Encountering Environments through the Arts

This edited collection of essays and artist reflections presents perspectives from arts and humanities researchers exploring how individuals and collectives engage with, relate to and experience environments. The term environment is broadly conceived in this volume and encompasses rural landscapes and nature spaces, urban and architectural sites, institutional, workplace and organisational spaces, domestic environments and public and private realms. Exploring what it means to encounter environments through embodied, artistic and reflexive practices, the essays and reflections draw on theoretical fields of feminist posthuman discourse, new materialism, anthropology, human geography, queer studies, performing and fine arts, art and health, psychology and ecological perspectives. Drawing on dialogues emerging from discursive border crossings between disciplines, Encountering Environments through the Arts includes contributions from the fields of dance, walking practice, sonic arts, visual art, cultural and human geography, somatic movement practice, poetry and architecture. This collection offers insights and reflections on environment and experience from a range of voices - established and emerging scholars, independent researchers and practitioner-researchers within and beyond the academy. Providing a truly interdisciplinary range of research that centres on notions of site-specific practice and experience, this is an invaluable contribution to performance studies and the wider field of arts and humanities. The reflective accounts and articulation of research methods and approaches make this volume ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as scholars and researchers of performance studies, dance and choreography studies, cultural studies, environmental humanities, arts and social sciences.

Victoria Hunter is Professor of Site Dance at Bath Spa University, UK. Her research explores site-based dance, new materialism and performance, and examines the body's engagement with space and place through corporeal, spatial and kinetic engagements with lived environments. Shirley Chubb is Emerita Reader in Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Chichester, UK, and held a Creative Physiotherapy Scholarship at Auckland University of Technology, NZ, working within the Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences. Her research focuses on broadening the reach, impact and collaborative potential of the visual arts and involves the use of artefacts, film and digital technologies.

Introduction Part 1: Encounters and Imaginaries 1. 'Walking White Cliffs Country' 2. 'Imagined Landscapes/ Uncertain Surfaces: Running, writing, experimental film and Parkinson's Disease' 3. Native American Theatre as Environmental 'Intervention': Larissa FastHorse and Cornerstone Theater Company's 'Place-Specific' Production of Urban Rez 4. 'Correspondence, Coequality and Wildness in Site-based Screen Dance' Part 2: Access and Permissions: Inclusions and exclusions 5. 'Playing Kate: Encroaching and enclosing the maternal commons' 6. Dancing in the Street: Pride, Parade and Protest 7. 'Black dancers: Breaking barriers in British ballet institutions' 8. 'Mudlarking through organisational culture' Part 3: Poetic Encounters: Inner and Outer dialogues 9. 'Tumbles through reality, memory and fiction: desiring a tactile (re)imagining with the Pembrokeshire coast' 10. 'Using Diagrams in Place-Based Performances' 11. 'Sympoietic Encounters' 12. 'The poetics of eco-somatics: on body, mind and ecology.' Part 4: Ecologies, Care and Immersion 13. 'Who Cares: Encounters with the aesthetic use of thermal imaging to explore the role of touch as a signifier of care, contamination, intimacy and trust.' 14. 'From Home to Home: Steps Between Worlds: Peregrination and the Art of Place-Making' 15. 'rince / damsha / macnas: A dance between Gaelic language, embodied disputed spatial practice and choreography as a tool of socio-ecological praxis.' 16. Transgressing Boundaries: BMX biking, public green space and the generation of the commons