, which themselves contribute to the complex social and ecological assemblages of its field sites. This makes it distinct in its ability to enter a transdisciplinary space of becoming in which researchers are performed by

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the site, as much as the site is performed by the research. In this sense, this book has suggested that performance offers a particular contribution to the broad methodology of fieldwork, which Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels originally proposed as a ‘performing art’ (1989, p. 171). Before a discussion of the specificity of performance in this context, the methods and practices that are shared here should also be understood in the context of a broader artistic turn to fieldwork, which has played out across the geohumanities in recent years (Hawkins, 2021; Modeen & Biggs, 2021). Reconceptualisations of fieldwork offer ways of understanding and working with unknown situations and processes—experiences that Hopfinger and Bissell (2022) argue are particularly well-served by performance. This is a research practice that responds to ‘the complexities and unknowns of the current times we are in’, converging in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic (p. 52). It is fieldwork for the patchy Anthropocene, in which human and more-than-human relations play out unevenly across landscapes dominated by anthropogenic industrial forms (Tsing et  al., 2019). It is art for a damaged planet, capable of new transdisciplinary imaginings (Tsing et al., 2017). What is required is fieldwork that stays close to these multiple and complex situations, learning from and becoming part of tangled ecologies of space to reconfigure relations to the world (Haraway, 2016). Creative fieldworkers have increasingly looked to long-established place-based worldviews to acknowledge that such open and relational ways of being in an entangled world are not without precedent. While it is problematic to infer synonymity between Indigeneity and ecological harmony, Modeen and Biggs advocate a commitment to re-indigenising knowledge, pointing out that ‘peoples who have lived in a close harmony with their environment over many generations have usually arrived at a point of deep knowledge, shared with stories and practices that have had iterations over the centuries, in patterns that sustain a balance among humans and non-humans alike’ (2021, p.  219). This is the model for research that is promoted by the Creatures Collective (Hernández et al., 2021) and by Bawaka Country collective of Indigenous, non-Indigenous and more-than-human collaborators, whose insights have been influential to many of the field trips in this book. A commitment to co-becoming informs an approach to fieldwork that aspires to a decentring of research through its encounter with other ways of knowing and being in the world (Tynan, 2021). At the same time, there are occasions when fieldwork might attempt to re-centre certain humans, who have been excluded or

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marginalised from dominant spatial cultures and identities. The dialectic promoted by Bram Büscher (2021) between more-than-human and ‘less-­ than-­human’ geographies is upheld in this context. Field sites are not sources of an extractable form of knowledge, which is there to be accessed, interpreted and disseminated. Rather, the pursuit of ‘a resolved, static, ethical position’ gives way to ‘a “dwelling” in and as complex and uncertain places’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2019, p. 693). Researchers enter into new relationships with shifting and evolving environments. Temporarily, contingently, they become a part of them. Practice-based engagements with the condition of ‘not knowing’ may seem ‘dangerously light-hearted’ at times, but are of great value in the context of shifting disciplinary convictions about what fieldwork is and what it can look like (Hawkins, 2021, p.  44). What becomes clear in these accounts is that such playful and responsive approaches to field sites need not preclude methodological precision, and indeed may demand it. As Kershaw and Nicholson’s both/and formulation of theatre and performance suggests, it is possible to employ specific disciplinary skill-sets but for these to be placed within and generative of transdisciplinary conditions (2011, p.  7). A wide range of methods including recording, deep mapping, geopoetics and community action have been explored in these emerging geo-ecological field practices. In these examples, it is often artistic skill and technique that facilitate the condition of responsive openness to which this work aspires. However, it is often a case of reprioritising this as part of a methodology that values messy, unpredictable encounters above rigid deployment of practice. As these recent contributions suggest, there are now a growing number of artistic fieldworkers negotiating the space between methodological precision and radical openness. Performance offers particular ways of working with site, text and collaborators, which have their roots in the artform of theatre—the set, scripts and staging that attracted Cosgrove and Daniels as rich metaphors for the cultural representations of landscape. Performance is also a feature of the world and an inherent quality of field sites, the acknowledgement of which can transform how we understand and perceive landscapes and environments. And performance is often the result of fieldwork as creative walks, theatre productions, audio and video works and a whole host of actions, scores, interventions and installations result from days, weeks, months or years working collaboratively at field sites. As the case studies in this book took place over a long period of time, visited different types of

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field site and used a variety of approaches, the following section looks back at the six chapters of this book. With this overview, it is possible to ascertain a loose framework for performance fieldwork, which is offered here as a potential model for future practice.

A Model for Performance Fieldwork: By, for, with/ as Field Site The following model is presented sequentially, moving through phases of encounter, intervention and co-becoming: being performed by the field site, performing for the site, performance with or as the site. However, it is important to stay open to those moments when the unpredictability of the field disrupts this formula. As with any research practice in the field, it is usually impossible to neatly separate work flows into simple steps and distinct activities. These categories blur into each other and overlap. Nonetheless, as far as these phases can be anticipated and facilitated, they may provide a useful structure for reflection, analysis and dissemination. Throughout this work, a range of methods have been employed to sensitise participants to their environment. This is partly a process of attunement: of ‘learning to be affected’ by the more-than-human performances of the field site (Despret, 2004). However, fieldwork also creates the conditions for researchers to be performed by the field site. Modeen and Biggs’ suggestion that we are the fieldwork can be understood in these terms. Fieldworkers are performed by ecological vectors: the energies and agencies that move through us, even as we move through a field site (Kershaw, 2016, p. 283). This performative quality of site has to be understood and experienced before any progress can be made towards creative interventions. As Grant Kester asserts, ‘[W]ell before the enunciative act of art-making, the manipulation and occupation of space and material, there must first be a period of open-ness, of non-action, of learning and of listening’ (2013, p. 118). Conceiving of this listening as a performative process emphasises its active and affective qualities. For the majority of the case studies in this book, this is a substantial phase of the research process, which in some cases becomes almost the entirety of the work, as any definitive ‘outputs’ are deferred. A range of methods have been utilised to meet sites on their own terms, rather than imposing a structure that has been designed a priori. This ensures that insight emerges from the pre-existing field rather than the

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predetermined work. The wet-suited plunge into the cold water of the Bamff beaver pools, my tracking of the Suffragette’s journey by bike from Glasgow to Alloway and our ‘long, collective breath’ at Gully Cave—these were all instances when fieldworkers were performed by the forces and energies of the field sites (and routes). These were moments of acclimatisation, of entering into new contexts, open to what might be found there. They were not limited to the moment of encounter and often continued throughout the field trips, but they were essential preparation for the next phase of the research. The process of working at a specific field site develops slowly and incrementally. It might begin with small-scale ‘creative responses’, including generation of short texts, site-specific sculptures or ritual actions in the field. When I exchanged objects between Glasgow and Egham as I travelled repeatedly by air, I did not have an outcome in mind, but rather imagined that this performed action might activate the route in some way, subjecting myself to more-than-human agencies in order to reconfigure its relational space. Whether these are generated individually (often as part of a short ‘solo’ exercise) or through pair or group activities, they are usually created quickly with limited resources. Occasionally, more substantial performances are transported into a site (as in the case of touring theatre (Overend, 2015)). In these cases, it is more challenging to meet the site on its own terms, but a dialogue might still be possible and certain strategies can be employed to open up new configurations. These performances are for field sites, in the sense that geographers Doreen Massey and Harriet Hawkins use the preposition (For Space (2005) and For Creative Geographies (2013), respectively) as generative of reflection and recognition of particular qualities in specific contexts. They are also for field sites because they are a way of seeking an appropriate relationship and way of working that does not presume a right to enforce a hierarchy, but aims to find a sensitive and responsible way of being and evolving in space. In this phase, performance is a question, the instigation of a conversation or a call that hopes for a response. However, for can be problematic when it asserts distance and difference between researchers and field sites. Performing for a field site implies site as audience, which is a differential arrangement in space. Such performance may be developed with sensitivity and respect to the people and places that are visited. But the sense of responsibility that this suggests may fail to acknowledge the assumed response-ability of the fieldworkers (Bawaka Country et  al., 2019). In other words, it is important to remain attentive to where power lies in

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these exchanges, which is not a straightforward aspiration. This is why performing for field site can be a contentious practice, which often reveals the limitations, antagonisms and political sensitivities of the field sites. The performance sculptures at the edges of the Bamff Estate and the playful theatrical antics at the Death Disco club night: these performances played out at different scales and durations, but they were created or adapted for their sites. These particular examples also had the unintended effect of generating some form of tension or antagonism—the politically insensitive call for the Bamff beavers to ‘GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY’, the literal barriers imposed by the club security staff—performance cannot be imposed on a site and it will often encounter resistance. There is always the option of drawing back, rethinking, trying another path, but it is important to recognise when the power balance has shifted too far. Gradually, as Dee Heddon suggests, ‘contingent and relational’ performances play out ‘inside a thick, lively and complex matrix of interconnected actants’ (2016, p.  336). Without erasing difference or ignoring positionality, performance fieldwork enters a third phase, in which multiple elements are brought together into interventional performances with or as the field site. Importantly, these performances work hard to avoid imposing their interventions on unwilling or unresponsive ‘collaborators’. This is a continuous process and there will inevitably be missteps along the way. However, there is great value in the continual effort to meet sites on their own terms and to enter into a meaningful relationship with them. The resultant work is co-authored; an assemblage of human and more-­ than-­human agencies, which are temporarily and contingently brought together. Forming communities of practice around performance interventions in field sites offers an alternative model for fieldwork, which works against the separation of researchers and the environments that they enter into. For Bawaka Country, ‘living (and working) as kin, with shared gurrutu [kinship], prioritises connections and relationships, challenges separation of the “field”, research, and life, and challenges the notion of universities as the centre of knowledge production’ (Bawaka Country et  al., 2019, p.  694). Performance fieldwork, also, attempts to move between and across boundaries, understanding the interconnectedness of research, life and knowledge and recognising the response-ability of researchers to take their place within this web of entangled relations. The eventual merging of the theatrical event into the final hours of the Arches’ club night; progression along multiple ‘cause ways’ of the village of Alloway, the historical narratives of the museum and contemporary

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feminist politics; the fragmented, layered and partial text of the Gully Cave film: these were collaborations that moved beyond response and reflection towards a way of co-becoming with the field site or through collective performance as the site. That is not to suggest that these are perfect examples for this work, but rather that they enacted a movement in a productive direction. In moments such as these, performance has progressed through the phases of this model to achieve a fragile state of ecological convergence with its site. Such moments of synergy between performers, landscapes and environments are difficult to achieve; they are fragile and they can often only be sustained for a fleeting moment. They also avow and acknowledge disharmony, limitations and the productive insights offered by failure. As an aspiration, they drive much of the work in this collection. Modeen and Biggs’ call for a reconsideration of the progressive, possessive and individualist field of ‘art’ might as usefully be applied to conceptualisations of ‘research’. The case studies in this book have joined with the complexity and multiplicity of their sites, emerging directly from their environments as relational performances, which are open-ended and generative. This is to follow Tim Ingold by entering into Correspondences with the world: studying with the world, rather than making a study of it (2020, p. 198). The aim here is not to approach a site as an object to investigate and analyse, in a search for conclusion and definition. Rather, it is to recognise the messiness and the unknowability of the world, and to find ways of becoming with the social and ecological assemblages that define them. The result is perhaps more a way of being than of knowing. As an event, performance fieldwork takes place for a defined period—a few hours, a couple of days, or a consistent or repeated action over a longer but finite time. After spending time in the field, co-becoming with the relational assemblages of these sites, disentanglement is therefore inevitable. This is the nature of performance as an ephemeral and momentary intervention. But performance also lingers on and leaves traces. As an encounter, it has potential to effect change. This is true of the individual ‘actants’ within the matrix, as the experience, sensations and memory of taking part may come to shift perspectives and influence future actions. It may also be true of the wider assemblage, as relationships are reconfigured and new possibilities are opened up. These excursions and visitations are now part of the collective history of performances at these field sites, just as the encounter with the environments and landscapes has affected those who worked together there.

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(In)conclusion1 In the final section of Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith’s The Pattern, the authors state simply, ‘There is no conclusion’ (2020, p. 199). While I echo the sentiment, I will say just a little more than that here. A conclusion is usually relied on to draw a thesis to a close, to tie up any loose ends and to assert the key lessons or findings from the research. Conclusions are usually conclusive. Conversely, this book is intended as a stopping off point on an ongoing journey. If it ends untidily and fails to draw everything together into a satisfying statement of its achievements, then all the better. My real hope is that others will consider taking up the concept of performance fieldwork and reinventing it for their own purposes. The examples in this collection will hopefully offer some inspiration, and the model above may suggest some things to look for or strive towards. Ultimately, this book is a call for a new way of working in the field and a context for the expansion and reimagination of the performing art of fieldwork.

References Billinghurst, H., & Smith, P. (2020). The Pattern. Triarchy Press. Büscher, B. (2021). The Nonhuman Turn: Critical Reflections on Alienation, Entanglement and Nature Under Capitalism. Dialogues in Human Geography, 12(1), 54–73. Cosgrove, D., & Daniels, S. (1989). Fieldwork as Theatre: A week's Performance in Venice and its Region. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 13(2), 169–182. Bawaka Country, Suchet-Pearson, S., Wright, S., Lloyd, K., Tofa, M., Sweeney, J., et al. (2019). Goŋ Gurtha: Enacting Response-abilities as Situated Co-becoming. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(4), 682–702. Despret, V. (2004). The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-Genesis. Body & Society, 10(2-3), 111–134. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hawkins, H. (2013). For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. Routledge. Hawkins, H. (2021). Geography, Art, Research: Artistic Research in the GeoHumanities. Routledge. Heddon, D. (2016). Confounding Ecospectations: Disappointment and Hope in the Forest. Green Letters, 20(3), 324–339.

1

 Or Anti-conclusion, after Kershaw et al. (2011).

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Hernández, K., Rubis, J.  M., Theriault, N., Todd, Z., Mitchell, A., Bawaka Country et  al. (2021). The Creatures Collective: Manifestings. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(3), 838–863. Hopfinger, S., & Bissell, L. (2022). Performance Research and Pedagogy: Inviting in the Unknown. Media Practice and Education, 1–18. Ingold, T. (2020). Correspondences. Polity. Kershaw, B. (2016). Projecting Climate Scenarios, Landscaping Nature, and Knowing Performance: On Becoming Performed by Ecology. Green Letters, 20(3), 270–289. Kershaw, B., Miller, L., Whalley, J.  B., Lee, R., Pollard, N., & Nicholson, H. (2011). Practice as Research: Transdisciplinary Innovation in Action. In B.  Kershaw & H.  Nicholson (Eds.), Research Methods in Theatre and Performance (pp. 63–85). Edinburgh University Press. Kershaw, B., & Nicholson, H. (2011). Research Methods in Theatre and Performance. Edinburgh University Press. Kester, G. (2013). Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. University of California Press. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. SAGE Publications. Modeen, M., & Biggs, I. (2021). Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies. Routledge. Overend, D. (2015). Dramaturgies of Mobility: On the Road with Rob Drummond’s Bullet Catch. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 35(1), 36–51. Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. A. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press. Tsing, A.  L., Mathews, A.  S., & Bubandt, N. (2019). Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20. Current Anthropology, 60(S20), S186–S197. Tynan, L. (2021). What is Relationality? Indigenous Knowledges, Practices and Responsibilities with Kin. Cultural Geographies, 28(4), 597–610.

Index1

A Accessibility, 17, 69, 75, 81, 85, 87, 126 Actants, 138, 182, 183 Acting, 76, 77, 81 as signpost, 76 Aesthetic collectives, 95, 98, 103 Agency, 5, 55, 98, 111, 126, 135, 137, 139, 148, 150, 156, 160, 169, 180 Agriculture, 32, 35, 39–41, 46–48 Air travel, 116, 117, 134–141 aeroplanes, 136 airports, 116, 136, 140 ghost flights, 127 Alloway, Ayrshire, 61–87 Antagonism, 96, 97, 106–110 Anthropause, 118, 119, 167 Anthropocene, 4, 6, 21, 33, 42, 45, 55, 127, 148–150, 155, 156, 167, 170–172 patchy, 4, 24, 36, 45, 56, 120, 178

Anthropocentrism, 135, 141, 164 Anthropogenic, 3, 24, 36, 38, 178 Anthropology, 15 Anthropomorphism, 54 Arches, the, 91–111 Archives, 83, 134 Art, 19, 21, 95, 183 fieldwork as, 2, 10, 25 geography collaboration, 12, 151, 158 science collaboration, 5, 148 Art collaboration, see Art Arthur, Janet, see Parker, Frances Artistic research, 8, 18, 19, 37, 132, 158, 178 Artistic residencies, 11, 92, 94 Assemblage, 5, 32, 35, 37, 51, 123, 141, 147, 153–155, 161, 164, 177, 182, 183 Audiences, 43, 68, 69, 76, 78, 82, 85, 94, 95, 98, 100, 103, 104, 108, 111 mobile, 67, 81

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Overend, Performance in the Field, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21425-7

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INDEX

Australia, 55, 156 Authorised heritage discourse, 75 Autobiography, 45, 134 Autoethnography, see Ethnography Autotopography, 45 B Bamff Estate, Perthshire, 31–57 Ramsay family, 31, 31n1, 32, 40, 45, 47, 50 Bawaka Country, 20, 55, 156, 160, 178, 181, 182 Beavers, 31–57 castor canadensis, 38n3 costumes, 43 culling, 47 dams, 41 ecosystem engineers, 38 keystone species, 38 reintroduction, 38 Bianchi, Victoria, 62, 77, 79, 83 Billinghurst, Helen, 161, 163, 164 Bio-abundance, 52 Biodiversity, 35, 40 Bissell, Laura, 36, 51, 116, 117, 124, 125, 128–132, 139, 168 Boundaries, 38, 39, 44, 46, 47, 93, 96, 106, 122 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 92, 95–97, 100, 110 Brecht, Bertolt, 69, 81 Broughton, Annaliese, 68, 76, 78 Burns Cottage, see Robert Burns, Birthplace Museum C Camouflage, 76 Cars, 99, 100 Cartography, see Mapping CauseWay: The Story of the Alloway Suffragettes, 63, 67–69, 74, 77, 79, 83, 85, 86

Caves, 158, 164 Characters, 76–82, 101 Cities, 150, 151, 153 Climate change, 147, 156, 171 Clubbing, 91–111 as performative, 102–106 Co-authored, 8, 160, 164, 182 Co-becoming, 20, 177–183 Co-existence, 5, 22, 48, 151, 164 Collaboration, 5, 7, 8, 18, 32, 33, 40, 41, 43, 48, 49, 54, 92, 99, 124, 132, 148, 153, 158, 160, 179, 182, 183 Colonisation/colonialism, 20, 41, 43 Community, 11, 38n3, 56, 96, 98, 104, 129, 133, 136, 182 of action, 8 Commuting, 115–142 super-commuting, 115 Conservation, 34, 39, 47 Conviviality, 102 Cosgrove, Denis, 1, 178 Costumes, 43, 44, 78, 103 Counter-tourism, 72, 84 COVID-19, 117–124, 127, 133, 142, 167, 178 working from home, 119 Creative adventures, 121, 123–125, 132 Creative responses, 181 Cycling, 63, 65, 68, 77, 101, 126 feminist, 78 Pashley bicycles, 78 performance, 81 D Dance, 103 Daniels, Stephen, 1, 178 Dead time, 120, 121 Death Disco, 91–111 Debord, Guy, 150 Decentring, 20, 178 Deep maps, 12, 45, 49, 118, 129

 INDEX 

Deep time, 21, 52, 140, 147–172 Deep Time and Future Pasts at Gully Cave, 149, 160 Democracy, 96 Dérive, 150 Detritus, 52 Devising, 40 Disability, 17, 69, 75, 122, 123, 127, 133 Discipline, 7–10, 23 Discomfort, 44 Disentanglement, 183 Displacement, 139 Documentation, 11, 66, 74, 134, 152, 160 Drama, 1, 2, 8, 79 Drawing, 129, 159, 164, 166 Drifts, 150–154 Driving, 115, 124 E Ebbor Gorge, Somerset, 18, 147–172 Ecognosis, 7, 22 Ecology, 31–57 Ecosystems, 35, 38, 41, 48 Ecotones, 35, 42, 46–48, 52, 54, 55 Ecstatic, 104 Edge effects, 35, 40 Edges, 33–37, 41, 82, 94, 96 Embodied, 2, 7, 22, 37, 43, 51, 63, 73, 98, 126, 128, 129, 137, 156 Enchantment, 6, 52, 54 Encounter, 2–4, 6, 22, 23, 33, 43, 44, 49, 50, 57, 69, 80, 82, 84, 95, 101, 111, 119, 122, 126, 141, 148, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158, 162–164, 170, 172, 177–183 Entanglement, 5, 33, 37, 48, 160, 178, 182 Environment, 4, 6, 11, 19, 35, 63, 64, 75, 76, 85, 86, 95–97, 101–103,

189

126, 127, 138, 139, 149, 150, 153, 162, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183 beaverlands, 42 clubbing, 105 cultural, 71 definition of, 3 Environmental humanities, 16 Environmentalism, 17 Epic theatre, see Brecht, Bertolt Ethics, 7, 9, 14, 19, 21, 100, 128, 179 Ethnography, 16 auto, 123, 134, 141 Exchange, 139 Experiments, 5, 12, 17, 18, 80, 86, 99, 117, 125, 133, 139, 149, 160, 177 wild, 18 Extinction, 141, 171, 172 F Failure, 53, 183 Feminism, 62 Feral Atlas, 5, 24, 37, 45 Feral effects, 24, 37, 38 Ferries, 117, 124, 128–132 Caledonian MacBrayne, 129 Waverley Ferry, 128 Field sites, 31, 61, 70, 91, 115, 147 bounded, 16, 80 as found space, 18 Film, 43, 149, 150, 164, 166, 168–170 Flexible characterisation, 77 Flying, see Air travel Fossil fuels, 155 Fossiliferous, 154 Fossils, 147–151, 153–155, 157, 161, 162, 164, 166–169, 172 digital, 160 Future fossils, 141, 148, 164–167 Future pasts, 147–172

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INDEX

G Gast, Christy, 43 Gender, 63 androcentrism, 67, 70, 122 in heritage, 70 Geography, 1, 10, 150 cultural, 3, 7 human, 3, 12 Geohumanities, 178 Gifts, 49, 141 Glasgow Central Station, 91 Global warming, 127 Granular, 3, 4, 24, 34 Green capitalism, 41 Guided tours, 75 misguided tours, 77 Gully Cave, 18, 147–172 H Hawkins, Harriet, 18, 158, 162 Heritage, 61–87 performance of, 70–73 Herstory, 63 Heterochronies, 159, 172 Heterotopias, 159, 171 Hetherington, Lewis, 48 Holey space, 157 Holoents, 37, 160 Hyenas, 160, 167 Hyperobjects, 4, 164, 171 I Immersion, 6, 54 Immobility, 81–85, 119 Impersonation, 80 Improvisation, 75, 164 Inaccessibility, 53 Incarceration, 83 Indigenous, 42, 55, 152, 156, 160, 162, 178 Māori, 20 Métis, 54

Potawatomi, 152 Selk’nam, 38n3 trawlwulwuy, 19 Tulalip, 38n3 Yolŋu, 20, 157, 162 Interdisciplinarity, 7, 9, 23, 153 Intersectionality, 72, 97 Intervention, 62, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 128, 177–183 Invasive species, 48 Irony, 80, 85 J Journeys, 115–142 K Kershaw, Baz, 21 Kinship, 42 Knepp Castle Estate, West Sussex, 32, 39, 164 L Laboratories, 12, 18 Land management, 47 Landscape, 2, 4, 11, 24, 35, 45, 61, 71, 73, 78, 86, 123, 124, 126, 128, 139, 147–149, 152, 159–164, 166, 169–172, 177–179, 183 cultural representations of, 1 definition of, 3 Less-than-human, 179 Liminality, 70 Listening, 162, 163, 180 Little Fire, see McGeechan, Jamie London, 150, 153 fossils, 150 Thames, 151 Trafalgar Square, 151 Lorimer, Jamie, 32, 36, 50, 53, 148, 150, 151, 172

 INDEX 

M Mapping, 23–25, 45–50, 129 Marambio, Camila, 43 Materialism, 135, 148, 156, 158, 161, 166, 168, 170 vibrant matter, 137–141, 160, 169 McGeechan, Jamie, 68, 78, 81 Mendips, the, 154, 157–158, 167 Micro, 136, 142 -mammals, 154 -politics, 98, 109, 122, 125 -utopias, 96, 97 -worlds, 152, 169 Midland Street, 93, 99–102 Mimesis, 44, 77 Mobility, 16, 100, 115–142, 167 justice, 128 mobile methods, 16 paradigm, 120 performing, 73–81 revaluation, 117, 120 Molar, 123, 125 Molecular, 119, 123, 125 Moorhead, Ethel, 64, 77, 79, 83 More-than-human, 3, 4, 21, 32, 33, 35, 37, 42, 43, 126, 135, 139, 148, 150–152, 156, 162, 164, 167, 168, 178–182 More-than-life, 20 Motorways, 64, 115, 124, 125 Music, 102 Mythogeography, 12, 67, 132, 155, 169 N National Trust for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 147 for Scotland, 71 Neanderthals, 153 Network capital, 116, 119, 123, 133, 159

191

Nomadism, 123, 124, 133 as myth, 123 nomadology, 125 shifts, 122 subjects, 122 Non-human, 3, 20, 42, 44, 55, 138, 141, 160, 178 Non-representational theory, 10 North America, 38n3, 41, 43 O Object oriented ontology, 138, 169 Objects, 134–141 performance of, 138 Oceanic, 104 Ogden, Laura A., 36 O’Neill, Rachel, 128–132 Overwhelming, 162, 168, 169 P Palaeo -ecological, 147, 150, 155, 161 -ontological, 154 Palaeolithic, 147 Pandemic, see COVID-19 Parker, Frances, 64, 77, 79, 83 Parrott, Flora, 18, 158, 162 Participation, 11, 43, 54, 95, 104, 111, 132 Patchy, 33, 35, 42, 45, 55 performance, 31–57 Pathologisation, 118, 120, 127 Patriarchy, see Gender Pearson, Mike, 12 Performance portals, 150, 172 Performance studies, 2, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 23 Peripheral, 70, 74 Plastic, 148, 155, 156 Pleistocene, 148 Poetry, 48, 149, 163 haiku, 51

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INDEX

Portals, 148, 150, 157, 167, 172 Positionality, 15, 17 Postcards, 128–132 Pterodactyls, 135, 141 Q Quaternary, 140, 151, 164, 171 drifts, 150 Queer, 43, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105 R Race, 73 Realism, 80 Reflexivity, 5, 14, 54, 78 acting in quotation marks, 77 Reid, Pamela, 68, 76, 78 Relational, 3, 6, 9, 24, 42, 98, 123, 127, 140, 156, 178 journeys, 117 performance, 91–111 space, 71, 92, 93, 181 Relational aesthetics, 82, 92, 95, 96, 104, 106 Representation, 1, 45, 104 Resistance, 98, 108, 116, 124 Rewilding, 32, 39, 40, 47, 48 private land, 40 Roads, 64, 65, 100, 116, 124–133, 139 Robert Burns, 82 Birthplace Museum, 61–87 S Schreve, Danielle, 147–172 Science studies, 12 Sculpture, 49 Sedentarism, 72, 73, 120 Sensing, 50–56 Silver birch, 140

Site-specific performance, 11, 13, 14 Situationists, 150 Smith, Phil, 72, 161, 170 Smooth space, 46, 124, 125, 133 Socio-spatial dialectic, 105, 110 Song, 68, 81 Spectatorship, 103 Stochastic, 41, 42, 46, 47, 52 Striated space, 46, 124, 125 Subcultures, 94, 98 subcultural autonomy, 108 Subterranean, 148, 149, 154, 158, 169, 171, 172 Suffragettes, 61–87 amnesty, 84 Surrealism, 164 Swimming, 50–56, 125, 126 Sympoietic, 42 T Temporalities, 52, 81, 140, 147–172 alternative, 156 countertemporalities, 156, 157 Theatre, 1, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 35, 42, 52, 78, 80, 86, 101, 107, 179 eco-, 35, 41 as fieldwork, 75 laboratory, 8 mobile, 62 pantomime, 43 promenade, 80 studies, 2, 10 Theatricality, 99, 100 Thing-power, 135, 169 Tierra del Fuego, 38n3, 43 Topography, 46 Tourism, 76, 147, 154 Traces, 52, 183 Train travel, 119, 124 Trans, 42 -species, 42–44

 INDEX 

Transdisciplinarity, 5, 8, 9, 22, 23, 121, 177, 179 Transgression, 43, 45, 122–123 Transparency, 76 Travel, see Commuting Trespassing, 122 U Uncanny, 21, 23, 159, 160 Underground, see Subterranean Unknown, 17, 18, 21–24, 41, 178, 179, 183 Unpredictable, 2, 36, 37, 40–42, 56, 100, 179 Urban wandering, 150

193

V Value, 124 Vibrant space, 73 Voids, 22, 157 W Walking, 21, 45–50, 77, 122, 124–126 Weird, 21–23, 163 Wild, 6 epistemology, 18 Wild performatives, 50 Wookey Hole, Somerset, 147–172 Witch of Wookey, 154 Wrights & Sites, 77 Writing, 51, 55, 129, 150, 159, 163, 166