Performance Research Residency: Atmospheric Forces

Building on earlier work

Stylistically, and in terms of research process, Atmospheric Forces builds on the artists’ earlier work, Common Salt, performed at Chelsea College of Arts in May 2022. Both performances take place around a table populated by objects, memorabilia and significant texts, allowing the work to unfold through interweaving of narratives, story-telling and performative demonstration. Common Salt explores colonial history and post-colonial temporality, taking the audience across intersecting micro-histories linking India and England from early 17th century and the formation of the East India Company, to 21st century configurations of trade, race and culture.

Atmospheric Forces, in contrast, focuses on exploring geographies of place, location and the politics of displacement and dispersal. Evoking the multiple senses of creating ‘atmosphere’, the work investigates both the environment and the world in which performance takes its breath, and the mood or intangible feeling it breathes into life.

Questioning how performance is made

During their residency, Sheila and Sue interacted daily with the performance research community at Wimbledon College of Arts, generously sharing their reflections on studio practice with PhD researchers, MA students and their tutors and supervisors. This enabled students to engage with detailed questions and discussions about how performance is made, rather than simply focusing on what it means.

The focus on making – and on exploring processes of practice-led enquiry – is a distinctive feature of the practice-based performance research taking place at the College. We value performance-making as a mode of knowledge production and circulation, celebrating the creative thinking and critical aesthetics that its distinctive modes of practice are uniquely placed to contribute.

The work-in-progress showing of Atmospheric Forces, which concluded the week-long residency, was itself an example of the creative atmosphere generated by a performance research environment.

Professor Carl Lavery for the University of Glasgow observed: “It was a fantastic event. I was super impressed by the contribution made by your students and staff, and it was great to see so many artists in attendance. This is exactly the type of thing that university theatre and performance departments ought to be doing. The pedagogical and research components of such events are in dialectic play, and the University becomes a nexus for thinking and making. It was a generous offer and a vital one.”

Collaboration, dialogue and exchange was at the heart of the process, stretching back to a researcher development workshop led by Sheila and Sue at Wimbledon College of Arts in November 2023. Focusing on the ethics of care and making, Artistic Atmospherics asked a series of semi-structured, self-reflexive questions about how performance-makers collaborate and how collaboration is essential to performance-making.

How do we want to live? How do we start? What is the atmosphere? These questions won’t be answered easily, and never conclusively; but Sheila and Sue’s artists’ residency gave us confidence that performance research is essential to investigating them rigorously and imaginatively. The artists will be creating the final work to be shown in late 2024.

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