Helen Billinghurst – 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.

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.