UK
Chatterley Whitfield, Stoke-on-Trent
This dance-poetry-film comes out of an Arts and Humanities Research Council project on Quebec's Eastern Townships and l'Estrie. It is a response to an audio-walk set in Magog, a lakeside town, tourist destination, and site of a former textiles factory - a trace of the region's industrial past that is little known outside it. The walk considers literature, geography, and history, and includes creative prompts for participants to try if they so wish. Choreographer, Clare Reynolds, responded to the walk with this solo danced by Patsy Browne-Hope, which brings together Magog's deindustrialised landscapes with Reynold's home city of Stoke-on-Trent.
'Heartlands: Earth & Bones' is part of a literary geographies and participatory geohumanities project, entitled 'Heartlands/Pays du coeur: Geohumanities and Quebec's “regional” fiction’. Ceri Morgan (PI) drew on desk-based research on C21 fiction and creative nonfiction (in English and French) set in Quebec's Eastern Townships and l'Estrie to script an audio-walk (in English, also translated into French). Located in Magog, the route of the lakeside walk is partly symbolic, in that whilst elements are site-responsive, others make reference to elsewhere in the Townships/l'Estrie. The walk offers an insight into the region's literature, geography, and history, and includes creative prompts. Prior to publication, Morgan trialled the audio-walk with other artists and community members, making modifications in response to feedback. Reynolds participated in the second trial, drawing on it to choreograph the dance solo performed in the film. Paul Rogerson also participated in the trial, going on to compose the film's music. Morgan wrote the poem used in the film's soundtrack following a participatory activity involving undertaking the walk around a lake on Keele campus (in psychogeographic fashion). She performed a draft version of 'Wrinkled Skin' at an informal public reading event to mark the close of the project.
Exploring themes of bodily responses to place/s, site-responsive creative practices, interconnections between places, interrelationships between the human and other-than-human, the expansion of literary studies.