Living Landscapes

The Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies in collaboration with the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences are hosting a major international conference on performance, landscape and environment from 18 to 21 June.

Organised by Prof Mike Pearson and Dr Heike Roms from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Living Landscapes will examine the manifold and diverse relationship between landscape, environment and performance.

The conference will address a number of questions, including;
How are landscape and environment revealed, imagined, experienced, contested, animated and represented by, in and through performance? How can performance inform, extend and enhance our engagement with ­ and the interpretation and appreciation of ­ landscape and environment? How can performance help illuminate, explain and problematise the multiplicity of attachments, meanings and emotions that resonate within and from landscapes ­ visual, aural and tactile?

The four day event draws together artists, practitioners and academics for such fields as geography, performance and theatre, archaeology, anthropology, music, dance and film studies, environmental policy, folklore, studies and art history, and will include more than 180 papers, performances, workshops, performative interventions and installations by artists and researchers from Canada, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Uk and USA.

LIVING LANDSCAPES is the annual conference of the Landscape and Environment programme, a thematic, multidisciplinary initiative funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the direction of Prof Stephen Daniels (Nottingham University).

The aim of the five-year programme is to develop arts and humanities understandings of landscape and environment in distinctive, innovative and engaging ways through research projects of the highest quality and international significance.

Its ambition is to increase and enhance perception and knowledge of cultural views of landscape and environment, the many ways the world has been imagined, experienced, designed, made and managed, the complex meanings landscape and environment have for people who live in as well as look at them. In response to this challenge the programme produces work that is critical and creative, collaborative and communicative.

For further details please see http://www.landscape.ac.uk/2009conference.html.