Performances

Site specific and outdoor sensing, contemporary ritual and ceremony, movement work and performance are foundational aspects of my practice and tend to feature in most projects. This page shares a few examples from the last 20+ years from street performance to remote rural locations to performance activism. See CV for full details

Assembly of River Beings A creative exploration of how we might give voice to and speak on behalf of the species of the river Exe, leading towards the shaping a new rights-based River Covenant for the Exe. Devised with Lucy Neal (writer) and Friends of the River Exe, Shelley Castle, Ione Maria Rojas and Ruth Webb (artists) Paul Powlesland (Lawyers for Nature), Neil Williams (environmental philosopher) Devon Wildlife Trust and hosted by Artweek Exeter. See Tidelines blog for more details

Skep performances and Salmon Invocation with Jo Salter at Natural England, National Donut Economics conference, Exe Estuary Management Partnership meeting.

Overwintering with Emma Welton (musician and composer) & Sarah Owen (singer) and participants. Indoors and outdoors at dusk in The Exe estuary. Sound, listening, song, movement and stillness. Learning and sharing our creative responses to spending January and Februrary 2024 alongside the estuary’s wild inhabitants. See Tidelines for more details

Nightjar commissioned by Thelma Hulbert Gallery for Art on the East Devon Way in 2018. Public workshop field sensing and listening to nightjars. A collaboration with Tony Whitehead. Included limited edition hand screen printed handkerchiefs on organic cotton. A further iteration of Nightjar as a performance took place at Walking Forest Dartmoor camp, Moor Barton in 2022.

Running with Trees explores the intimate relationship between breath, trees, carbon dioxide & climate change starting from our own breath. Scripted with Dr Tom Powell, Earth System Scientist, Exeter University. Runs have taken place in Riverside Valley Park, Exeter as part of the FLOW project; at the Timber Festival in 2019, National Forest and at University of Exeter’s James Lovelock Centenary Conference 2019.

Field Sensing + participatory sessions. Field Sensing is an extreme slow-walking practice that amplifies awareness of an inner and outer landscapes. It offers a framework for experiencing time and place in a different way. Field Sensing has evolved from my experience of Butoh dance training and has links to meditation and tracking practices.  The phrase was coined by Buddhist writer and poet Gary Snyder to refer to the perception of land as a ‘resonant landscape’ by Paleolithic Hunters. I’ve been delivering Field Sensing events and workshops since 2009.   I have hosted participatory Field Sensing walks on an ancient hillside at dawn; in a torrential downpour at a Dark Mountain Festival; on a university campus at Exeter University; on the site of the site of a Neolithic coastal settlement as part of Earthwalking; on Bodmin Moor as part of a BosArts commission for the National Trust, as part of my teaching for undergraduate Arts and Ecological design students and for health professionals. Field Sensing sessions are often followed by a reflective session for participants which can include sharing food together.

The field sensing made me see the forest we walked in as we weren’t walking in it but being part of it, going at the forests pace. It was very profound. Caroline Hunt, Dark Mountain Festival, Devon

Landing Crew is a performance action which was devised and developed with Miriam Keye for the Heathrow Climate Camp 2007 as a creative and performative way to be part of actions against the third runway. Landing Crew was revived and has been active since 2018. It is performed in silence and based on slowed-down movements of air craft landing staff with devised semaphone language and signalling.  Street based performances take place frequently with large groups of performers as part of Stop Bristol Airport Expansion non-violent direct actions and at other significant sites and actions in the UK.

Tidal Duets is an ongoing research project with New York based artist Sarah Cameron Sunde, meeting each month at or around the time of the full moon by a water body for a shared improvisation and exploration of presence, water, tidal and lunar cycles. This collaboration started after the Tidelines & Art. Earth’s High Water in March 2021 (highest spring tide of the year)  and is ongoing. High Water was a 12 hour + (high tide to high tide in the Exe estuary) online event with 60+ contributors from around the world sharing stories, films, objects, live feeds about tides and oceans.

Transglobal Duets was a year-long monthly collaboration in 2007 with performer Miriam Keye exploring simultaneous movement duets in different parts of the world supported by Earthdance, USA & New Works Festival, Vancouver, Canada. UK documentation was by Jo Salter. The Transglobal duet film was exhibited at Dis-locate, Ginza Art Lab, Tokyo international exhibition and symposium on art, technology and locality and at Dance City, Newcastle in 2009.

For other large scale site specific performance/ritual see Salmon Run, Walking Forest coventry or FLOW Wassail