I have worked as a performer, designer, deviser, director, writer for: Clanjamfrie (Scotland), Collectif Organum (France), Theatre of Public Works (England); was a founding member of Pants Performance Association, and for the past 25 years has been collaborating with Jules Dorey Richmond. I have also worked in film, in particular with Daniel Reeves (USA) and worked with the European Council running workshops with young men as a means to prevent violence in everyday life.
In an attempt to answer 'How can you bear testimony to an event you did not witness?', I developed the Level 2 module Artist as Witness to evoke a pedagogic model of how to liberate the creativity of student participants within a non-fixed, fluid, ruptured landscape. The project sat alongside, and was interconnected with my postgraduate work into memory, place and performance.
This project aimed to engage students in a three year performance research programme examining the effect of the Shoah as an epistemic breach in the ‘story’ of culture. Specific emphasis was placed on representation, creativity, composition, performance, documentation and collaboration.
In each year of the project, I continue to take a group of Level 6 students to Poland for a five day study visit. The group spend an eight hour day at Auschwitz and Birkenau, in addition to a walking tour of Kazimerz, the site of the Jewish community pre-Hitlerzeit and the Kantor Museum.
On their return to York, the students spend a 14 week semester working to reflect on the cultural, political and aesthetic repercussions of the events, and then create a performance which reflects the times we live in.
