Output details

Jack Scout

This hour-long walking performance featuring dance and music explored divergent understandings of the natural world. In Performing Nature (Giannachi and Stewart 2005: 34?62), I grouped these into four “epistemologies”: "spectacle”, in which nature is seen as a scientific or cultural object (or landscape) of the human mind; “world”, in which nature is encountered through human conversation about the other-than-human world; “environment”, in which nature’s “symbiotic interactivity” is kinaesthetically felt; and “void” in which nature is the ineffable sublime exceeding the limits of human scale and cognition.

We developed performance material by exploring these epistemologies through “dialogues” with local specialists. For instance, a spectacle was made of nature by using movement to illustrate, through a bespoke sign language, the morphology of plants identified by plant ecologists; or flute and clarinet to mimic the songs of birds identified by National Trust wardens using the Common Bird Survey. Nature was explored as world by writing songs with special-needs children about their checkered feelings on the heath, by recording social gestures, by learning from fishermen how to work nets and tractors, and from conservationists how to prune the heath. Nature was experienced as environment by amalgamating clarinet sounds with birds flocking at key tidal moments, or using “logging” techniques (first developed with Jennifer Monson during the AHRC-funded Re-enchantment and Reclamation project) to distil kinaesthetic sensations of the shoreline. Finally, by improvising on the vast sands and learning from historians about shipwrecks and drownings, the bay was experienced as a void place in which human life can be swallowed.

This and other material was montaged into the public performance work, and then scenes from that work selected and re-edited into the film. The public impact of this work is outlined through four reports in the project website and in the separate Impact Case Study.