Myers and Heddon will create a Walking Library that will accompany the festival over its four wee... more Myers and Heddon will create a Walking Library that will accompany the festival over its four week duration. The library, carried on foot, will contain books that people feel should be taken on a walk. Participants in the festival are encouraged to bring a book to deposit in the library. Readings will be selected and shared daily, and a new book of writing about walking, created by participants, will be added to the library at the end of the festival
In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of femin... more In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of feminist and queer performance scholars and artists embarked on the research project Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially Engaged Art. Our aim was to document contributions of womxn theatre makers, while conducting a feminist analysis of strategies used to deal with gender inequality and oppression, on stage and off. While pivoting to the digital and the virtual, we recognised a need to support womxn theatre makers whose lives and livelihoods are thrown into further precarity by the pandemic. This paper speaks to our commitment to bringing together critical theory, arts practices and everyday life in ethical forms and encounters that make visible, recognise and express care for one another and for the work.
In an economic and cultural context in which public libraries are under threat widely, On Librari... more In an economic and cultural context in which public libraries are under threat widely, On Libraries offers tangible evidence of the diverse interrelations between and interventions of artists and libraries which reveal the library as dynamic, shifting and contested spaces of creativity, subversion, refuge, labour, testimony, imagination, choreography, repetition, invitation, inhabitation, solitude and conviviality. Including contributions from Europe, America, Australia and Iran, the issue foregrounds the practices of 'library performances', including work which displays and disrupts in equal measure library forms, rituals and technologies; work which acknowledges and takes sustenance from the library as icon of safe space for reflection and intellectual pursuit; work which responds to the materiality of libraries, most particularly books and their para-texts, including marginalia, secret deposits and traces of singular readerly engagement. Performances in libraries offer one lens through which to approach the question of ‘What are libraries for in the 21st century?’; and, further, ‘What might libraries become?
The Walking Library for Women Walking (2016-18) is an edition of the ongoing creative research pr... more The Walking Library for Women Walking (2016-18) is an edition of the ongoing creative research project, The Walking Library. Co-created and launched in 2012 by Dee Heddon and Misha Myers, The Walking Library explores the multiple relationships between walking, literature, and environment (see Heddon & Myers 2014, 2017, in press). For each edition of The Walking Library, we invite donations and suggestions of books to accompany what we propose is a pedestrian pedagogy: a learning that takes place on foot and on the move in the company of others (present and virtual), sharing and creating knowledge side-by-side, step-by-step and without hierarchy. Pedestrian pedagogy facilitates meaning-making as emergent and re-orientating (Osberg et al., 2008). In this pedestrian pedagogy learning is improvisatory and relational, engendered through the collaborative and collective body of walkers moving through space and time, side by side, in the company of each other and a diverse collection of bo...
In this chapter we explore whether locative media can develop a deeper connection with landscape.... more In this chapter we explore whether locative media can develop a deeper connection with landscape. In the context of our research, locative media is defined as multimedia content delivered through users’ mobile phones dependent on a user’s geographical location. The chapter draws on the analysis of and reflection on data collected from users of the Hayle Churks app (2013) created by Lucy Frears using app-making software AppFurnace by Calvium. The development of the app was partly funded by a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant and created as part of inter-disciplinary practice-based research supported by the European Social Fund (ESF) and Falmouth University. Hayle Churks was published on iTunes in December 2013 and won a national Collections Trust award in June 2014. The app can be downloaded over Wi-Fi onto an iPhone and contains over an hour of audio content that plays automatically, triggered by GPS as the participant walks (walking includes wheelchair movement in this document) ar...
Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2016
Technological innovations in digital communication technologies offer possibilities for new forms... more Technological innovations in digital communication technologies offer possibilities for new forms of participation and storytelling in theatre. Wildworks Theatre Company creates work that is discovered and devised with partners, artists and community participants in response to specific cultural and geographical locations. The work includes people in roles that can mirror their everyday real life roles inside the performance world. This paper considers findings and interaction methods of research the company pursued with researchers Myers and Watkins. to explore how transmedial methods may extend the reach of story-worlds it creates. The research considered how these methods might help build stronger relationships with communities and enhance experiences of the work for both participants and audience members.
The material cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher and... more The material cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher and is for private use only. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it.
The set of instructions from way from home (2002-2008) was created for refugee and asylum seeker ... more The set of instructions from way from home (2002-2008) was created for refugee and asylum seeker participants across the UK to take a walk with someone. The instructions became a stimulus for a conversation between the walker and their partner. The approach of a civic cartography and creative practice of home-making proposed through way from home aimed to respond to the disparate needs of this population. The walks created situations that enabled the possibility for social interaction, creative agency, self-determination and self-representation, for the recognition and exchange of critical resources, capacities and contributions that refugees have to offer.
The board game Bumper Crop was designed and its social impact tested as part of the Play to Grow ... more The board game Bumper Crop was designed and its social impact tested as part of the Play to Grow project to explore what game design properties and mechanisms are most effective in promoting change-related agendas. Bumper Crop was designed for both physical and digital platforms, to engage young urban adults in complexities of rural development, agricultural practices and issues facing farmers in India. The project involved a partnership with Digital Green, a non-profit and charitable organisation helping small and marginal farmers in both India and lowincome African countries to share best practices with their communities through creating and sharing videos. Combining real life content with serious play, Bumper Crop was designed through a participatory and human-centred design approach with field visits, dialogues and play tests with farmers working with Digital Green in the region of Madhya Pradesh, and with young urban adults in Mumbai. Contrary to expectations, initial evaluation results revealed that the game's original purpose of generating empathy for farmers was not realised amongst the available pool of samples. Surprisingly, however, it did serve as an effective tool for peer-topeer learning between farmers themselves, bringing the game back to Digital Green's core business of creating platforms for sharing of expert knowledge.
This book chapter articulates and philosophically contextualises the dramaturgy of audio walks an... more This book chapter articulates and philosophically contextualises the dramaturgy of audio walks and their significance as a site-specific theatrical mode and space of performance. It not only contributes to the neglected subject of the theatricality of sound production that is addressed in the entire volume, but also to the understanding of the significance of walking, vocalising and listening with audio walks as modes of performance that shift the locus of meaning production to a new understanding of a participant as percipient. Sarah Jane Bailes’ review of the book cites this contribution to the understanding of audio walks in the context of auditory dramaturgies (http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/Theatre-Noise--The-Sound-of-Performance1-4438-3440-8.htm). The chapter appears alongside a selected collection of contributions from the Theatre Noise conference exploring sound and performance at Central School of Speech and Drama in 2009. Another version of the chapter was also presented at t...
Every time … the United States acts forcefully abroad to protect its interests, you can bet the f... more Every time … the United States acts forcefully abroad to protect its interests, you can bet the farm some pencil-neck in America or Europe will whip out the charge that America once more is acting like a "cowboy" … that acting like a cowboy is about the most horrible thing one could do' (Thornton 2002: unpaginated). Charging onward… It's High Noon. A stranger comes to town. Searching. Speculating. [Close-up shot from ground level: dark figure in cowboy hat, bat-wing yoked shirt, boots and jeans fore grounded against a big blue sky with thunderclouds approaching in the distance. Theme song from Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.] For the exhibition he co-curated with Richard William Hill at Compton Verney, exploring the American West, Jimmie Durham wrote, 'This kit has an "understood" gun. The wearer and the public know that the gun is there. Every cowboy suit has a gun. (And a script, of course.)' (2005: 21). This here kit comes complete with the requisite firepower and masternarrative, but wait… there's a woman in that hat to boot. What is her role in the script? I will come back to her later, as there's another part I want to address first, that of the silent 'Indian', the Tonto or Queequag who 'is always a passive witness to the cowboy's action' (Durham, 1993: 176). How to intervene within the tightness of this script? In his essay 'Cowboys and …' written in 1990, Durham recognised that America 'becomes more closed, but "kinder and gentler"' as it attempts to keep up the concomitant niceties of a democratic empire and to model Europe's forced and tokenised receptivity to interventions in its myths. This narrowing ideology, that I will call "corral consciousness", is what Durham proposed in 1990, as a 'potential weakness of the system', and that triggered his continued experiments (Durham, 1993: 186).
Conversive Theatres: Performances with/in Social Media
Performance Paradigm, 2016
What does the use of social media offer in terms of participation in theatre, where audiences are... more What does the use of social media offer in terms of participation in theatre, where audiences are invited to interact with and contribute to content of narrative worlds played out live within transmedial participatory communications landscape ? Who is creating these worlds? How are participants’ own lived experience, personal worlds, narratives, and content involved in the creation of those worlds? Does participation and interaction via social media within such theatre lead to new forms of authorship and of authored work? Do particular methods of participation and interaction within transmedial theatre problematise what might constitute active or productive engagements? Do they prioritise some content contributions over others? Considering these questions, this paper explores how the ‘logic of sharing’ (Artieri 2012) that is implicit within participatory media may be understood within transmedial theatre and performance works that employ social media generally, and Twitter specifica...
The Walking Library is an ongoing art project created by Dee Heddon and Misha Myers, that seeks t... more The Walking Library is an ongoing art project created by Dee Heddon and Misha Myers, that seeks to bring together walking and books – walking, reading, reflecting, writing… Each Walking Library we create responds to – is specific to – the context of its walking. Each walk changes the shape – the content and the actions – of the library.
Myers and Heddon will create a Walking Library that will accompany the festival over its four wee... more Myers and Heddon will create a Walking Library that will accompany the festival over its four week duration. The library, carried on foot, will contain books that people feel should be taken on a walk. Participants in the festival are encouraged to bring a book to deposit in the library. Readings will be selected and shared daily, and a new book of writing about walking, created by participants, will be added to the library at the end of the festival
In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of femin... more In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of feminist and queer performance scholars and artists embarked on the research project Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially Engaged Art. Our aim was to document contributions of womxn theatre makers, while conducting a feminist analysis of strategies used to deal with gender inequality and oppression, on stage and off. While pivoting to the digital and the virtual, we recognised a need to support womxn theatre makers whose lives and livelihoods are thrown into further precarity by the pandemic. This paper speaks to our commitment to bringing together critical theory, arts practices and everyday life in ethical forms and encounters that make visible, recognise and express care for one another and for the work.
In an economic and cultural context in which public libraries are under threat widely, On Librari... more In an economic and cultural context in which public libraries are under threat widely, On Libraries offers tangible evidence of the diverse interrelations between and interventions of artists and libraries which reveal the library as dynamic, shifting and contested spaces of creativity, subversion, refuge, labour, testimony, imagination, choreography, repetition, invitation, inhabitation, solitude and conviviality. Including contributions from Europe, America, Australia and Iran, the issue foregrounds the practices of 'library performances', including work which displays and disrupts in equal measure library forms, rituals and technologies; work which acknowledges and takes sustenance from the library as icon of safe space for reflection and intellectual pursuit; work which responds to the materiality of libraries, most particularly books and their para-texts, including marginalia, secret deposits and traces of singular readerly engagement. Performances in libraries offer one lens through which to approach the question of ‘What are libraries for in the 21st century?’; and, further, ‘What might libraries become?
The Walking Library for Women Walking (2016-18) is an edition of the ongoing creative research pr... more The Walking Library for Women Walking (2016-18) is an edition of the ongoing creative research project, The Walking Library. Co-created and launched in 2012 by Dee Heddon and Misha Myers, The Walking Library explores the multiple relationships between walking, literature, and environment (see Heddon & Myers 2014, 2017, in press). For each edition of The Walking Library, we invite donations and suggestions of books to accompany what we propose is a pedestrian pedagogy: a learning that takes place on foot and on the move in the company of others (present and virtual), sharing and creating knowledge side-by-side, step-by-step and without hierarchy. Pedestrian pedagogy facilitates meaning-making as emergent and re-orientating (Osberg et al., 2008). In this pedestrian pedagogy learning is improvisatory and relational, engendered through the collaborative and collective body of walkers moving through space and time, side by side, in the company of each other and a diverse collection of bo...
In this chapter we explore whether locative media can develop a deeper connection with landscape.... more In this chapter we explore whether locative media can develop a deeper connection with landscape. In the context of our research, locative media is defined as multimedia content delivered through users’ mobile phones dependent on a user’s geographical location. The chapter draws on the analysis of and reflection on data collected from users of the Hayle Churks app (2013) created by Lucy Frears using app-making software AppFurnace by Calvium. The development of the app was partly funded by a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant and created as part of inter-disciplinary practice-based research supported by the European Social Fund (ESF) and Falmouth University. Hayle Churks was published on iTunes in December 2013 and won a national Collections Trust award in June 2014. The app can be downloaded over Wi-Fi onto an iPhone and contains over an hour of audio content that plays automatically, triggered by GPS as the participant walks (walking includes wheelchair movement in this document) ar...
Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2016
Technological innovations in digital communication technologies offer possibilities for new forms... more Technological innovations in digital communication technologies offer possibilities for new forms of participation and storytelling in theatre. Wildworks Theatre Company creates work that is discovered and devised with partners, artists and community participants in response to specific cultural and geographical locations. The work includes people in roles that can mirror their everyday real life roles inside the performance world. This paper considers findings and interaction methods of research the company pursued with researchers Myers and Watkins. to explore how transmedial methods may extend the reach of story-worlds it creates. The research considered how these methods might help build stronger relationships with communities and enhance experiences of the work for both participants and audience members.
The material cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher and... more The material cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher and is for private use only. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it.
The set of instructions from way from home (2002-2008) was created for refugee and asylum seeker ... more The set of instructions from way from home (2002-2008) was created for refugee and asylum seeker participants across the UK to take a walk with someone. The instructions became a stimulus for a conversation between the walker and their partner. The approach of a civic cartography and creative practice of home-making proposed through way from home aimed to respond to the disparate needs of this population. The walks created situations that enabled the possibility for social interaction, creative agency, self-determination and self-representation, for the recognition and exchange of critical resources, capacities and contributions that refugees have to offer.
The board game Bumper Crop was designed and its social impact tested as part of the Play to Grow ... more The board game Bumper Crop was designed and its social impact tested as part of the Play to Grow project to explore what game design properties and mechanisms are most effective in promoting change-related agendas. Bumper Crop was designed for both physical and digital platforms, to engage young urban adults in complexities of rural development, agricultural practices and issues facing farmers in India. The project involved a partnership with Digital Green, a non-profit and charitable organisation helping small and marginal farmers in both India and lowincome African countries to share best practices with their communities through creating and sharing videos. Combining real life content with serious play, Bumper Crop was designed through a participatory and human-centred design approach with field visits, dialogues and play tests with farmers working with Digital Green in the region of Madhya Pradesh, and with young urban adults in Mumbai. Contrary to expectations, initial evaluation results revealed that the game's original purpose of generating empathy for farmers was not realised amongst the available pool of samples. Surprisingly, however, it did serve as an effective tool for peer-topeer learning between farmers themselves, bringing the game back to Digital Green's core business of creating platforms for sharing of expert knowledge.
This book chapter articulates and philosophically contextualises the dramaturgy of audio walks an... more This book chapter articulates and philosophically contextualises the dramaturgy of audio walks and their significance as a site-specific theatrical mode and space of performance. It not only contributes to the neglected subject of the theatricality of sound production that is addressed in the entire volume, but also to the understanding of the significance of walking, vocalising and listening with audio walks as modes of performance that shift the locus of meaning production to a new understanding of a participant as percipient. Sarah Jane Bailes’ review of the book cites this contribution to the understanding of audio walks in the context of auditory dramaturgies (http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/Theatre-Noise--The-Sound-of-Performance1-4438-3440-8.htm). The chapter appears alongside a selected collection of contributions from the Theatre Noise conference exploring sound and performance at Central School of Speech and Drama in 2009. Another version of the chapter was also presented at t...
Every time … the United States acts forcefully abroad to protect its interests, you can bet the f... more Every time … the United States acts forcefully abroad to protect its interests, you can bet the farm some pencil-neck in America or Europe will whip out the charge that America once more is acting like a "cowboy" … that acting like a cowboy is about the most horrible thing one could do' (Thornton 2002: unpaginated). Charging onward… It's High Noon. A stranger comes to town. Searching. Speculating. [Close-up shot from ground level: dark figure in cowboy hat, bat-wing yoked shirt, boots and jeans fore grounded against a big blue sky with thunderclouds approaching in the distance. Theme song from Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.] For the exhibition he co-curated with Richard William Hill at Compton Verney, exploring the American West, Jimmie Durham wrote, 'This kit has an "understood" gun. The wearer and the public know that the gun is there. Every cowboy suit has a gun. (And a script, of course.)' (2005: 21). This here kit comes complete with the requisite firepower and masternarrative, but wait… there's a woman in that hat to boot. What is her role in the script? I will come back to her later, as there's another part I want to address first, that of the silent 'Indian', the Tonto or Queequag who 'is always a passive witness to the cowboy's action' (Durham, 1993: 176). How to intervene within the tightness of this script? In his essay 'Cowboys and …' written in 1990, Durham recognised that America 'becomes more closed, but "kinder and gentler"' as it attempts to keep up the concomitant niceties of a democratic empire and to model Europe's forced and tokenised receptivity to interventions in its myths. This narrowing ideology, that I will call "corral consciousness", is what Durham proposed in 1990, as a 'potential weakness of the system', and that triggered his continued experiments (Durham, 1993: 186).
Conversive Theatres: Performances with/in Social Media
Performance Paradigm, 2016
What does the use of social media offer in terms of participation in theatre, where audiences are... more What does the use of social media offer in terms of participation in theatre, where audiences are invited to interact with and contribute to content of narrative worlds played out live within transmedial participatory communications landscape ? Who is creating these worlds? How are participants’ own lived experience, personal worlds, narratives, and content involved in the creation of those worlds? Does participation and interaction via social media within such theatre lead to new forms of authorship and of authored work? Do particular methods of participation and interaction within transmedial theatre problematise what might constitute active or productive engagements? Do they prioritise some content contributions over others? Considering these questions, this paper explores how the ‘logic of sharing’ (Artieri 2012) that is implicit within participatory media may be understood within transmedial theatre and performance works that employ social media generally, and Twitter specifica...
The Walking Library is an ongoing art project created by Dee Heddon and Misha Myers, that seeks t... more The Walking Library is an ongoing art project created by Dee Heddon and Misha Myers, that seeks to bring together walking and books – walking, reading, reflecting, writing… Each Walking Library we create responds to – is specific to – the context of its walking. Each walk changes the shape – the content and the actions – of the library.
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