Ideas Exchange 2023/2024
What will the project involve?
Nightwalker brings together three perspectives; historical, environmental and performative to consider the feminine contemporary nightwalker. Typically our perception of a woman walking at night is shrouded in danger, this project seeks to examine and alter the narrative of women’s presence within the urban night. And In doing so identify what treasures or transformations are being lost through women’s exclusion from certain spaces and times. Both walking and the night time environment have significant impacts on our physical health and wellbeing. This research will pay close attention to the effects of nightwalking on our emotions, physicality and imagination, and how women's wellbeing may be intrinsically connected to the practice of nightwalking.
The team aim to understand, challenge and experience nightwalking. They will share their existing research, identify potential crossovers, points of reflection, and key questions for further research in this area.
The researchers will consider how to develop a practice of nightwalking to test and generate new ideas and insights and to explore their key questions:
- How might historical, ecological and artistic practices inform contemporary night-walking?
- How does gender impact night-walking?
- What is our notion of ‘wildness’, and how does this connect to experiences of nightwalking and femininity?
- What are the contemporary qualities and presences of the night?
- How can nightwalking behaviours be observed, challenged or recreated?
- What does the presence of a feminine nightwalker do to the city, and our notion of cities at night?
The research will use performative practices of score making (a set of actions within a particular time and space) and simultaneous drift (walking without destination). Followed by reflection and development of new strategies for taking nightwalking forward into future projects.
Who are the team and what do they bring?
- Eleanor Rycroft (Theatre, University of Bristol) is an early modern theatre expert, interested in practice, performance, politics and gender. She explores representations of the body in early modern history and drama, as well as in the performance of classical texts today.
- Andy Flack (History, University of Bristol) is an animal and environmental historian, working primarily on human engagements with the non-human animal world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- Hannah Sullivan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Bristol working with performance, dance, writing and audio. She is currently focused on creating new projects around women, music and the night. Hannah has established a monthly nightwalking group of somatic based practitioners, who continue to collectively walk and write on the subject. (www.hannahsullivan.co.uk)
- Jane Mason, Rosalind Holgate Smith, Anne-Marie Fairbrother, Katsura Isobe and Laura Burns are participating artists forming a nightwalking cohort, with specialisms in dance, somatic and environmental arts.
What is to come?
This project will solidify the team’s research question and methodologies of practice, identify additional knowledge or research partners required for larger funding bids, and begin a wider international cohort of invested artists.