Deirdre Heddon

Environmentalism, Performance and Applications: Uncertainties and Emancipations.

This introductory article for a themed edition on environmentalism provides a particular context for those articles that follow, each of which engages with different aspects of environmentalism and performance in community-related settings. Responding to the proposition of Bottoms that there is a lacuna in the field of applied drama and environmentalism, we suggest that the more significant lack is that of ecocriticism. As the articles in this journal testify, there are many examples of applied theatre practice; what is required is sustained and rigorous critical engagement. It is to the gap of ecocriticism that we address this issue, signalling what we hope is the emergence of a critical field. One response to the multiple challenges of climate change is to more transparently locate the human animal within the environment, as one agent amongst many. Here, we seek to transparently locate the critic, intertwining the personal – ourselves, human actants – with global environmental concerns. This tactic mirrors much contemporary writing on climate change and its education, privileging personal engagement – a shift we interrogate as much as we perform. The key trope we anchor is that of uncertainty: the uncertainties that accompany stepping into a new research environment; the uncertainties arising from multiple relations (human and non-human); the uncertainties of scientific fact; the uncertainties of forecasting the future; and the uncertainties of outcomes – including those of performance practices. Having analysed a particular turn in environmental education (towards social learning) and the failure to successfully combine ‘art and reality’ in recent UK mainstream theatre events, such uncertainties lead to our suggestion for an ‘emancipated’ environmentalism. In support of this proposal, we offer up a reflection on a key weekend of performance practice that brought us to attend to the small – but not insignificant – and to consider first hand the complex relationships between environmental ‘grand narratives’ and personal experiential encounters. Locating ourselves within the field and mapping out some of the many conceptual challenges attached to it serves to introduce the territories which the following journal articles expand upon.

Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility

Narratives attached to walking practices, influenced by the Romantic, Naturalist and avant-garde movements, continue to frame and prioritise aestheticised acts of walking as heroic, epic, individualist, and conquering. This reiteration of dominant knowledge risks obscuring certain types of walking and other ways to think about and recognise walking art’s potentialities. Encountering work by contemporary women artists and interviewing them about their motivations and experiences suggests the need for a radical mobilization of the rhetorics of scale, a task we begin here. The walking art works we introduce propose a destabilisation of values, unsettling familiar analytical and interpretative approaches: the local is magnified to the scale of the epic; the epic is one small step after another; the familiar is a site of risk; and walking a means for building relations rather than escaping them. Whilst assumptions about who walks, in what way and with what value are confronted, so too is the nature of the task in hand, as the walking body remains entangled in monumental historical and social structures, including the spatial.

Come Closer: Confessions of Intimate Spectators in One to One Performance

‘One to One’, ‘One on One’ or ‘Audience of One’ are all terms used to describe performances that invite one audience member to experience the piece on their own. In practical terms, the spectator books a performance slot during which they alone encounter the work. This formal shift in the traditional performer/spectator divide can, quite radically, reallocate the audience’s role into one that receives, responds and, to varying degrees restores their part in the shared performance experience. In place of the metaphorical or imaginary dialogism that pertains to all acts of theatre (the spectator is always in some sort of relationship with what is seen), in One to One performance the spectator is actively solicited, engendered as a participant. Demanding a more explicit and overt relational exchange, performers Adrian Howells, Sam Rose and Martina Von Holn are part of a wider group of UK-based Live Art and performance practitioners including Kira O’Reilly, Franko B and Oreet Ashery who have been drawn to utilising the form in their practices. In the last few years, early-career Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 22(1), 2012, 120 – 133

Walking Women: Interviews with artists on the move

Writing of the limitations placed on women’s walking, Rebecca Solnit comments that, ‘Women from Jane Austen to Sylvia Plath have found other, narrower subjects for their art’ (2001: 245). Solnit does cite some exceptions – Virginia Wolf, Sophie Calle, Marina Abramovic, Mona Hatoum, Patricia Johanson, Ingrid Pollard. But the history of walking art woven through her book is inevitably dominated by the better-known names of male artists: Charles Baudelaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Guy Debord, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton. If there have always been some women who walked (and whose art reflected this), Solnit suggests that ‘many more must have been silenced altogether’ (2001: 245). In Chapter 3 of her book Autobiography and Performance, Deirdre Heddon turned her attention to ‘site-specific’ performances that used sites familiar to the performers. Exploring the relationship between identity and place, she recognized both notions as contingent, in process, continuously becoming – and, as she argued, interdependent. She wrote:

Stories from the Walking Library

From August 17 to September 17, 2012, Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers created and carried a Walking Library, made for the Sideways Arts Festival. Sideways, an art festival ‘in the open’ and ‘on the go’, aimed to connect ecology and culture through using the ‘slow ways’ or ‘slow paths’ of Flanders. The Walking Library was comprised of more than 90 books suggested as books ‘good to take for a walk’ and functioned as a mobile library for Sideways’ artists and public participants. In addition to carrying a curated stock, the Library offered a peripatetic reading and writing group. Drawing on the Library’s resources and the experience of reading, writing and walking one’s way across Belgium, Heddon and Myers consider how reading in situ affects the experience of the journey and the experience of walking; how journeying affects the experience of reading; how reading affects the experience of writing; and how a walk, as a space of knowledge production, is written and read.

Histories and practices of live art

Introduction: Writing Histories and Practices of Live Art D.Heddon Developing Live Art J.Klein The Time of Live Art B.Hoffman Art, Meeting and Encounter: The Art of Action in Great Britain R.Hunter & J.B.Hunter Site: Between Ground and Groundlessness S.Hodge & C.Turner Intimacy and Risk in Live Art D.Johnson All Together Now: Performance and Collaboration C.Macdonald The Politics of Live Art D.Heddon Bibliography Index

‘Glory Box’: Tim Miller's Autobiography of the Future

Performance artist Tim Miller has been making autobiographical work for more than twenty years. Dee Heddon explores Millers recent show, Glory Box (2001), arguing that, both in his practice and his use of his own life stories, he is attempting not only to connect with but to energize his audiences, transforming them into activist spectators. One tactic Miller employs in Glory Box is futurity – performing an autobiography that he has not yet lived. This future is one that Miller compels us collectively to rewrite, inviting us to change his potential life and life-story in the process. Dee Heddon argues that Millers commitment to and faith in the transformative potential of live performance enacts a resistance to those pejorative terms too easily thrown at autobiographical performance: Miller may work from his ‘self’, but his work is far from solipsistic, egotistic, or narcissistic. Dee Heddon makes and teaches autobiographical performance, and her writing has appeared in Performance Research, Studies in Theatre Production, Research in Drama Education, Reconstructions , and M/C . Her Devising Performances: Histories and Practices , co-authored with Jane Milling, is forthcoming from Palgrave.

The Walking Library: Mobilizing books, places, readers and reading

The Walking Library, inaugurated in 2012, has functioned as a mobile laboratory and art project for the ongoing exploration of the relationships between environments, books, reading and writing. In this essay, our focus turns to The Walking Library’s function as a library, asking: ‘What sort of library is a walking library? What does a walking library do—for its books and its borrowers and the places through which it moves? And what can it reveal or teach us about libraries, books, reading and environment?’ In a context in which data has become ‘mobile’, we explore the mobility of physical books through the Walking Library’s social and architextural designs and structures. The book on the move is recognised as the material of social bonding. The Walking Library depends upon and promotes the mobility of books through social networks by gifting, lending, borrowing and sharing; it is the social capacity—the social capital—of The Walking Library, and of walking and reading together, which concerns us most here. The Walking Library has offered temporary spaces for sociality, for shared contemplation, poetic spatiality and kinaesthetic comprehension. In doing so, it has generated a heightened sense of books’ sociability, spatiality and mobility through a stronger understanding of the inter-dependencies of reading, walking, time and place.

Confounding ecospectations: disappointment and hope in the forest

ABSTRACT The task of this essay is to stage an encounter with disappointment. Though the ‘affective turn’ is manifest across many disciplines, there has been little reckoning with disappointment as a particular affect. In the overlapping contexts of environmental catastrophe and environmentally or ecologically oriented performance – where the global challenges are immense, solutions impossible, but action vital – disappointment is inevitable. It seems imperative that we begin to think through disappointment’s affective registers in order to understand where disappointment comes from and what it does. What sort of affect, or force, is disappointment? How does it work and what work does it do? Where does it go and what does it take with it? I argue that disappointment remains vital to hope. If disappointment is figured as the space created between expectation and disconfirmation, then that space in between is the necessary place of hope’s reappearance.

Adapting to the future: vulnerable bodies, resilient practices

In this chapter, we are concerned with the contribution of arts-based approaches to support participation in service of a fairer society. As illustration, we offer an account of the Walking Interconnections: Researching the Lived Experience of Disabled People for a Sustainable Society project and the interventions that the project and its outcomes have staged not only in environmental discourse and debate about inclusive public space, but also in representations of walking practices. We start by describing and contextualising the Walking Interconnections project, before going on to consider the arts based approaches used within the project and the research findings they enabled. Walking Interconnections brought disabled people and sustainability practitioners together to share walking encounters in public places. Through mapping, talking, walking and reflecting together they entered each other’s life-world’s. Their experiences are caught in photographs, maps and Going for a Walk, a verbatim play crafted by Deirdre Heddon from the recorded conversations of the walkers. Throughout the chapter, we include co-researchers’ voices using excerpts from Going for a Walk.