“The unearthings” are an ongoing body of performance research into rivers, rive-stones and emergent constellations as underground performance practice. The work explores how an expanded form of land dreaming/listening at the imaginal encounter between body, place and spirit, gives rise to certain “otherwise” futures.
The unearthings are designed as an "underneath" movement practice, to listen to the human and nonhuman energies, resonances, information held in places and sites. The unearthings might exist alongside another’s project, or in accompaniment to another event. A kind of divination. A this-is-what and where we are working with/in.
Often human/more-than-human imprints get left in places in ways which repeat over time and need help being shifted or changed. Although this isn’t necessarily the purpose, sometimes the unearthing will resolve something unresolved in a place, or make apparent an action, exchange or ceremony that needs to happen. A virtual choreography to be in dialogue - through movement, gesture, language - with the already dynamics of a place, to reveal what is already-there, already-in-motion, so that we (humans) might attend to the invisible presences as much as the visible. A practice to acknowledge what is underneath in the sense of matter as well as time. The unearthings are performed in collaboration with one or more witness(es), whose dialogue after the unearthing is a part of the practice.
The unearthings can happen anywhere, alongside, underneath, below or just before. Unearthings have so far happened in paf (performing arts forum), Lancashire Forest of Bowland, Betonest Stolpe Germany, Goldsmiths University of London. 2018 - ongoing.
