SOAK LAB: Watery Bodies

This SOAK LAB was a three-day series of participatory performance workshops, which explored site-based practices at waterside locations around Plymouth: Firestone Bay, Mount Batten Peninsula and Drake’s Reservoir. This SOAK Lab event was made possible by funding from an AHRC Impact Accelerator Award.

Each day explored embodied ways of working with environments with a focus on listening, sound-making and movement as approaches to devising material. The work considered what human and more-than-human stories were revealed by our embodied encounters in these watery locations, paying particular attention to the language of seaweeds and other ecologies. The workshops explored approaches to sounding the shoreline using our bodies (sound walking, field sensing, deep listening, water drumming), and tools (hydrophones for underwater recording).

The creative outputs from the three days were three original new sound pieces broadcast on Soundart Radio (winter 2024).

The Lab was curated and run by Sarah Blissett in collaboration with artists Kerry Priest, Jan-Ming lee, Emma Welton & Anne-Marie Culhane.