Pearson|Shanks—Theatre/Archaeology—Return and Prospect

Abstract

Twenty years ago we opened a dialogue and collaboration through the theatre company Brith Gof, of which Mike was the founding artistic director. As Pearson|Shanks we bring together performance art and archaeology through shared interests: forms of (re)collection-the gatherings of memory practices; and site and locale-treated as multitemporal articulations, where different events and times endure and come together in the material forms of inhabited places, in the traces and remains of the past in the present.Our hybrid practice around archaeologies of the contemporary past has involved fieldwork and encounter, performed work on a large and small scale, media experimentation in documentation and representation, curated itinerant colloquia, research and authoring through sites and landscapes in northern Europe (Wales, northern England, and the Scottish borders), the Mediterranean (Sicily and the world of the ancient Greek city state), California, and the online world Second Life.We define this theatre/archaeology as the re-articulation of fragments of the past as real time event (Pearson and Shanks 2001). We maintain that performance is dynamic, creative, constitutive design practice that offers fertile and liberating means of addressing some key contemporary concerns regarding the significance of the material past to the present in that vast culture industry of heritage, as well as in negotiations around personal and community identity, and particularly regarding site and landscape. Concomitantly we hold that archaeological practice is a paradigm of inscription, documentation, (re)mediation, and (re)presentation of site and performance.

The New Old Rush

“…Its material strata, which juxtapose older and newer media to tell a reflexively partial and unfixed story about the pasts and present of a place, perform the work of "interpretive archaeology," a process that "entertains no final and definitive account of the past as it was" -or the present as it seems to be -"but fosters multivocal and multiple accounts." 30 No one of Bonanza's documentary subjects pronounces the final word on Bonanza's past, present, or future, just as no one medium provides the uncontested foundation of the piece and its spatialized meanings; it is rather in the interplay of voices and the layering of media -as well as in the vocative interplay of layered media that address each other -that contingent insights about place, space, and time emerge.…”

Imagined Archaeology and Enlivening the Proximate Senses in the construction of Blind Torrent – An Interdisciplinary Screendance Project

“…As Pearson and Shanks discuss in Theatre and Archeology, "The square mile, the intimate landscape of one's childhood, the patch of ground we know in a detail we can never know again." 13 Thus it was the primal understanding of an immediate landscape, which provided the foundation for the film.…”

“…Memories, pasts, continuities, present aspirations and designs are assembled and recontextualized in a work that is both performance and archaeology." 28 Merleau-Ponty implies that there is, a relationship, between beings who are both embodied and limited and an enigmatic world of which we catch a glimpse, but only ever from points of view that hide as much as they reveal.…”

“…We imagine that Blind Torrent creates an environment where "history is experienced as contemporaneous, where the past still operates on the present" 30 and where the landscape becomes a palimpsest, marked, named and overwritten by the actions of ancestors. The landscape in this context can be seen as the same original document but layered with the barely discernible traces of past lives and cultures, and acting as prompts to unearth and re-imagine.…”

Activating Imaginative Attention and Creating Observant Moments in the Everyday Through the Art of Walking

“…In their in uential book eatre/Archeology, Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks point out three speci c worlds that come together in the site-speci c performance: the performance, the site and the audience. 31 And these are constantly overlapping. Fiona Wilkie, who has written a number of important works on walking and performance, develops these thoughts further and highlights the aspect of negotiation as an aspect that is involved when di erent "worlds", or complex and overlapping sets of rules, meet.…”