Phil Smith
Phil's background is in theatre-making, as a writer and dramaturg, specialising in recent years in performance inspired by walking, and now moving into dance practice.
His research includes the uses of performance in heritage sites including guided tours, the theory and practice of mythogeography, ideas of spatialization in cinema, contemporary developments of the situationist 'drift' and acting in site-based performance.
There is an account of autobiographical-performance aspects of Phil's work in Deirdre Heddon's 'Autobiography and Performance' (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) pages 105-111.
Two texts from his Crab Walks performances and an essay on walking and mythogeography are published in 'Walking, Writing and Performance', edited by Roberta Mock, Bristol: Intellect, 2009. http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4571/
His research includes the uses of performance in heritage sites including guided tours, the theory and practice of mythogeography, ideas of spatialization in cinema, contemporary developments of the situationist 'drift' and acting in site-based performance.
There is an account of autobiographical-performance aspects of Phil's work in Deirdre Heddon's 'Autobiography and Performance' (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) pages 105-111.
Two texts from his Crab Walks performances and an essay on walking and mythogeography are published in 'Walking, Writing and Performance', edited by Roberta Mock, Bristol: Intellect, 2009. http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4571/
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Books by Phil Smith
Using 30 carefully crafted ‘movement meditations’ – each with an accompanying photo to facilitate it – 'Covert' outlines a straightforward embodied practice to defend and aid inner reflection. Both active and accessible, the 'Covert' practice offers a way to diminish the lure of the screens, sidestep invasive scrutiny, and nurture the dialogue between our conscious and unconscious selves.
By prioritizing introspective interactions with the quirky and complex world around us, 'Covert' proposes that we have the means to cultivate our interior and imaginative selves through a dynamic physical engagement with the wider world.
"This is a handbook for walking, art making and using a map that has been left for us in the landscape. A codebook for living in a new/old mode; in which the barriers between humans and cosmos, and between subjective beings and objective spaces, begin to disappear. The book is also about mysterious gameboards and rules for old pastimes that we have made up. Games for you to play. There are ladders to climb and snakes to ride. An invitation to make a playful pilgrimage that is attentive to both new and ancient special places, webbed together around a tattoo that is in the earth and in the mind.
However you choose to use this book – solve its mystery, borrow a tactic or two, drill it for ideas – we will feel very happy. Particularly, if you change our work as you work it.
While The Pattern describes a model for art making, we did not start out with one. Instead, the model emerged from our ‘hyper-sensitized’ walking in marginal and disregarded spaces and it has become a kind of ‘web walking’. The model continued to develop as we read our poems and performed actions at events, invited people to take us on walks, ran art making workshops and assembled an exhibition from which the threads ran out in many directions.
The Pattern is then the story of the places we found as we spun those threads wider.
It is also a fictioning (we adopted narratives and characters to find things out). There is a story to follow. This story snakes through the book, but it first snaked through us. Throughout The Pattern, through our alternative selves – the artists Crab & Bee and the wandering Smoke & Mirrors – the threads of the story are unwound; then gathered together into a quest to live in the new/old mode. We hope you will join your thread to it."
This new book is a wide-ranging account of 40 years in the life of the most successful touring theatre company, playing to over 300,000 people each year. The narrative dances between storytelling, a masterclass on the skills and practice of acting, directing and writing for theatre, considering the role of theatre in different countries and continents and offering a eye-opening history of TNT Theatre.
The work draws on many walks and performances with groups like Wrights & Sites and GeoQuest and a longstanding fascination with the layers of terrain in South Devon, UK (which reach out far beyond its boundaries). In order to get at its elusive layers and narratives, the book approached its subjects through different authorial voices, pseudo-autobiography, fiction and personal immersion and mythologisation; there have been many journeys, sometimes lone, sometimes convivial.
If ‘mythogeography’ means anything – as a method that anyone can use anywhere, as a practice of lay or expert geography – then it stands or falls by this book. It is intended to provide materials and approaches for others to create their own mythogeographical journeys and accounts, and develop their own methods.
Here are the roots of contemporary views of daily-life movement (including walking). We notice people who don’t walk normally. We notice ourselves when we don’t walk normally.
There is, it seems, an intense, invisible pressure to walk normally. Straight is the gait. Call it ambulonormativity.
For about 9 months, two walking-authors/artists – Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith – found themselves wrestling with not being able to walk normally. They wrote to one another about it and, amongst other things, reflected on:
prostheses ~ waddling ~ Butoh ~ built-up shoes ~ walking in pain ~ bad legs ~ vertigo ~
falling (and fallen) places ~ hubris ~ bad walks ~ scores for falling down ~
walking carefully ~ disappointment.
This is their conversation. From it, there emerges an 'Alphabet of Falling', a sustained reflection on the loss of normal capabilities, anecdotes and autobiographical stories, and the beginnings of a larger discussion about stumbling and falling: the pedestrian equivalent of blowing an uncertain trumpet.
As the book concludes: "When you next fall, stay down for a while, see what comes. Then, when you get to your feet again, rather than relying on your body’s natural approximations of space, choose your steps, not anxiously but in an excited kind of wariness; and, with each pace, a little more undo the ‘grounds’ that tripped you up."
The author has been a keen observer of the zombie mythos for the past 35 years, and here he draws on the mass of plots, images and metaphors that can be found swarming in zombie movies and comics. Instead of treating zombie media as a kind of parallel universe, he concentrates on the 'normality' of the zombie apocalypse - showing how zombies have been used to depict, slave labour, wage labour, the consumer, the dispossesed, the disenfranchised and the underprivileged, and then moving on to explain how much more complicated it is than that.
He uses his analysis of zombie media to set out a groundbreaking way to have presence in everyday life. Invoking slowness, fragmentary consciousness, thickness and thingness, the author describes in theory and in practice, how to walk from Night to Day and away from the old Dawn into a radical nothingness.
Drawing examples from across the spectrum of zombie media, with plenty from its margins, Phil Smith celebrates and berates the zombie; then turns it into a meditation, a manifesto, a dance score and the herald of a social movement.
Starting with the three key principles of Interiority, Carnival and an End to Ends, The Footbook of Zombie Walking offers a way back to a vital Life and an art of Living. It is the next step, beyond Mythogeography, to ending media predations, putting subjectivities back on the streets and coming to be present in everyday life."
54 intriguing ideas for different ways to take a walk - for enthusiasts, practitioners, students and academics.
This is your invitation to some of the many different ways to wander: 54 intriguing encounters produced by artists involved with the Walking Artists Network and beyond.
Pop it in your back pocket, leave it in your rucksack, share it with friends and take them on a walk, use it in creative workshops, read it as if each instruction were poetry, engage with each page as visual art or as a performance activity, let it remind you of places you’ve been or walks you’d like to do. When the moment takes you be inspired by the variety of inventive and reflective ideas mapped out here and then simply… wander.
Readership
Ways to Wander is intended for anyone who makes, or wants to make, walking art or walk-performances - and for anyone interested in psychogeography, radical walking, drift and dérive.
a partial mapping of the ‘evolution’ of walking that looks at ‘stages’ in that evolution.
a helicopter view that allows walking artist/practitioners to place themselves in historical and artistic context.
important new ideas about abusive semi-public spaces (in the wake of scandals in the UK and elsewhere involving public figures, the church and others) – suggesting how radical walking can act against ‘the spectacle’ and power.
a compelling theory about romanticism and the postmodern in relation to walking.
a World Brain for walking.
strategies, tactics and a full manifesto for Radical Walking.
- See more at: http://www.triarchypress.net/walkings-new-movement.html#sthash.bepJ0513.dpuf
The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside are performances made by Phil Smith based on an initial exploratory walking of an area of South Devon where he was taken for childhood holidays and then on to Munich, Herm and San Gimignano. Both shows were accompanied by the distribution of maps seeking to provoke the audience to make their own exploratory walks. Mourning Walk is a performance that relates to a walk Carl Lavery made to mark the anniversary of his father’s death. Lavery shows how a secret can be both shared and hidden through the act of communication as he explores “an ethics of autobiographical performance”. In Tree, the result of a multi-disciplinary collaborative process, Dee Heddon occupies a single square foot of soil, and discovers that by standing stationary and looking closely she can travel across continents and centuries, making unexpected connections through an extroverted autobiographical practice.
The work of all three artists, taken together and separately, raises important issues about memory, ritual, life writing, textuality, subjectivity, and site in performance.
On a second level it sets out a kind of walking that the author has been practising for many years and for which he is quietly famous. It's a kind of walking that burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and the Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and disgruntlement of the everyday. Those who try it report that their walking [and their whole way of seeing the world] is never quite the same again. And the Suffolk walk described in this book is an exemplary walk, a case study - this is exactly how to do it.
Finally, on a third level, On Walking... is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, jouissance, dancing, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, performance, architecture, the nature of grief, pilgrimage, World War II, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, synchronicity, somatics and the Underchalk.""
Once identified, these absurd, empty, recalcitrant enchantments can transform the way we live and think and occupy our inner and outer landscapes.
Urging us to “hypersensitize ourselves to the full blast of contemporary landscape’s intensity”, Phil Smith explains how to “let our tentacles unfurl” in order to explore and see the world around us in all its glory.""
Using 30 carefully crafted ‘movement meditations’ – each with an accompanying photo to facilitate it – 'Covert' outlines a straightforward embodied practice to defend and aid inner reflection. Both active and accessible, the 'Covert' practice offers a way to diminish the lure of the screens, sidestep invasive scrutiny, and nurture the dialogue between our conscious and unconscious selves.
By prioritizing introspective interactions with the quirky and complex world around us, 'Covert' proposes that we have the means to cultivate our interior and imaginative selves through a dynamic physical engagement with the wider world.
"This is a handbook for walking, art making and using a map that has been left for us in the landscape. A codebook for living in a new/old mode; in which the barriers between humans and cosmos, and between subjective beings and objective spaces, begin to disappear. The book is also about mysterious gameboards and rules for old pastimes that we have made up. Games for you to play. There are ladders to climb and snakes to ride. An invitation to make a playful pilgrimage that is attentive to both new and ancient special places, webbed together around a tattoo that is in the earth and in the mind.
However you choose to use this book – solve its mystery, borrow a tactic or two, drill it for ideas – we will feel very happy. Particularly, if you change our work as you work it.
While The Pattern describes a model for art making, we did not start out with one. Instead, the model emerged from our ‘hyper-sensitized’ walking in marginal and disregarded spaces and it has become a kind of ‘web walking’. The model continued to develop as we read our poems and performed actions at events, invited people to take us on walks, ran art making workshops and assembled an exhibition from which the threads ran out in many directions.
The Pattern is then the story of the places we found as we spun those threads wider.
It is also a fictioning (we adopted narratives and characters to find things out). There is a story to follow. This story snakes through the book, but it first snaked through us. Throughout The Pattern, through our alternative selves – the artists Crab & Bee and the wandering Smoke & Mirrors – the threads of the story are unwound; then gathered together into a quest to live in the new/old mode. We hope you will join your thread to it."
This new book is a wide-ranging account of 40 years in the life of the most successful touring theatre company, playing to over 300,000 people each year. The narrative dances between storytelling, a masterclass on the skills and practice of acting, directing and writing for theatre, considering the role of theatre in different countries and continents and offering a eye-opening history of TNT Theatre.
The work draws on many walks and performances with groups like Wrights & Sites and GeoQuest and a longstanding fascination with the layers of terrain in South Devon, UK (which reach out far beyond its boundaries). In order to get at its elusive layers and narratives, the book approached its subjects through different authorial voices, pseudo-autobiography, fiction and personal immersion and mythologisation; there have been many journeys, sometimes lone, sometimes convivial.
If ‘mythogeography’ means anything – as a method that anyone can use anywhere, as a practice of lay or expert geography – then it stands or falls by this book. It is intended to provide materials and approaches for others to create their own mythogeographical journeys and accounts, and develop their own methods.
Here are the roots of contemporary views of daily-life movement (including walking). We notice people who don’t walk normally. We notice ourselves when we don’t walk normally.
There is, it seems, an intense, invisible pressure to walk normally. Straight is the gait. Call it ambulonormativity.
For about 9 months, two walking-authors/artists – Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith – found themselves wrestling with not being able to walk normally. They wrote to one another about it and, amongst other things, reflected on:
prostheses ~ waddling ~ Butoh ~ built-up shoes ~ walking in pain ~ bad legs ~ vertigo ~
falling (and fallen) places ~ hubris ~ bad walks ~ scores for falling down ~
walking carefully ~ disappointment.
This is their conversation. From it, there emerges an 'Alphabet of Falling', a sustained reflection on the loss of normal capabilities, anecdotes and autobiographical stories, and the beginnings of a larger discussion about stumbling and falling: the pedestrian equivalent of blowing an uncertain trumpet.
As the book concludes: "When you next fall, stay down for a while, see what comes. Then, when you get to your feet again, rather than relying on your body’s natural approximations of space, choose your steps, not anxiously but in an excited kind of wariness; and, with each pace, a little more undo the ‘grounds’ that tripped you up."
The author has been a keen observer of the zombie mythos for the past 35 years, and here he draws on the mass of plots, images and metaphors that can be found swarming in zombie movies and comics. Instead of treating zombie media as a kind of parallel universe, he concentrates on the 'normality' of the zombie apocalypse - showing how zombies have been used to depict, slave labour, wage labour, the consumer, the dispossesed, the disenfranchised and the underprivileged, and then moving on to explain how much more complicated it is than that.
He uses his analysis of zombie media to set out a groundbreaking way to have presence in everyday life. Invoking slowness, fragmentary consciousness, thickness and thingness, the author describes in theory and in practice, how to walk from Night to Day and away from the old Dawn into a radical nothingness.
Drawing examples from across the spectrum of zombie media, with plenty from its margins, Phil Smith celebrates and berates the zombie; then turns it into a meditation, a manifesto, a dance score and the herald of a social movement.
Starting with the three key principles of Interiority, Carnival and an End to Ends, The Footbook of Zombie Walking offers a way back to a vital Life and an art of Living. It is the next step, beyond Mythogeography, to ending media predations, putting subjectivities back on the streets and coming to be present in everyday life."
54 intriguing ideas for different ways to take a walk - for enthusiasts, practitioners, students and academics.
This is your invitation to some of the many different ways to wander: 54 intriguing encounters produced by artists involved with the Walking Artists Network and beyond.
Pop it in your back pocket, leave it in your rucksack, share it with friends and take them on a walk, use it in creative workshops, read it as if each instruction were poetry, engage with each page as visual art or as a performance activity, let it remind you of places you’ve been or walks you’d like to do. When the moment takes you be inspired by the variety of inventive and reflective ideas mapped out here and then simply… wander.
Readership
Ways to Wander is intended for anyone who makes, or wants to make, walking art or walk-performances - and for anyone interested in psychogeography, radical walking, drift and dérive.
a partial mapping of the ‘evolution’ of walking that looks at ‘stages’ in that evolution.
a helicopter view that allows walking artist/practitioners to place themselves in historical and artistic context.
important new ideas about abusive semi-public spaces (in the wake of scandals in the UK and elsewhere involving public figures, the church and others) – suggesting how radical walking can act against ‘the spectacle’ and power.
a compelling theory about romanticism and the postmodern in relation to walking.
a World Brain for walking.
strategies, tactics and a full manifesto for Radical Walking.
- See more at: http://www.triarchypress.net/walkings-new-movement.html#sthash.bepJ0513.dpuf
The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside are performances made by Phil Smith based on an initial exploratory walking of an area of South Devon where he was taken for childhood holidays and then on to Munich, Herm and San Gimignano. Both shows were accompanied by the distribution of maps seeking to provoke the audience to make their own exploratory walks. Mourning Walk is a performance that relates to a walk Carl Lavery made to mark the anniversary of his father’s death. Lavery shows how a secret can be both shared and hidden through the act of communication as he explores “an ethics of autobiographical performance”. In Tree, the result of a multi-disciplinary collaborative process, Dee Heddon occupies a single square foot of soil, and discovers that by standing stationary and looking closely she can travel across continents and centuries, making unexpected connections through an extroverted autobiographical practice.
The work of all three artists, taken together and separately, raises important issues about memory, ritual, life writing, textuality, subjectivity, and site in performance.
On a second level it sets out a kind of walking that the author has been practising for many years and for which he is quietly famous. It's a kind of walking that burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and the Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and disgruntlement of the everyday. Those who try it report that their walking [and their whole way of seeing the world] is never quite the same again. And the Suffolk walk described in this book is an exemplary walk, a case study - this is exactly how to do it.
Finally, on a third level, On Walking... is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, jouissance, dancing, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, performance, architecture, the nature of grief, pilgrimage, World War II, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, synchronicity, somatics and the Underchalk.""
Once identified, these absurd, empty, recalcitrant enchantments can transform the way we live and think and occupy our inner and outer landscapes.
Urging us to “hypersensitize ourselves to the full blast of contemporary landscape’s intensity”, Phil Smith explains how to “let our tentacles unfurl” in order to explore and see the world around us in all its glory.""
The article recounts the mapping of the three sites, and how we could draw on ideas from Ursula le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the Lessons in Hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis and the Arachnean web making of Fernand Deligny to help us make a performance container and draw a diagram in performance using colour-coded costumes, ribbons, and totemic objects to indicate the interlacing of the three storylines. We describe performance materials passing from body to body in observable and demonstrable patterns, and how attention is given to the diagramming of transcorporeality; how through the monstrous hybrid assemblages of these place-tales and by ‘being there’ – with water, limestone, tungsten, tin, copper, kaolin and arsenic – patterns are absorbed and passed on through performing bodies.
Mining the myths and stories in a Whovian landscape
Helen Bilinghurst & Phil Smith
In this paper we discuss an expansive area of china clay pits and tungsten mining on the southern fringes of Dartmoor; an otherworldly terrain we have repeatedly returned to explore through walking and hypersensitization, discovering so many strange stories and mysterious atmospheres, we refer to it as the ‘Doctor Who Zone’.
Walked from one end of the considerable site to another, the ‘Doctor Who Zone’ unfolds in a manner comparable to the television series itself. Each episode emerges from a different aspect of the site: an immense industrial mine dramatically reveals itself through an eerie mist; a tiny hamlet is abruptly abandoned due to catastrophe or plague. Weddings with phantasms of wolves, apocalyptic games, alien fungi, hollow hills, space/time distortions, ambient hums and deafening silences are interwoven with a single plot-line that threads through the entire site: that of a bitter struggle to resist and disrupt a sinister corporate giant called Wolf.
Through our repeated interrogation of this site, we expose how the Dr Who we watched as children – the ‘Dr Who in us’ – continues to resonate, inform the way we see the world, and re-enchant such exploited and ecologically degraded landscapes. Drawing from Mark Fisher’s writings on the eerie, Simon O’Sullivan’s work on Myth-Science and Jane Bennett’s discussion of enchantment and modernity, we ask whether, more than metals and materials, it is the stories and myths of these deranged and unsettling landscapes that are their most precious resources in a struggle for ecological repair
With a view to recruiting such vital terrains, as co-performers in a post-dramatic theatre of zombie movement, I worked with first year Theatre students at Plymouth University’s School of Humanities and Performing Arts to make an experiment; preparing in studio space and then exploring in public spaces.
It draws on the idea of ‘mythogeography’ originated in the work of Wrights & Sites, sprung from a growing awareness of how the multiple meanings of certain sites, particularly those designated as “heritage” or “touristic”, are ‘closed down’ and an aspiration to represent multiple and diverse meanings resistant to such a monocular politics of place.
Contrasted with previously ‘exemplary’ work, enacting only the possibilities that a mythogeographical approach to place and space might offer, the paper explores how far a performative ‘mis-guided tour’ (titled in publicity A Tour of Sardine Street) was able to generate a work of ‘realised’ geography applicable to the street and the city as an analysis as well as an aesthetic provocation.
This paper charts a changing relationship to ruins over fifteen years of making site-specific performance. It looks at three sets of ruins (a nineteenth-century water tower and a chapel and almshouses, both of medieval origins) and records how they each acted as the beginning of three separate post-dramatic performance projects. By re-visiting and walking between the three sets of ruins, the author tests his own changing understanding of their materiality: from inert properties waiting for invasive or re-compositional acts to unfinished and vibrant materials actively recomposing themselves as allies in resistance and ‘slow revolution’.
Working for three days in Cramond, Siriol and Phil explored an edge-place, drawing both on research about it and on their physical and emotional encounters with it. Playing at the edges of overlapping senses and spaces, they explored the meeting place of sacred and non-sacred space; searching for what is there and what is changing there; for what can be told, performed, what can be felt and touched; reaching for what eludes, listening and waiting for what might emerge.
They next took a group on an exploratory journey around the grounds of the Old City Observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. This descriptive performance, designed for sighted, non-sighted and blind audiences, responded to the historic and evocative site of Calton Hill by overlapping and colliding place, dance, description, objects and narratives. Phil and Siriol invited the group to experience the site in different ways, challenging our perception of the space through a series of actions, moments and stories.
This is their report on the two events.
The paper describes the use of a multi-modal research methodology; predominantly mixing participant observation and practice-as-research. It narrates the key moments of transition in the research: a double movement of exorcism and spectral return on a ‘mis-guided tour’ (Water Walk, 2010), the discovery that volunteer panel members were not simply observing tours but beginning to re-perform them, the shift from a dispersal of specialised, technical knowledge to a more generally accessible toolkit model exemplified by the publication of A Sardine Street Box of Tricks in 2011, and a series of experimental visits by the author (some accompanied by panel members) to heritage sites on which ‘tactics’ were both tested and new ones devised.
The paper sets the emergence of a performative counter-tourism strategy as a development of practices and ideas informed by or originating in site-specific performance, contemporary Performance Studies and Tourism Studies, walking arts (including disrupted versions of the standard guided tour), and mythogeography.
By pretending that I’m talking about zombie movies and how their atmospheres, characters and representations of bodies and places can be used in walking, and then, when I’m close enough, I try to walk into that dead zombie body, walk into that thing that walks, and see where it takes us.
I will finish by suggesting some of the challenges and opportunities that are now there to be met not only by ‘the New Psychogeographers’, but by anyone who avails themselves of the unprecedentedly deep resource of ideas and tactics of far greater range of imagination and technique than ever before.
This joint paper discusses Dance Plague with Flanker Origami, a social media danced promenade, performed in the theatres and streets of Edinburgh and live-streamed on Facebook Live in May 2023. The event is part of an ongoing practice research project and stems from a creative collaboration between performer-researchers Bianca Mastrominico and John Dean as Organic Theatre and Dr. Phil Smith, mythogeographer, writer and artist specialising in walking and site-specific performance. Led by the characters of Flanker Origami, from a digital performance created in 2021 by the company for the first hybrid edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the promenade breaks and destabilises normative social behaviour in public sites through couple dancing, dopamine dressing and acts of bodily assemblages within the urban landscape.
Engendering queered and unruly site-specific practice, the promenade upsets and demystifies neoliberal modes of gatekeeping and fruition of cultural sites in the festival city, opening questions about the ontological status of hybrid characters, edging between digital and physical embodiment. In choosing to become interlopers in the daily life of theatre buildings, Flanker and Origami dance through and occupy the backstage whilst deserting the theatre auditorium. They hover in the adjacent streets, in search of found sets, streamed on social media like ghosts of a lost digital spectacle. In so doing the promenade actively (and ironically) counteracts and challenges capitalistic notions of cultural consumption, surveillance and social control, reframing the narratives of post-pandemic social spaces, both online and in presence. Through technologically enabled performance, the dance manifests itself both as the metaphorical plague of a market-driven creative industry struggling to keep up with its own vulnerable economy, and a possible cure which can reclaim and release hybrid and heightened spaces of connectivity in the private and public domains of theatre organisations.
While this project, the culmination of twenty years wandering, exploring and performing in the area, has generated multiple findings, in this talk I will particularly focus on how a series of material and imaginary meshworks and narratives, often entangled, have been revealed in the process. These meshworks, like the hollow ways that reach deep into the fabric of the cities, transgress the city/countryside boundary. They challenge assumptions about the city as a concentration, of centres as the defining points of communities, burrow and crawl under walls and boundaries with multiple myths of caves and tunnels, and excavate patterns of dispersal and relaxed spacing that underlie more recent social architecture.
In a search for traces of H.P. Lovecraft’s Devonian ancestors, a watery Dumnonian landscape emerges that leads me to a martyr’s well in a city centre vegan café. Memories of Michael Jackson’s healing mission to Exeter City’s football ground evoke iconographies of flow in High Street ornaments and on re-emerging roods screens. In seeking access to ‘The Old Grotto’ at Torbryan rationalist nineteenth century palaeontology and fairy cities become tangled. A stone circle in an urban playpark is spirited away.
Drawing on ambulatory explorations, on gothic texts from the prophesies of Exeter servant Joanna Southcott to the ‘Atomic Consciousness’ of Whimple’s ‘James Bathurst’, giving close attention to textures and materials (to the geological serpent coiled beneath), and given the emergence of the journey’s own narratives, I will propose a more loosely lived and more distantly connected model of urban landscape.
Phil Smith (University of Plymouth)
I would like to continue my longstanding and ongoing engagement with vampire literature through a critical consideration of the Victorian dystopian fantasy novel by the enigmatic W. Grove, ‘The Wreck of a World’ (1889).
Set in a fictional 1948, against a backdrop of the “decay of religion and the cultivation of a gospel of selfishness”, ‘The Wreck of a World’ is a technology-based nightmare. It opens in the USA at the Yellow Creek Works where engineers have created “self-feeding, self-supplying, even self-repairing” steam locomotives that learn how to reproduce themselves without the help of humans. These newly agentive machines turn on their human masters and begin to lay waste to cities, with their advantage of “the absence of affections and a nervous system”.
In this paper I will argue that the novel’s portrayal of “soulless machines, with all their.... blind implacable fury” are comparable to portrayals of the Victorian undead by Stoker (and others) and may have some bearing now on the vampires’ continuing relevance in an era of VR and AI.
Drawing on my previous theoretical and artistic engagements with vampires, (from reading Moretti’s essay ‘The Dialectic of Fear’ and mounting political horror story writing competitions [both 1983] to writing ‘Horror Story’ for Avon Touring Theatre [1984] and ‘Dracula and the Eco-Warrior’ for TNT Theatre [2016]), I will try to develop an argument around W. Grove’s metal vampires in relation to the increasing importance of themes of the undead in an age of climate crisis, and how they might help us make alliances with inanimate and ‘soulless’ things in our coming post-industrial adventures.
The first is a strategy for change that I devised about 10 years ago; I’ll explain how this strategy came to be devised, specifically for tourists and visitors to use against the heritage industry, its institutions and properties. And then in the second half of the talk I’ll address what I do now, working with what I call ‘placestories’ in different terrains. I begin with some very general ideas about change; in particular, regress and progress.
In this presentation I try to identify a shift in walking arts, and advocate for shifting further, from a focus on the psychogeographical affects of human subjects, with roots in former collectivities, to a shared activity with unhuman players that include place-stories, metals and their subterranean networks, and sites of rewilding. Noting the rising importance of ‘animism’, decolonialisation and challenges to anthropocentric perspectives, I will seek to address what is happening, and might happen, to human subjectivities in walking arts if we acknowledge and give attention to the fractures of past apocalypses in which we walk.
My contribution focuses on film-maker Maya Deren's ethnographic research into Haitian voodoo ceremonies and rituals, and the phenomenon of trance states, and her own experience of voodoo trance, of becoming zombie.
Lee Miller is Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance; he is interested in landscape, collaboration, the ability of the body to endure. Roberta Mock is Professor of Performance Studies; her research focuses on gender, sexuality, culture, place and the performing body. Kayla Parker is Lecturer in Media Arts; her research centres on subjectivity and place, embodiment and technological mediation, from feminist perspectives. Phil Smith is Research Fellow in Performance and the Everyday; he researches and practices in the fields of walking, performance and counter-tourism.
Lee, Roberta, Kayla and Phil are co-organizing an academic symposium Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance at Plymouth University 12 + 13 April 2013: www.plymouth.ac.uk/schools/hpa/zombies
email: livingdead@plymouth.ac.uk