Land-Sea-Self

Tess Denman-Cleaver will present extracts from a series of performance works made with the North Sea.

In both an imaginative and geographical sense, Project R-hythm, Sounds & Guts and Deeply Morbid have been created through processes of thinking with this body of water, and thinking through its role in personal experience and national identity. As well as sharing extracts from each work, Tess will also discuss the nature and challenges of the making processes. Presentation of these works as part of the Ecopoetics Seminar series will explore the significance of the landscape as a collaborating presence in performance making. Tess will invite discussion on the implications of performing – or thinking - with land/seascapes for wider understandings of landscape and our relationships to place.

The seminar will also include fragments of new work and thinking around performance and landscape, which I look forward to discussing in the context of the multidisciplinary context of the Ecopoetics series. Tess is a performance maker, theatre director and researcher. She is Artistic Director of Tender Buttons (www.tenderbuttons.co.uk / @TenderButtonsNE) and is carrying out a PhD at Newcastle University that considers human relationships with landscape through her Performance Philosophy practice.

She has a particular interest in coastal locations; places which are both seascape and landscape. Tender Buttons is currently producing The Sea Trilogy, a series of works that focus on the physical, cultural and philosophical significance of the North Sea.

The 2015/16 Art History and Visual Culture research seminar series, chaired by João Florêncio under the theme of “Ecopoetics,” brings together speakers from a wide variety of disciplines – from art history and visual culture to theatre and performance, geography, law, and sociology – to explore the ways in which the realm of the visual intersects with ecological debates, thus reflecting on what it might mean to build an oikos, a home or dwelling place, predicated on more ethical modes of engagement and cohabitation with the human and nonhuman other.

All are welcome to this public event. Free; no booking required.

Contact Details: j.florencio@exeter.ac.uk