Ecologies of Practice: Landscaping with Beavers
- Submitting institution
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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2847061
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.22501/ruu.699024
- Title of journal
- RUUKKU: Studies in Artistic Research
- Article number
- 12
- First page
- n.p.
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- -
- ISSN
- 2341-9687
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This article reports and reflects on a workshop that brought together a range of academics and practitioners, geographers and artists, with an interest in the landscaping practices of beavers. Building on previous interdisciplinary rewilding explorations (Performing Wild Geographies, Knepp,Sussex), 2017, we used practice research and a series of planned experiments to explore collaborative practice with more-than-human participants to explore the following questions: How do beavers sense and make landscapes? What do beavers and their humans tell us about the arts of multispecies collaboration, such as the turn to nature in water management? What might be gained from combining the fieldwork practices of artists and geographers?
Previous work at Knepp had indicated the benefits of sharing practice across disciplines and so we developed a programme of creative-critical tasks and performance-making prompts. The process drew on the work of Donna Haraway and was also inspired by Phil Smith’s Mythogeography approaches to site-responsive performance-making. We made progress in understanding how to collaborate with more-than-human collaborators and began to get a sense of how “making with” could happen using anthropological ideas of gift-giving and exchange. We also learned what our disciplines could offer each other in these shared enquiries.
My response deploys Augusto Corrieri’s ideas on major and minor dramaturgy in ecological performance as a framework for analysis and the reader may be left with expanded ideas of what performance/collaboration and artistic research can be, its forms, methods and outputs.
We subsequently received Royal Society of Edinburgh funding to further develop this work. Other material connected to this will also appear in 'Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010-2020', a book that David Overend and I are co-editing for Triarchy Press. The research has also been shared for a wider audience on the Making Routes blog.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -