Output details

Challenging Place: Half Moon

• PaR (website)

Documentation articulating a research process comprising a series of workshops and public performances at the Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, Limehouse, London. With the aim of impacting upon the broader constituencies of the project as well as an ‘academic’ audience, the PaR findings are published as website, www.challengingplacehalfmoon.org

300 word statement - Information about the research process and/ or content

This PaR project comprised a series of workshops and subsequent performances at the Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, Limehouse, London, April to July 2012. Challenging Place: Half Moon (CPHM) is one third of a larger research project funded by the AHRC of which Mackey is Principal Investigator: Challenging concepts of ‘liquid’ place through performance practices in community contexts, 2011-2014.

Using recently devised performance practices with each of three organisations, the research asks: a) to what extent contemporary theories of dislocation and transience are evidenced in particular 'real world' contexts?; b) how can performance practices be used to consider relationships to place?; c) how might dislocation be eased through such practices, where it might exist? The project aims to stimulate conceptual work together with the development of practical models for further dissemination as material for facilitation in community arts organisations. Specifically, the CPHM research became focussed on how performance might identify and ‘ease’ a fear of place, how everyday place is ‘performed’ and how expressing everyday place through performance might shift the quotidian.

The findings of CPHM have been disseminated through the public performances at the Half Moon on July 4th and 5th 2013. With the aim of impacting upon the broader constituencies of the project as well as an ‘academic’ audience, the inquiry and its findings are articulated as a research website, www.challengingplacehalfmoon.org, first launched March 2013. A range of papers in academic fora have also disseminated the work including: TaPRA, the universities of West of England, Cape Town, British Columbia, Victoria, Manchester and Kent.