site / sight <-> source / resource

Below is a list of contributors to the symposium. Scroll down through the page, or click on a names from the list below, to view the abstracts and personal details that were submitted in advance of the symposium.

Site and Photo-Poetic Practice
Åsa Andersson will discuss site-related practice in the context of two photographic/installation works recently made: 'The Anglo-Japanese Park' and 'Sea-Fiction'. What these works have in common is an approach to site that is actual and imaginary, a play between fact and fiction. Site may be an existing location, an activity, or a small found object. The camera functions as a receptacle and co-producer of constructed scenes while the artist acts in front of it using the timer. The final images are layered, theatrical, fragmented, and aim to function as poetic and associative connectors to the viewer's own experience.

After studying printmaking and art history in Sweden, Åsa Andersson completed an MA in Fine Art (1995) and a PhD in Fine Art/Philosophy (1999) at Staffordshire University. Her current practice includes: photography, projections, printmaking and text. She teaches on the BA (Hons) Art & Design course at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Professor Annette Arlander

Performing Landscape: here at that time / there now
"How does one move a 'sited' piece to another 'site'?" A performance created on Harakka Island, off Helsinki, will serve as an example. 'Istun kivellä' ('Sitting on a Rock'), a short audio play, was presented outside on location and in a gallery, combined with video documentations ('Year of the Horse' and 'Day and Night of the Goat'). Later these were transformed into an interdisciplinary live performance ('Sitting on a Rock at Muu') in the city. In these transformations the notion of time in different media had to be considered.

Annette Arlander has been Professor of Performance and Theory at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki since 2001, Doctor of Arts (Theatre and Drama) since 1999, and a theatre director since 1981. She has published 'Esitys tilana' ('Performance as Space') in 1998. Most of her recent work has been site-specific, using video or recorded voice.

www.harakka.fi/arlander

Horses for Courses: a year in the life of George Salter
This paper offers an insight into the work of six artists over the period of a year at George Salter High School in West Bromwich. 'Horses for Courses' aims to consider the tensions between artistic and teaching practices, raising issues of responsibility, disruption, collaboration and critical pedagogy. The school environment has provided a political and challenging playground. To date, the work made has included putting a horse in a classroom, a barking teachers inter-active sound installation, flooding the corridors with dry-ice, hosting a meal for teachers in an inflatable planetarium, and 1000 silver balloons being launched simultaneously into the sky.

Sarah Cole's art practice is multi-media, site-specific and often collaborative. She has made work in a wide range of sites, including two hospitals, a launderette, a lingerie shop and a prison. She is also a Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London.

Performing Space: site-specific projection as strategy for critiquing perceptions of the built environment
This paper documents and comments on the creation of a series of site-specific interventions, using projected digital imagery and sound, for Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA). It has been argued that CCA's recent refurbishment, exposed, weathered stone/brushed steel and glass, sanitises and homogenises its histories. Minty Donald's project explores/uncovers the fragmented and competing narratives inscribed in CCA's fabric, and enacted in its changing uses and functions. Through focusing on small details and restricted time-spans, snapshots of the here-and-now, it considers the 'living' relationships we have with the built environment.

Minty Donald is a practitioner-academic who lectures in the Theatre, Film and TV Studies Department at the University of Glasgow, makes her own work and designs for live performance. She currently holds a residency at CCA, Glasgow and is working as scenographer/digital artist on 'Habitats' by Philippe Minyana for ek performance/Tron Theatre, Glasgow.

Site People
FrenchMottershead will present a microperformance* game. The work will employ interventionist strategies to activate all as performers, encouraging participants to engage with the symposium in a new way. Participants will be asked to question social behaviour, our perceptions of the social networks we create and the roles we play. This living installation will layer on top of the other symposium events, working within the gaps: the waiting, the chatting, the walking, the watching, the eating and drinking and so on.

* Microperformance (noun) small, intimate one-on-one actions, gestures or conversations performed anonymously on an active audience.

FrenchMottershead create microperformances exploring human identity, physicality, interaction, social ritual and the everyday public and private realms in which they are played out. Responding to unconventional sites across the UK and beyond, FrenchMottershead encourage local participation through live art and mixed media to inform and alter an audience's perceptions.

www.frenchmottershead.com

One Square Foot: site as source and resource
This paper discusses 'site' as source and resource within the 'one square foot' project with Echo Arts, Cyprus and Theatre Alibi, UK. In this project performances took place on and around a number of chosen square feet and also in studio spaces, both in Cyprus and in England - and the question of how performance imagery generated in one place, and arguably belonging to, and co-authored by the space itself, might be translated, or transported, into another, became part of our concern.

Dorinda Hulton is a freelance theatre director and part-time Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter. This spring she directed a research project with Foursight Theatre investigating the embodiment of character in Aeschylus’s 'Agamemnon'. Her working methods are outlined in a chapter entitled 'Creative Actor' in 'Theatre Praxis' (ed. Christopher McCullough. Macmillan, 1998).

Site-Specific Dance Performance: the relationship between the site and the creative process
Informed by theories of creativity and creative cognition, this paper draws upon the author's PhD practice-based research by addressing the following questions:
What is the relationship between the site and the creative process?
What are the implications for the choreographer when creating site-specific work?
What types of interactions occur between choreographer and site, how do specific sites influence the creation of movement material, choreographic process, and form?

Victoria Hunter is a Lecturer in Dance at the University Of Leeds, Bretton Hall campus, currently researching a PhD in site-specific choreography. The aim of this research project is to identify the relationship between the site and the creative process focusing on the creation, performance, and reception of site-specific dance work. This will be achieved through a combined exploration of practice and theory, and practice as theory revealing inherent structures and modes of inquiry embedded in the practice itself. The first of three site-specific performances is scheduled for September 2004.

Body/Site: performing material place
"a successful piece of art is like a meeting point where energies go and from which energies depart. It’s a moment of tension between the inside and the outside, in all senses: in the personal sense and in the sense of the space." (Giovanni Anselmo)

This paper will explore performance strategies that question the sense of a differentiation between the performer or viewer's body and the materials of a given site. Focusing on imbrications of sculpture and performance developed through the Italian 'arte povera' movement and in North American Body Art, the paper will focus on strategies that articulate the performing body through a ‘dedifferentiation’ of organic and inorganic processes, of inside and outside, and of material and performance. Taking the artist Robert Morris' notion of a 'dedifferentiation' between sculpture and environment in post-minimal art as a point of departure, the talk will refer to work by Vito Acconci, Giovanni Anselmo, Dennis Oppenheim, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Gilberto Zorio.

Nick Kaye is the new Chair in Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. His publications include 'Postmodernism and Performance' (Palgrave, 1994), 'Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents' (Harwood/Routledge, 1996), 'Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation' (Routledge, 2000) and 'Staging the Post-Avant-Garde: Italian Performance After 1970', co-authored with Gabriella Giannachi (Peter Lang AG, 2002).

www.exeter.ac.uk/performing-presence

Taxi Gallery
This paper will take the form of an interim report on a three-year experiment due to conclude in August 2005. Through Taxi Gallery Kirsten is adopting a curatorial or editorial role in relation to a framework initiated and steered by herself but activated by others. A framework that reaches for an extended (over time) relationship with both local and translocal audiences in response to a broad range of challenging contemporary artworks, approaches and ideas. Taxi Gallery is an extended investigation into the formation of context through reciprocal processes involving multiple participants and a specific site.

Kirsten Lavers is an artist and freelance HE Lecturer. Her practice is rooted in a site/context specific approach and is increasingly involving new media and found/generated texts. Kirsten’s work tends towards collaborative, participatory, curatorial and interactive frameworks sited outside of traditional art spaces/places. Previous projects include a series of 10 site-specific events, 'The Zwillinge Project' (with Melanie Thompson), and an ongoing collaboration with cris cheek under the name TNWK.

www.taxigallery.org.uk

www.kirstenlavers.net

Mourning Walk
"'Mourning Walk' commemorates the life of my father, William Lavery, who died on the hottest day of the year in 1995, by retracing, on foot, the last 15 miles of a car journey he used to make from Cardiff to Oakham (Rutland) in the mid 1980s." In this paper, Carl Lavery will describe his performance of 'Mourning Walk', with excerpts from the piece; explain his methodology of walking; and reflect on the relationship between walking, memory, and what Derrida calls the 'debt of mourning'.

Carl Lavery is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at De Montfort University, Leicester. He has published articles on Genet, Levinas and Bataille, and is a regular contributor to journals. As well as making work, he is currently preparing a book on Genet and performance.

Luna Nera (Hilary Powell)

Responsive Resources
Practice and theory combine as Luna Nera use examples of their 'site-responsive' practices to explore the actuality and concept of 'site' in different contexts. Searching for and researching specific sites combines psychogeography with a form of archaeology uncovering the hidden facts and fictions of the surroundings. The question of site as both source and resource is critical as the group utilise a method of 'playful reconstruction'. Luna Nera will explore a symbiotic/reciprocal relationship of event and site involving playful sampling of history, anecdote and material and the questions of responsibility involved in this use of urban environment as source.

Luna Nera’s projects use object installation, video, sound and performance to interact with chosen sites. These include empty factories in eastern Berlin, a derelict hotel in London and abandoned naval buildings in Russia highlighting our mission to produce spaces of difference and affect in now 'invisible' sites of former cultural or infra-structural significance.

www.kronstadt2004.org

(details unavailable)

Derek McCormack is a Lecturer in Geography at the University of Southampton.

Incongruous Belongings
In this presentation Misha Myers will discuss her recent site-based projects in which she employs superimposition and displacement as strategies to interrogate issues of location of cultural identity and place in the contemporary world. Through these projects she aims to reveal the simultaneous, differential and multiple identities that coexist in contemporary experiences and places of displacement, of being and dwelling in between multiple identities and homes and to raise further questions about how site-specific strategies might locate the multiple narratives of belonging and displacement in particular contexts.

Misha Myers is an internationally recognised performance artist and a Lecturer at Dartington College of Arts. Recent projects include site-specific performance, video and installation in the Spacex Gallery and Relational project 'Homeland' and a DVD published in 'Performance Research'. She has engaged in research and presented her interdisciplinary work world-wide including in Japan, Denmark, Romania and USA.

Taking the Site Inside: a movement-based workshop exploring a site through imagery and the senses
This practical workshop will take place in a nature-rich site on campus. There will be an emphasis on the sensorial experience of the site and on the manifestation of imagery through movement. Participants will discover through a gentle guided meditation and movement improvisation exercises, their own dance, evolving from their own personal experience of the site's organisation and content as they experience it in the moment. Because of the internalisation of the site in a physical way, the site becomes a part of the performers being.

April Nunes is currently a Lecturer in Dance at University of Surrey Roehampton and is undertaking a practice-based PhD in Choreography at Middlesex University. April holds an MA in Dance from LABAN, a BA in Choreography from University of California Irvine and also works as an independent choreographer under the company name Newness Dance.

www.newnessdance.org.uk

There's someone in the house (Commissioned Work)

'There's someone in the house' is the latest in a series of multi-site performances created by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes - including 'Carrying Lyn' (2001), 'Polis' (2001) and 'Metroplitan Motions' (2002) - that employ simple technologies to bring other times and places to a given location. As a stream of material is constantly returned to a room rendered porous so a picture is built of events that happened 'just there', 'just now' but that appear to be getting closer. The work challenges notions of site as a singularly entity, of documentation as a post-event phenomenon and of co-presence as a definition of performance.

Mike Pearson is Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. He was a director of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (1973-80) and Brith Gof (1980-97). Mike Brookes is an independent artist and theatre maker. He established the degree scheme in Scenographic Studies in University of Wales Aberystwyth and has designed most recently for Quarantine and Victoria.

www.mikebrookes.com/ambivalence/pearsonbrookes/

Subliminal States of Occupation
Sarah Pell is developing an underwater practice as research in performance programme to investigate various conceptual and technological sites of neutral buoyancy, immersion and saturation. 'Subliminal states of occupation' reflects the corporeal/environmental/technological territories proposed by 'Aquabatics as new works of live art' - Pell, ARTi Aquabatics Research Team (AUS), through a three part absent performance presence. Aquabatic Territories propose arresting opportunities for both the 'philobat and oscophil' (Michael Balint, 1957) of the aquanaut to transcend traditional boundaries and expectations to make new works of live art in a space of 'apparent' weightlessness: a site that is indeed both an alien frontier, and a familiar embrace.

Sarah Jane Pell (Australia) is a fully qualified commercial diver and live artist. Pell is Principal Aquanaut for the Aquabatics Research Team initiative (ARTi); PhD Visual Arts Research Student, School of Contemporary Arts, Edith Cowan University; and LifeBoat Crew member ISEA2004.

myprofile.cos.com/spellart

Under the Wallpaper
How imagined traces of the past and remnants of memory embedded in architecture, contributed to Corridor's site-specific performances in empty hotels, schools and hospitals.

Geraldine Pilgrim is Artistic Director of Corridor site-specific performance company. Performances include 'Hotel' at the Midland Grand Hotel on Morecambe Bay, 'Dreamwork3' at St Pancras Chambers and 'Spa' at the empty Elizabeth Garret Anderson Hospital. Trained as a fine artist, she co-founded Hesitate and Demonstrate visual theatre company which toured Britain and mainland Europe till the mid 80s. Director/designer and installation artist, she is also a Visiting Lecturer in Performance at Wimbledon School of Art and Goldsmith's College.

Bodies on Site: the tip of the iceberg
An experiential exploration of the interaction between body and site. How is the way we receive/perceive and respond to a site mediated through the physicality of the body in movement and in stillness? This workshop will begin to explore the reciprocal relationship between body and site, how our embodied presence inhabits a site, how the site affects us physically and the potential for movement it elicits, and how our presence affects the site. Wear clothes that allow freedom of movement and which you don't mind getting dirty and trainers or equivalent.

A movement artist specialising in a kinaesthetic approach to site-specific performance, Helen has directed and performed in site-specific works and cross art-form collaborations in England and Australia. Co-author of 'Anna Halprin' (publication due in October) she trained with Anna Halprin and Suprapto Suryodramo from Java. Helen is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Plymouth.

Stacked Wonky Dance Company

It Certainly Doesn't Belong to Us
This is a rapid, unreflective, playful workshop, totally unsuitable for those who want to dance but right for those who are unsure or find themselves jigging in ordinary, inappropriate places, such as supermarket aisles. A micro-workshop requires a micro-subject. This workshop poses the question 'who does the site belong to in a site-specific workshop?'. Taking on an unfamilar site, Stacked Wonky provide a self-conscious, hour-long work-out/crash-course in what it means to own a site - as a workshop participant, workshop leader or symposium-goer - and how, with a little bit of dancing, something beautifully unexpected can result.

Stacked Wonky is a vibrant, idiosyncratic contemporary dance company that likes to make work in unusual places with people not commonly associated with dance. It has recently come up with ingenious devices for a large London law firm, Purves & Purves furniture shop and St Parish Parish Church, King's Cross.

www.stackedwonky.co.uk

Sleepwalks (Commissioned Work)
I wished to create a performance work with an intense specificity in the relationship between performer, audience and site, that would be nevertheless also a dis-placement, a turning outside-in. The original dreamers perform and site their own dreams; the dream experience is then inversed, so that the audience, attending alone, becomes the new dreamer of the same dream, in the kind of subject-shift familiar from dreams. The dreams will be recreated in the specific dreamt sites, the waking place that had entered the dream receiving the dream's counter-impression. The work will explore further shifts between lived and told, an art of rumour and re-seeing, dialectic slippages in point-of-view.

Fiona Templeton is a director, performer and poet whose work explores site, audience relationship and language. Co-founder of the Theatre of Mistakes in the 70s, she works in New York and Europe and has held numerous fellowships and awards. Her 'YOU-The City' (1988) was "an intimate citywide play for an audience of one". She was commissioned to create a new urban work for the opening of Lille Cultural Capital 2004. Her books range across theatre and poetry. She is working on 'The Medead', a performance epic.

www.fionatempleton.org

A Reflexive Dialogue with 'Site'
What strategies need to be put in place to develop a 'conversation' which is creative and useful for the artist and the site and the context it is sited in? This workshop will look at a very specific moment, a moment of reflection that needs to occur before the work commences with a site, where certain questions need to be asked. It will be based around these strategies, contextualising them within each participants own experience and the workshop leaders practice. It will be a practical workshop responding to a specific site, a hands on encounter with the place/space.

Melanie Thompson has been working as an artist and pedagogue within the field of site-specific practice for the last 25 years, here and abroad. She is currently writing a PhD dealing with the act of negotiation referring to her present practice as a performer and creator of installations.

On Marking Time: Tacita Dean's 'Fernsehturm'
After reunification Heiner Müller declared that the Berlin Wall had been a temporal barrier, "a time-wall between two speeds: acceleration in the West; deceleration in the East". Time reduced or movement accelerated, it’s a difference which emphasises the contingent nature of seeing, and it seems to have intrigued the British artist Tacita Dean when she made her 16mm colour film about the former eastern TV tower entitled simply 'Fernsehturm' (2001). Addressing the question of the gap between 'authoring' and 'revealing' site, the paper will consider the way the artist explores constructions of time via the play of light in space, leading to a form of both seeing the city and the city seeing itself.

Nicolas Whybrow lectures in the School of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick University. His book 'Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin' (Intellect Books) will appear in 2004. He is currently researching for a book on public art works and the European city.

Off Site: responsive and resistant spaces
Often in contemporary performance practice and writing the term 'site' is used to imply a particular critical position, performance legacy or set of spatial problematics. But we're also usually talking about a named geographical/architectural space: city square; former hospital; forest. This paper enquires into what might be at stake when we organize our response to questions of performance site into named categories: urban/rural; Pearson & Shanks' landscape/cityscape; David Wiles' recent 'sacred space', 'processional space', 'public space', and so on. And in between, are there spaces with which site-based work does not, or cannot, engage?

Fiona Wilkie is a Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Surrey Roehampton. Her research focuses on questions of space and place in contemporary performance, and in particular on the ways in which site-specific performance negotiates a relationship to spatial audiences, spatial texts and cultural meanings.

Anywhere: theories and practices at play in the current work of Wrights & Sites
Wrights & Sites, together with visual artist Tony Weaver, will reflect on the 'Mis-Guide' project: the traditions and vocabularies that have conceptually defined walking as an intervention, and the group's development of a broader vocabulary of walking in the making of 'An Exeter Mis-Guide'. This paper will address the potential for the urban walker adopting role, the nature of boundary and identity in crossing thresholds and gaining access, and the use of 'algorithms' and 'catapults' for disrupting habitual patterns of travel through the city. It will move on to consider inter-urban possibilities in the context of its present work, 'A Mis-Guide to Anywhere'.

Wrights & Sites are four performance-trained, reflective practitioners (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Dr Cathy Turner) who have been producing site-specific performances, walking projects and other art works since their formation in 1997. They lecture at the University of Exeter, Dartington College of Arts and University College Winchester.

www.mis-guide.com/ws.html

Symposium Organisers

Stephen Hodge
Stephen Hodge is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter and a core member of the artist-researcher group, Wrights & Sites. His primary research, practice and teaching are all concerned with place-based performance and performative practices, with a particular focus on walking, landscape and the city.

Dr Dee Heddon
Dee Heddon is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter. Her primary research on autobiographical performance includes exploring the relationships between autobiography and site ('autotopography'). In 2002, Dee attempted to 'become' Mike Pearson, or at least to follow in his footsteps (Performance Research Volume 7, No. 4). Dee was also a performance collaborator in 'One Square Foot' (Exeter, 2003).

Les Read
Leslie du S. Read, a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter, is currently completing work on ancient Greek and Roman theatres, as well as researching aspects of early modernism in relation to visual arts and motion. His research centres on seeing/doing relationships and recent productions include 'The Waste Land' and 'Bacchae'.