The politics of place and walking as an arts practice form the core concerns of
my research. The research is being conducted with particular reference to the
ongoing Mis-Guide projects, conceived and produced by the site-specific arts
company, Wrights & Sites, of which I am a member. Our apparent rejection of
performance-making for an audience has led to walking with spectators as
collaborators in the work, and has made the physical journeys and verbal
exchanges along the way an integral part of the practice. Through this work,
which revolves around place, site-specific arts and urban walking, I am
harnessing existing knowledge about cities as spectacle in the footsteps of the
Flaneur, the Dadaist, and the Situationist and in recognition of contemporary
works by artists who use journey and place as the text, reference points and
resources that generate or support their research and practice.
I am exploring a sense that urban spaces and places can offer passages to
utopian, creative and optimistic relationships with the everyday. I am engaged in
a research writing or re-writing of the city activated by wanderings and
explorations that can lead, for example, to an active engagement in issues of
ecology and environmental planning. In the spirit of a walk between places and
ideas I have attempted to structure the writing as if the writer and the reader are
passing though or over different thresholds. We pass through thresholds or
doorways or across boundaries in our physical and mental development but we
also employ such concepts practically and imaginatively in the devising of
performance work. As theatre-makers we could make claim to be leaving the
everyday and entering a dedicated space called a studio where by degrees we
often engage in vocal, physical and mental practices that might appear very
strange and out of place in any other context. The crossing of thresholds and
boundaries is also part of the composition of performance with entrances and
exits, appearance and disappearance, transformations and shape shifting as key
aspects of such work.
Some of these thresholds in this thesis might be regarded as doorways or
obstacles whilst others might verge closer to the ambient hubs noted by poets
and pychogeographers. I see this writing as a means of interrogating and
exploring and developing my own practice towards particular social and
environmental issues
