Contemporary Landscape Performance in Scotland : Mapping, Aesthetics, Political Effects
University of Glasgow
Biography
Kamila Mamadnazarbekova (she/her) is preparing her thesis on the role of landscape theatre and the concepts of nature in 21st century British theatre at the Sorbonne University under the supervision of Professor Elisabeth Angel-Perez and co-supervision of Dr Anna Street. Kamila graduated from the Moscow Theatre Academy. She also earned her Masters degree from Le Mans University, where she is part of Performing Water research platform.
Introduction
During the EARTH Scholarship, Kamila will continue her PhD research and create an analytical survey of contemporary landscape performance in Scotland. She intends to gather substantive documentation, interview artists and researchers, and catalogue existing personal and institutional archives. Building upon traditional forms of Humanities research, Kamila will also study first-hand the lochs and glens, the Cairngorm mountains and the tributaries of the river Clyde. Relying on unique performative methodologies developed at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Glasgow, Kamila will historicise and contextualise contemporary Scottish landscape performance and trace its influence on British and continental scenes. She will be conducting her proposed research with Professor Carl Lavery.
Research
My PhD is focused on landscape theatre, and the EARTH Scholarship gave me an opportunity to spend three months at the heart of a dynamic research community at the Theatre Studies of the University of Glasgow. I discovered the city as a text and as a network of alternative venues and historic sites bearing the memories of thirty years of the National Review of Live Art at the Arches, the transformation of Tramway into an art centre with its Hidden Gardens designed by the NVA, and the construction of new independent venues, such as the wall of death at The Clydebuilt Revelator, which connects the memories of Barclay Curle shipyards to the legacies of Clydeside showpeople. I had a chance to meet artists of different generations (from legendary figures like Richard Demarco and Sam Ainsley to emerging artists Hamshya Rajkumar and Rabindranath Bhose), to record interviews with some of them (Hanna Tuulikki, Nic Green, Ivor McAskill, Iman Tajik) and schedule further meetings. At the Archives & Special Collections, I had access to unpublished scripts, such as the texts of David Greig for Suspect Culture and those of Peter Arnott for 7:84. The University Library was a precious source of contemporary publications on theatre and performance, and the authors were often right there available for interviews. On the theoretical level, the history and practices of walking performance research and the methodologies of infrastructural humanities gave me new ideas for my thesis. I would like to share some of my field notes with you.
15-18 May
Very intense days of the Re-Playing It Again Symposium at the CCA make me discover strategies of contemporary artists working with landscapes in the liminal space between theatricality and performativity. Many of them personally present or retrospectively comment on their work.
I see Simon Starling and Graham Eatough together on stage, talking about their collaborations, objects and sculptures, scenography and site-specific projects. I take part in Minty Donald’s and Nick Millars’s workshop Deviating from the Score: What’s Repetition to a Rock? and closely observe their interpretation of Fluxus-inspired performance scores and life cycles of minerals. I do it myself. I later notice the influence of their work on performance scores in their students’ projects.
11-13 June
In June, I follow the creation of Three Words for Forest at James Arnott Theatre, witnessing a massive archive of transcribed interviews with UK forestry professionals in the face of rising uncertainty being turned into a structured piece of verbatim theatre with three actors and a live cello music inhabiting Morven MacLeod scenography.
May-June
My stay in Glasgow starts with long walks along the Kelvin and Clyde Rivers and the Forth and Clyde Canal with Minty Donald’s corpus of river works in my head and her new materialist approach to water cycle and water infrastructure extended in time and space. Revisiting and taking the footsteps is one of the possible ways to approach archives. I fall in love with the River Kelvin running through the green parts of West End and Kelvingrove Park, a well-behaved river providing shade for idle walks under Victorian bridges and soothing urban anxiety with the views of fishing herons. The other river, the great Clyde that made Glasgow, gives me a very different impression with its blowing winds and granite shores shaped by improvements, transatlantic trade, the decline of the shipbuilding industry, and the recovering human and non-human communities. ‘Here in Glasgow everything is pointing West, towards the Atlantics’, observes Carl Lavery in his paper of NOW/THEN Symposium. Reading published accounts of different people walking in the mountains and along the rivers —dancers, theatre-makers, geographers and historians —I think I am reading everything as a script, as something that either has been performed or could be performed.
Image: Minty Donald, Nick Millar, Reservoirs : Lily Loch (2016), one of nine granite boulders showing reservoirs that feed the Forth and Clyde Canal, part of THEN/NOW performative installation
7 July
Walking performance is a way to address the genealogy and evolution of the concept of site-specificity. Various researchers (Clive 2021, Turner 2012) refer to the Korean-American art critic Miwon Kwon (2004) and her definition of a ‘site’ that transforms from a physical location—’grounded, fixed, actual’—to discursive, ungrounded, fluid and virtual. Kwon considers the notion of a site to be nostalgic and outdated. She proposes three ‘paradigms of site specificity – phenomenological, social/institutional, and discursive’, which stay in fluid and dialectical relations to each other. Using river-based metaphors, Kwon suggests that ‘site-oriented practices’ work between ‘flow’ and ‘sediment’, ‘fluidity’ and ‘sedentariness’. Even though Kwon mostly wrote about visual art, her conclusions can be applied to theatre and performance as well. Thus, in Site: Between Ground and Groundlessness, Stephen Hodge and Cathy Turner root British site-specific performance in the 1960s avant-garde practice of happening, situationist drift and American land art. For each historical parallel, a Scottish connection emerges: from Alan Karpow’s happenings being brought to the 1963 Edinburgh Festival to Richard Long’s and Hamish Fulton’s works created locally (A Line in Scotland, 1981; 21 Days in Cairngorms, 2010). In terms of genealogy, Hodge and Turer draw a line between the ‘quiet activism’ of Hamish Fulton, the Welsh director Mike Pearsons, who worked massively in non-theatre spaces and proposed the concept of ‘theatre/archaeology’, and the Glaswegian artist Angus Farquar, the founder of the much-celebrated company NVA (Nacionale Vitae Activa). In Archives&Special Collections I read the press cuttings about their work Half-Life (2007), a theatrical study of five-thousand-year-old culture in Kilmartin Glen.
24 July
Sonic approaches to site-specificity are explored in Raise the Alarm—a full-day experience of deep listening curated by Martel Ollerenshaw at the Glasgow School of Art. It is a chance to see Hanna Tuulikki’s work with voice and movement, props and costumes, animal mimetism and reinterpretation of folkloric traditions in Seals’kin (2022). Her careful attention to remote landscapes through vocal response to their shapes and histories merits further discussion.
Away with the Birds (2014) is a live performance set on the Isle of Canna. Female ensemble responds to the calls of waders, wildfowl and corvids, evoking sea, shoreline, cliffs, moor, wind and woodland. They sing the shape and the movement patterns of birds—wading on the shoreline, swooping before the cliffs, and beating skeins. In Cloud-Cuckoo-Island (2016), Hanna Tuulikki embodies the birdlike Sweeney, the legendary Irish king who exiled himself on the Isle of Eigg after a violent battle. There he wandered lost in the landscape, sleeping in thorn trees, growing feathers on his skin and developing a sensitivity to sound, particularly to bird calls. In another song cycle Women of the Hill (2015), Tuulikki explores a prehistoric matriarchal cult that existed around High Pasture Cave on the Isle of Skye and the shapes of land expressed through the sound and the production of sound. Seals’kin (2022) is a work that exists both as a live performance and as a film shot at the mouth of the river Ythan on the Aberdeenshire coast where hundreds of seals rest on estuary banks. The music score performed by Tuulikki uses voice imitation of seal calls. Her costume refers to folkloric creatures, half-women and half-seals, who are looking for their skin to return to the sea and often being a metaphor for grieving. Becoming a seal through the song, the performer eventually puts on the skin and enters into the water.
Image: Hanna Tuulikki prints and objects from different performance pieces on the table at her studio on Pollokshaws Road.
Some scores are performed directly in the locations that inspired them. In other cases, the work with landscape and folklore is brought into the studio. In the choreographed piece Deer Dancer (2019), Tuulikki revisits three different folkloric traditions with similar elements of ritual dance performed by men before or during deer hunting and imitating male deer predatory behaviour—the one of pasqua yaqui tribe in Arizona and the Abbots Bromley Horn dance from Yorkshire and Highland Fling. Four characters represent the archetypes of fragile masculinity—monarch, young buck, old sage and fool—each with his costume, props and movement vocabulary. The idea of wilderness as a site of toxic hetero-masculinity is deconstructed by female dancers who change roles during the six-hour live-streamed performance (during Covid).
28 July
Emblematic of class and royalty, the deer is very present in Scottish performance. From David Overrend’s experiments with becoming the deer at the Knepp estate to Fleur Darkin’s recent piece My Muses Take Care of Me (2024), which reflects on the presence of women and animals in the museums. At the Burrell Collection, the dancers Melissa Kieffer, Valerie Ebuwa and Amy Hollinshead graced among the sculptures wrapped into ethically designed animal skins led by the voice French sculptor and singer Claire Barbier taking on the lines of Robert Burns.
Animal drag and folklore pave the way to the aesthetics of new ecological relations. Radical trans-feminist revision of Highland music and storytelling in Charlotte MacLean’s Futuristic Folktales (2024) connects remote timescales through the cosmology of a giant primordial womb and constant rebirth. Day changes to night, seasons turn in circular time, and creatures get born and die, articulating their identity and existence.
Deer Dance devised by Nic Green, Jo Hellier, Simone Kenyon, Fabiola Santana and Hanna Tuulikki, with the dramaturgy by Peter McMaster and costumes and props by Lydia Honeybone, is also a landmark of specific ecology of the Glaswegian performance scene. The work of every participant deserves individual attention. For example, Simone Kenyon is known for having walked 270 miles in 31 days from Eddle in Derbyshire to Kirk Yetholm at the Scottish border for her piece The Pennine Way, which she devised and performed together with the dancer Tamara Ashley. After moving to Scotland, she explored the small routes around Huntley in her work Hielan Ways (2014). Home to the walking artist Claudia Zeiske and to the Deveron Project, Huntly appears as another important centre of landscape art and walking performance. Later Simone Kneyon translated Nan Shepherd’s Cairngorms-based novel into site-specific choreography for five dancers (Caroline Reagh, Petra Soor, Jo Hellier, Karen Smail, Claricia Parinussa) Into the Mountain (2016). In this performance, in order to become water streams that are rolling down the hills of Glen Feshie, the dancers ‘gradually run down the hillsides … all searching for a pathway through the glen floor with an evident joy and collective fayness, gleaning the sense of each other’s emergent wateriness and curiosity’.
30 July
Animal drag and interest in metamorphosis led me to the work of the Cade & MacAskill duo. The Making of Pinocchio (2023) is a personal take on the story of a piece of wood who first becomes a puppet and then longs to be a real boy. From Stud (2015) to Groom and Stable Boy (2024), Ivor MacAskill continues their research into performing masculinity in the Scottish context. They trans-feminist approach to subversive authoritarian ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ has inspiring political potential. In the video essay Presenting Ourselves (2021), Cade&MacAskill show their vacation in a fisherman village facing Skye Island. The simple gesture of undressing on the beach becomes reclaiming and affirmative for the trans-man after the breast surgery. Seal-watching cruise offers identification with ‘wild mythological creature climbing through the landscape: You may not have seen this kind of creature before, but you have been told that we exist’.
The political potential of autobiographical performance can manifest itself in many different ways. In Bordered Miles (2020), Iman Tajik walks 26 miles from the Glaswegian town hall at George Square to the refugee detention facility of the Dungavel House Immigration Removal Center (IRC), where the artist spent his time during his long asylum-seeking procedure. In the bucolic beauty of the Lanarkshire countryside the walkers put a flag made of golden emergency blankets as a sign of solidarity with the refugees in the bordered world. In his account of the walk, Tom Jeffreys cites the French trans-feminist philosopher Paul B. Preciado on the universality of the border experience: ‘The migrant has lost the nation-state. The refugee has lost their house. The trans person loses their body. They all cross that border. The border is part of them and cuts through them. Usurps and overthrows them.’
August 8
On the very last days of my stay, while trying to catch some shows on Fringe, I meet the legendary Richard Demarco who invented the festival, brought Joseph Beuys and Alan Kaprow to Scotland, created Traverse theatre, and introduced Beuys to George Wyllie. Looking at the images of Joseph Beuys at Rannoch Moor from his archive, I realise that all this time I have been walking through the pages of history and that, indeed, as Demarco says, meaningful art originates through meetings with places and through friendships.
The National Review of Live Art 1979- 2010: a personal story. Edited by Dee Heddon with Nikki Milican and Jennie Klein.
https://nrla30.com/catalogue-flip-book/
Stephen Hodge and Cathy Turner, “Site: Between Ground and Groundlessness”, Heddon, Deirdre & Klein, Jennie (2012), edited by, Histories & Practices of Live Art, Palgrave Macmillan, p.90-120.
Clive, Rachel (2021) Geodiversity and human difference: disability, landscape form and process. PhD thesis.
Donald, Minty, “Urban River and Site-Specific Performance”, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 22(2), 213-223
Donald, Minty (2014), Exploring human/environment interdependencies through critical spatial practice. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.
THEN/NOW Symposium on public art, place-making, heritage and ecology, 2016 // http://www.then-now.org/symposium
Tom Jeffreys, Bordered Miles: In the Footsteps of Iman Tajik, Map Magazine, December 2021
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/bordered-miles-in-the-footsteps-of-iman-tajik
Simone Kenyon (2019), Into the Mountain, Performance Research, Vol. 24(2), p. 32-35.
Simone Kenyon, Journey towards multitudinous bodies: working with the body weather practices through the creation of Into the Mountain, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Vol 12(2), p.224-232.