Deby, Carolyn May (2020) Urbanwild becomings : choreographing audience experience to reveal sympoietic entanglement in the Anthropocene everyday. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This practice-led research draws on, and develops, practice methodologies developed over 20 years of site-based performance work with the company sirenscrossing. The research articulates this practice as a phenomenological, embodied theatre of urban human life which seeks to perform and reveal biological, ecological, social, and technological entanglement. The thesis explores how this practice, shaped within a time-space field of affect, sensory inputs, and sign relations, might reveal the sympoietic nature of human life. The research has taken place within the frame of the Anthropocene (the currently proposed stratigraphic Earth epoch), recognising that Earth systems have been overwhelmingly altered by the actions of (some) humans. It proposes that by employing a specific approach to choreographing audience experience, the audiences in question will undergo an embodied insight into their own entangled lifeworld or Umwelt. The research examines the lived experience of urban humans, situating the practice within the everyday. It posits the urban as an aspect of a ‘wild continuum’ (Van Horne and Hausdoerffer 2017: 4) or rather as an urbanwild: a field of converging flows and energies encompassing animal and elemental movement, and equally, social space and technologically reconstructed nature. Both human and nonhuman ‘actors’ are significant within the enquiry, as is the inter-mingling of conscious, unconscious, cognitive, felt, and sensed ways of knowing. The human is understood to be porous and unbounded, as are nonhumans.

lThe written thesis is structured in two chapters: Chapter 1 sets out the relevance of the Anthropocene and the everyday. It then articulates the project’s conception of the urbanwild, drawing on the example of city:skinned (2006). Next, Chapter 1 thinks through the permeable nature of bodies, the significance of sympoiesis, and relates these to the example of rivercities (2010-2014). Chapter 2 focuses on the practice as research (PaR) production of urbanflows: entangled in the grain of worlds, becoming (Coventry, 2019) exploring the significance of sign relations (biosemiosis), rhythmanalysis, and psychogeography as ways to perceive the patterning of the urbanwild. The PaR is considered in relation to relevant theories of theatre and performance, suggesting how audience experience produces a porous immersion in the everyday world.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater T Technology > TR Photography
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Art and anthropology, Public art, Art and society, Art -- Philosophy, Theater -- Anthropological aspects, Performing arts, Urban ecology (Sociology)
Official Date:	September 2020
Dates:	Date Event September 2020 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Whybrow, Nicolas ; Lavender, Andy
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	viii, 182 leaves : illustrations
Language:	eng

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