Web Walking, the Landscape Pattern and Place-story Diagrams in Performance

Abstract

In this article we (artist-researchers Crab & Bee) describe a process of tracking minerals and strands of significance through three contrasting landscapes (Llaneirwg/St Mellons in the Cardiff suburbs, the Hemmerdon mine between Plymouth and Dartmoor, and the Seaton River in Cornwall) using a performative and hyper-sensitized web walking. The paper explains the plotting of these strands onto a geographical pattern, grounded by what anthropologist Gilbert Simondon has described as beacons of immersive orientation or ‘privileged points’ and, at the same time, onto an emergent pattern of stories that unevenly connects the three sites. We then describe how we drew on such connective strands, stories and patterns to create a diagram for a performance, Webs, Nets and a Carrier Bag, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, in September 2021, as part of celebrations for the launch of Making routes: journeys in performance 2010 – 2020 (Triarchy Press). The article recounts the mapping of the three sites, and how we could draw on ideas from Ursula le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the Lessons in Hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis and the Arachnean web making of Fernand Deligny to help us make a performance container and draw a diagram in performance using colour-coded costumes, ribbons, and totemic objects to indicate the interlacing of the three storylines. We describe performance materials passing from body to body in observable and demonstrable patterns, and how attention is given to the diagramming of transcorporeality; how through the monstrous hybrid assemblages of these place-tales and by ‘being there’ – with water, limestone, tungsten, tin, copper, kaolin and arsenic – patterns are absorbed and passed on through performing bodies.