Phil Smith – författare

Diagrammatical Performances’ traces some of the traditions and contemporary developments in the uses of diagrams – actual and metaphorical – in the making of performance that nurtures a relationship between humans and more-than-humans.Addressing students, researchers, and teachers of radical theatre, eco-activists, makers of eco-theatre and site-specific performance, the book provides a radical description of the diagram, a history of its uses in theatre and performance, and a toolkit for its applications in making radical eco-theatre that swerves anthropocentric concerns for more direct engagements with the more-than-human. ‘Diagrammatical Performances’ draws on a global diversity of practices from those of Atis Rezistans in Haiti to the choreographies of Henry Daniel and Zab Maboungou via the embodied performance art of Ana Mendieta, Miranda Whall, and Louise Ann Wilson. It charts lineages of use through Symbolist Theatre, modernist theatres like Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, while drawing on ideas from key theorists such as Astrida Neimanis, Baz Kershaw, and Donna Haraway. The book also draws upon the authors’ own diagrammatical performance-making in their ‘Crab & Bee’ partnership – in performances such as ‘Around The Hills’, ‘Leadworking’ and ‘Scoriton Mysteries’ – to present accessible techniques, tactics, exercises and approaches for other performance makers to draw upon.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance, fine art, and creative writing studies, eco-activists, and media commentators on green matters.

This practical, accessible and far-reaching guide to making site-specific theatre and performance emphasises the diversity of approaches to the practice, and explores key principles of space and site. Phil Smith draws on a wide range of interdisciplinary and international performance examples, and uses an innovative variety of exercises, to show students and aspiring performance-makers how to find a site and generate a performance beyond the theatre building.

[Economy edition] This is the definitive guide to Counter-Tourism, except that Counter-Tourism has a low opinion of definitive guides. So it's more like an equivocal misguide. It includes dozens of detailed Counter-Tourism 'tactics' plus the thinking behind Counter-Tourism, its academic and philosophical background, and its roots in film, music and literature. It also features more than 200 colour photographs, gathered by the author in the course of his counter-tourist driftings. In addition, Part 2 of the Handbook has ideas on how to extend the tactics into interventions that can be planned and performed in heritage sites. And Part 3 goes on to suggest open 'infiltrations' that can be used by heritage site managers themselves to reinvent their own sites. Alongside this there's a photo-essay on using the tactics, and a full bibliography. The Handbook is a bridge between the playful practicality of the Counter-Tourism Pocketbook and the deep space of Mythogeography.

"A sensitive walk up any High Street is a Pilgrim's Progress" Phil Smith - playwright, walk-performance artist and author (Mythogeography and Counter-Tourism) - recently retraced W.G. Sebald's famous 'Rings of Saturn' walk round East Anglia. At one level On Walking describes this blistered walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in places like Dunwich, Bungay, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs, white deer and alien trails. Phil Smith's walk soon becomes every bit as remarkable as Sebald's and he matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe. At a second level, the book sets out a unique kind of 'hyper-sensitised' walking for which the author is quietly famous. It burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and aches of the everyday. The Suffolk walk described here is an exemplary walk that goes beyond 'wandering around looking at stuff' and shows how every walk can be art, revolution and pilgrimage. At a third level, On Walking is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, dancing, jouissance, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, architecture, grief, pilgrimage, WWII, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, somatics and synchronicity.

Among other things, Phil Smith proposes: * An unravelling of psychogeography from its early roots, assessing its contribution to the state of the walking arts, and looking forwards/around to what might come next. * a partial mapping of the 'evolution' of walking that looks at 'stages' in that evolution. * a helicopter view that allows walking artist/practitioners to place themselves in historical and artistic context. * important new ideas about abusive semi-public spaces (in the wake of scandals in the UK and elsewhere involving public figures, the church and others) - suggesting how radical walking can act against 'the spectacle' and power. * a compelling theory about romanticism and the postmodern in relation to walking. * a World Brain for walking.# * strategies, tactics and a full manifesto for Radical Walking.

In this Footbook, Phil Smith (Mytho, Crab Man) extends his critical account of the gentle walking arts to the predatory lurch of the living dead. The author has been a keen observer of the zombie mythos for the past 35 years, and here he draws on the mass of plots, images and metaphors that can be found swarming in zombie movies and comics. Instead of treating zombie media as a kind of parallel universe, he concentrates on the 'normality' of the zombie apocalypse - showing how zombies have been used to depict, slave labour, wage labour, the consumer, the dispossesed, the disenfranchised and the underprivileged, and then moving on to explain how much more complicated it is than that. He uses his analysis of zombie media to set out a groundbreaking way to have presence in everyday life. Invoking slowness, fragmentary consciousness, thickness and thingness, the author describes in theory and in practice, how to walk from Night to Day and away from the old Dawn into a radical nothingness. Gorehounds will never see the zombie the same way again.Drawing examples from across the spectrum of zombie media, with plenty from its margins, Phil Smith celebrates and berates the zombie; then turns it into a meditation, a manifesto, a dance score and the herald of a social movement. Starting with the three key principles of Interiority, Carnival and an End to Ends, The Footbook of Zombie Walking offers a way back to a vital Life and an art of Living. It is the next step, beyond Mythogeography, to ending media predations, putting subjectivities back on the streets and coming to be present in everyday life.

In a 1934 lecture, Marcel Mauss said: "A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema."Here are the roots of contemporary views of daily-life movement (including walking). We notice people who don't walk normally. We notice ourselves when we don't walk normally.There is, it seems, an intense, invisible pressure to walk normally. Straight is the gait. Call it ambulonormativity.For about 9 months, two walking-authors/artists - Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith - found themselves wrestling with not being able to walk normally. They wrote to one another about it and, amongst other things, reflected on: prostheses waddling Butoh built-up shoes walking in pain bad legs vertigo falling (and fallen) places hubris bad walks scores for falling down walking carefully disappointment.This is their conversation. From it, there emerges an 'Alphabet of Falling', a sustained reflection on the loss of normal capabilities, anecdotes and autobiographical stories, and the beginnings of a larger discussion about srumbling and falling: the pedestrian equivalent of blowing an uncertain trumpet.As the book concludes: "When you next fall, stay down for a while, see what comes. Then, when you get to your feet again, rather than relying on your body's natural approximations of space, choose your steps, not anxiously but in an excited kind of wariness; and, with each pace, a little more undo the 'grounds' that tripped you up."

Mythogeographer Phil Smith has been walking, exploring, photographing, filming, talking and writing about South Devon for about 20 years. He has absorbed it, and it him. In Anywhere, walking and writing as Cecile Oak (a young PhD student of Symbolist art and performance who is invited to report on a Radical Walking conference in Paignton) Phil offers us an extraordinarily vivid portrait of a small part of South Devon - including Dawlish, Teignmouth, Paignton, Goodrington, Babbacombe, Dartington, Newton Abbot, Plymouth, Exeter and their surroundings. The picture he presents is not always pretty but never short of startling and sometimes jaw-dropping detail. Ad it's all brought to exhilarating life in this account of a series of intense journeys that he has made on foot in these places. Anywhere is an adventure, momentous and fleshy as any novel. It is also the first, detailed mythogeographical survey of a defined area. Its subject is the place, the landscape, the buildings, the history and the people. It sets in motion, around each other, its subject's geological instabilities, deep political fissures, legends and monsters, street generosities and unexpected histories. This is Devon as it has never been seen before - Devon from deep within, mined and ploughed by a quarter century of investigation, treading its footpaths and pavements. And Anywhere is also a way of looking and feeling: a lesson in how to be (and walk) in your own place, village, city, countryside, wilderness: a guidebook for anywhere. - See more at: http: //www.triarchypress.net/anywhere.html#sthash.XRHGrG4b.dpuf

Every place has it stories. But in some places those stories get forgotten and distorted, even tarmacked and concreted over. This is nowhere more true than in Milton Keynes, where the opinions of those who have never been to the place, or who have never ventured beyond its traffic grid, are repeatedly rolled out in the media: 'it all looks the same', 'a dystopian urban sprawl', 'concrete cow culture'.Writer, walker and mythogeographer Phil Smith has walked Milton Keynes to find some of its missing stories: stories of the old, even ancient, places within the modern city; stories of the unusual geography of ritual spaces awaiting new processions and services; stories of the forest hidden within the houses. In 'The MK Myth' he has used these rarely told stories and less well-known spaces as the backdrop to an original novel that gives MiltonKeynes a new myth of itself.'The MK Myth' is a novel for our decaying, digital times that will make sense to readers anywhere. Pursuing its central character, K, a marketing executive who falls out of the comforting ambition of her everyday life, The MK Myth takes us on a precarious journey through a city in transition, encountering its extraordinary characters as they navigate a returning past and daunting future.Uniquely, readers can follow, not only from the comfort of their sofas, but also by taking the book out into the streets, alleys, paths and woods, walking or cycling the same journey as K and sharing in her uncovering of the hidden and emerging MK.Make it your (mis)guide to a remarkable and unique city. Feel the stories under, in and through your feet. Become the myth.

Phil Smith (Crabman/Mythogeography) and Tony Whitehead join forces with master photographer John Schott to lead readers on a `virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. “What is most real is what you have still to discover.” “Relax in your seat. Allow the train to take you along the water’s edge to the beginning point of your walking pilgrimage… When the train pulls into the platform, step off. Hidden behind the platform is a broken machine; a mechanised fortune teller – the `voice of truth’ – discarded from the nearby arcade of slot machines. Propped against the side of a building, its mouth is silent, its pronouncements have ceased; any truths you find today will be your own.” Pilgrimages – real and imagined - are always popular, sometimes compulsory. Bodh Gaya, Santiago, Mecca, Jerusalem, Puri: a few of the sites that beckon. The pilgrimage to the authentic self takes a similar path in an interior landscape. In the 15th century, Felix Fabri combined the two, using his visits to Jerusalem to write a handbook for nuns wanting to make a pilgrimage in the imagination, whilst confined to their religious houses. For Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, the authors followed Fabri’s example: first walking together over many weeks – not to reach a destination but simply to find one – then, in startling words and images, conjuring an armchair pilgrimage for the reader… along lanes and around hills, into caves and down to the coast. “We arrived again and again at what we assumed would be a final `shrine’, only to be drawn onwards and inwards towards another kind of finality… rather than reaching a destination, the pilgrimage was repeatedly reborn inside us, until its most recent rebirth in this book.” Over the course of the 19-day Armchair Pilgrimage, they invite us to experience the world around us just as they did as they walked. So, over the first three days, they suggest that we contemplate, among other things:•Our habit of generalising – acquired 40-50,000 years ago, when our `chapel’ mind of specialisms became a `cathedral’ mind•Our tendency to let one thing remind us of another thing•What it might be like to be an ocean where fish swim through us•How the world experiences us just as we experience it: `gently feel for the feelers feeling for you’•A world where we tend to `add’ meaning and intensity•A world where we let go (without the aid of dementia) of memory, imagination, desire and wild fancy.And, as the pilgrimage concludes: “Returning is never going back to the same place.”“A brilliant idea, inviting us to `be present’ to a reality that is imagined and recorded, mediated by words and images. The feelings and emotions are no less `real’ than if we were actually standing in and experiencing that reality. I love the genius of words and images displayed here -- no less than the reality itself.” Carol Donelan, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Carleton College, Minnesota

Walking and movement artists often stumble when they describe the modes and registers of perception and expression they adopt in their practice. The attempt to represent their experience can end in a kind of somatic soup. Crab & Bee eschew the soup and, in this little book of poems and essays − the prequel to their forthcoming book 'The Pattern' (2020) – they give us clear hints of where and how they find and make meaning in their work. They tell us, for example, that: the interpenetration of our human lives with the movement of the planet’s watery channels (seas, rivers, underground watercourses, etc.) is constant, ubiquitous and important​the movement of water connects so-called ‘privileged points’, actual landscape features and actual moments whose existence and potency has been keenly experienced by humans, more anciently than recently By reconnecting with the movement of the waters and with these privileged points, Crab & Bee re-engage with a ‘magical mode’. This is what they invite us to share in their walks, prose and poetry. They suggest that the challenge (not just for walking artists but for all of us in a climate emergency) is to dissolve our artistic or habitual/life practice, to “sink into the dark forest beneath our feet”, to embed ourselves in the grander patterns, systems and flows of our wet planet, to “feel our way, but also to allow what we feel to feel us, and direct us by its flows”. In this book they give us a glimpse of how to do exactly that.

In their 'Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage', authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage that any of us can follow, even if we are confined to our homes.To research the 'Guidebook' the authors went on an actual journey. 'Bonelines'​ is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so they have decided to bring it into the light. ​It is written as a novel.

The experience and variety of walking practices have never been so broad, relevant or unpredictable. Walking Bodies charts some of their very latest developments.Editors Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind and Phil Smith put out a call for artists, activists, academics, radical walkers and psychogeographers to discuss, perform and share their experiences of current walking cultures. In these essays, provocations, artworks and documentations, new terrains emerge and diverse energies and thinkings reflect the huge response to the initial call and the demand for tickets to the conference. 'Walking Bodies' evidences anxieties, exclusions and gradual but major changes of direction for walking arts, towards more considered and embodied practices that re-navigate their terrains and challenge assumptions about trajectories through the unhuman world. Here are the beginnings of differently negotiated, shared, provoked and provocative ambulations.

'Covert' responds to three converging afflictions in society:our growing fixation with spending time looking at a screenthe proportion of our lives we spend sitting/lying down, as a resultthe invasion of our privacy in the digital age To address these challenges (amplified in the Covid-19 pandemic) this handbook compiles 30 'movement meditations' that encourage readers to put down their phones and tablets to reclaim both an active and contemplative lifestyle, one that is highly integrated with, and inspired by, our surroundings. 'Covert' joins-up inner reflection, subtle physical play and public space to suggest ways of resisting invasion and activating the self in an era of sedentary screen time and surveillance. Using 30 carefully crafted 'movement meditations' - each with an accompanying photo to explain it - Covert outlines a straightforward, embodied practice that we can use to defend and preserve ourselves in the everyday world against the intrusion of digital media and the surveillance state.The 'Covert' practice is a way to diminish the lure of the screens, sidestep invasive scrutiny, and nurture the dialogue between our conscious and unconscious selves.By prioritizing introspective interactions with the quirky and complex world around us, 'Covert' shows that we have the means to cultivate our interior and imaginative selves through a dynamic, physical engagement with the wider world.

In 2019 a group of book-lovers began to turn from their usual diet of contemporary novels to read classics of the ‘English eerie’ like Arthur Machen’s 'The Great God Pan'. The documents recovered, (edited by Phil Smith of 'Mythogeography'), and published here as 'Living In The Magical Mode', describe the subsequently inspired attempts of these readers – in a time of virus and social and climate catastrophe –– to live anew, with ‘magic-as-ordinary’, to do magic as if it were the washing up.At first, the readers fall on new ways of remaking their everyday lives in the magical mode, but the mode soon find ways to remake the readers. Challenging assumptions, magic turns lives upside down and shakes out mysteries. The documents of 'Living In The Magical Mode' describe a pulling back of veils, until all veils but one are exhausted; then the book-lovers put their hands upon the veil inside themselves....'Living In The Magical World' crosses dream wastelands, racecourses, motorway cafes, edgeland quarries and suburban valleys, in an adventure of encounters with ‘others’. It brings its readers to an occulted realm of unbounded desires that once unfolded refuses to recede. The surviving documents of the book club, reprinted here, describe the final frantic efforts of what remains of its members to understand a collision of many worlds and make novel webs of reconciliation.

As our relationship with the world around us becomes more fragile andunpredictable, more paraded and more desperate, the role of ecogothic literature isto give voice to some of the growing fears and deepest feelings we have about ourenvironment and climate change.The three ecogothic novellas in this collection show us individuals and societiescoming apart at the seams in the face of an eerieness that is often hiding from usin plain sight. The toolkit at the end proposes walking, hypnagogic and ‘new ritual’practices that draw on the novellas and invite refl ection and reconnection.The whole book was written and devised as part of Phil Smith’s groundbreakingresearch as a member of the School of Society & Culture at the University ofPlymouth (UK).

A little book of comfort for people who are troubled by the way that life is being hollowed out by digital media, populist politics, hyper-capitalism, AI and so on. It suggests ways to be yourself, in the face of a thousand pressures to become someone else. It makes life into a pilgrimage of purpose, humour, awareness and compassion.It can be used by anyone who wants to lessen their digital dependence and deepen their connection with their surroundings. It can be used by coaches, therapists and teachers - as well as walking artists, writers and anyone with a general interest in movement and somatics or politics and pedestrianism.

What if the universe is stitched together with absences? What if our deepest realities – personal, political, cosmic – are not shaped by grand ideas or all-encompassing ‘explanations’, but by the tiny, unremarked gaps between them?In this kaleidoscopic essay, Phil Smith covers some unlikely terrain: from the quantum unevenness of the cosmos to the haunted ruins of mines and the fragile misadventures of lost mariners. He rejects the siren call of big, smooth answers and plunges into the turbulent space where anomalies, coincidences and disturbances matter.Phil gathers stories, observations and practices from the disturbed edges of culture, ecology and everyday life – inviting us to attend to absences, to find hope in the vacuum and to experiment with living differently in the leaks and loopholes of existence.

Catch up on the Event of the Year! Discover the series that has everyonebuzzing with this introductory priced trade paperback collection released tocoincide with the beginning of the second chapter of the yearlong event! Separately, thirteen mystical Artifacts will guide the fate of the Universe.Together, thirteen Artifacts will end the Universe! When a mysterious antagonistkidnaps, Hope, the daughter of Sara Pezzini and Jackie Estacado, Armageddon isput into motion. Starring virtually every character in the Top Cow Universe,this is a series for diehard fans and new readers alike.Written by Top Cow Universe architect Ron Marz (Witchblade,Magdalena) and featuring art by Michael Broussard (The Darkness),this volume collects Artifacts #1-4 along with the Free Comic BookDay #0 issue, a beautiful cover gallery, behind-the-scenes extras, and muchmore!"It's loud, widescreen comic book mayhem that sticks to the roof of yourbrain!" [4 out 5 stars] — Comic Book Resources"...dramatic and heavy...visually striking..." — Newsarama