Using Diagrams in Place-Based Performances

This chapter addresses certain problems for a poetics of experience of landscape and how a diagrammatical reading of the text of a place, as part of ‘being there’, might help avoid our experiencing it as a literary landscape and, instead, enter a corporeal entanglement with it. This chapter describes how we might embody, and not simply ‘tell of’ (or tell of the telling of) landscape experience, using diagrammatical performance to draw others into a sensorial re-imagining of space and its place-stories. By seeking an intersection where bodies and the imaginal meet, this chapter explores the parts that the stories, substances, colours and codes might play in such a poetics. The author presents a response to these possibilities partly by describing Crab & Bee’s performance-making in response to particular landscapes in Plymouth. For the past two years, the author, with Helen Billinghurst, as Crab & Bee, has been visiting these areas regularly, tracking deer, keeping abreast of local news stories and monitoring the phenomenological and ecological effects of large-scale traffic infrastructure and house-building. Then making diagrammatical performances in response to our findings. It describes how, in making such performances, they have found help in Fernand Deligny’s arachnid paths, the diagrams of Simon O’Sullivan, the visceral approach of Alkistis Dimech to the moving body in space and Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction.