A regional conversation

The following text is based upon a conversation in Nottingham on 19 March 2010 between Mike Pearson and David Matless, who met to talk around three issues concerning the narration of regional landscape: the differences and parallels in disciplinary terms between geography and performance studies in approaches to the region; the place of autobiography in approaching a region; and the materials to be called upon when investigating a region. The immediate context was a potential piece for Cultural geographies in practice, within this special issue of the journal on narrating landscape, but the meeting followed previous discussions which had indicated shared interests and enthusiasms around regional landscape. Mike Pearson’s recent performance research has focused on North Lincolnshire, brought together in his book ‘In Comes I’: Performance, Memory and Landscape, and his project Carrlands, while David Matless’s cultural geographic work has included a number of studies of the Norfolk Broads, a wetland area in eastern England, on which he is currently writing a monograph. The conversation lasted for 1 hour 45 minutes, and the following 20 short texts are based upon extracts from the discussion.

The order here does not necessarily follow the conversational proceedings. The conversation was recorded, the participants listened back, and each independently produced 10 conversational texts prompted by spoken words, which were then arranged, with minor amendments, in the order below. Conversation is a complex term, and the arrangement here seeks conversational affect not only in terms of intellectual exchange and the sparking of enthusiasm, but in the ways in which conversational voices may speak past one another, burrow into personal reflection regardless of the other in the room, or confirm the maintenance of existing positions alongside newly found meeting points. At times we set individual pieces to perform mutual commentary, while at others they speak past one another. Intentional differences in voice help distinguish disciplinary positions that are confirmed, questioned and developed during the conversation. Components variously rest on autobiography, theoretical reflection and anecdote. Initial contributions sail past one another, to a meeting of topics halfway, and onto autobiographic excavations of differential regional material. The conversational process suggests for us that geography and performance studies might find, in regional landscape, learning exercise ground.

MP 1]

In 1992, I created a solo performance entitled From Memory: an account of the death of my father, for a small audience in the restored, circular cockpit at the then Welsh Folk Museum in Cardiff. The text drew together memories of significant childhood happenings and places, sketches of family members, and recollections of the social fabric of rural Britain in the 1950s. I quickly realized the facility with which the individual voice can shift registers and conflate material of various orders, deriving from differing sources. Later, I devised less personal works on the manifold and often conflicting claims, concerns and narratives that cluster around death: on the shooting of Llwyd ap Iwan by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Patagonia in 1909; on the murder of Lynette White in Cardiff in 1988.

DM 1]

Geography and performance studies carry different expectations concerning the ability or obligation of disciplines to move across different registers of material. In geography such a move, whether dramatic or subtle, might surprise or even offend disciplinary convention. Attending to the voices of place, geographical discussion may tend to align local voice and dwelling with a particular class, working rather than elite, and a particular temporality, past rather than future. Here lies dialect. In the traffic between disciplines geography might consider how performance technique offers other renditions of region, obliging shifts in the geographical register.

MP 2]

Given the robust survival rate of the play script, theatre historiography has unsurprisingly focussed upon authors and their canons, their nationality and period. Performance studies – with origins in anthropology – has preferred practitioners and their practices, but is ever prone to constructing artistic genealogies and to inventing classificatory genres. Both have had to acknowledge shifts from the representational to the performative in contemporary theory. Region offers a new optic for the critical apprehension of performance that professes specific relationships with site/place – positioning it as a phenomenon amongst other cultural practices and topographical features within a certain area. Reciprocally, performance might suggest approaches to the exposition and espousal of regional specificities.

DM 2]

The term region carries strong associations in geography; heavy freight, ghosts which wake at the utterance of the word. If for performance region offers an attractively clean slate, geographers cannot help but trade in such regional currency. The geographer revisiting the region may either spend pages clarifying and qualifying what is not being done, or make this inherited regional predicament productive. Performative engagement with region may allow the geographer to revisit and recast longstanding forms of geographical practice – fieldwork, local study, survey – although one should be wary of taking performance studies as avant-garde blessing for geographical revivalism, an innovative other pointing to our virtuous old ways. The remaking of geography through encounter with another discipline needs as ever to go beyond the simple swapping of terms to attend to the baggage of language; geography with heavy regional freight, performance travelling very light.

MP 3]

The geology of north Lincolnshire is simple: gently inclined horizontal beds of Jurassic limestone and Cretaceous chalk. The topography of scarps, dips and intervening clay vales is easy to grasp, and all that proceeds from this too – environment, land use, historical formation, demographic distribution. I learned it early, and how to get around: from Sunday motoring tours, from delivering fish-and-chips. An open terrain: upon which to situate key events and occurrences as a spatial dimension of memory. Region as a concatenation of personal, familial, communal, and eventually disciplinary moments, related to distinct locales, at a variety of scales: deriving from direct experience, hearsay and instruction, and recalled through chorographic visitation.

DM 3]

The autobiographical has achieved different kinds of background presence in geographical writing, beyond the formal end-of-career memoir. The autobiographical and the positional may be put in alignment, with personal experience and characteristics presented as a barrier, or a means, to empathy and understanding. The tradition of regional geographical work often confines the autobiographical to a preface, getting the personal out of the way before the academic account. So a book on the Norfolk Broads might open with: ‘I have known the Broads for forty years, spent many happy days, nothing is more delightful than a Broadland sunset’, and so on, before the analysis starts. The siphoned-off personal preface can, however, crucially establish personal authority; you would never begin ‘I have never visited the Norfolk Broads and do not intend to start now’. Geography carries its own set of techniques of autobiographic rendition, some of which might be redeployed.

MP 4]

Welsh provided the terms to orientate both practical engagement and scholarly reflection: y filltir sgwar – the ‘square mile’ of immediate habitation, primarily of childhood; y fro – the district, to which one might profess attachment; and particularly cynefin – a figuration of environment that includes human agency as well as natural phenomena, and within which linguistic formulations – the naming of places – and the poetic imagination play a role. Leading to a conception of region that includes, in the details of dwelling, distinctive ways of ‘going-on’. In the Lincolnshire of my childhood, there survived a rough pragmatism and practicality: an enacted bricolage, that echoed a demeanour still essentially Primitive Methodist – a form of Non-Conformism regionally prominent among agricultural labourers in the 19th Century – in outlook.

DM 4]

I grew up near to the Norfolk Broads, but had little experience of the region. This produces an interesting geographical psychology of study, different from work with an autobiographical centre as the focus. The Broads were something adjacent but apart. Some locational life geography is pertinent here. Growing up in suburban Norwich, only seven or eight miles from the nearest broad, I can only recall a couple of boat excursions on large tour boats from Wroxham. Boat hire was out, perhaps due to cost, or parental fear of a child falling overboard, but more likely from the appeal of the open and free coast 10 miles further on. The Broads were difficult to access unless you had a boat, and there is little to see of the region from the road. I had no enthusiasm for fishing or birdwatching.

MP 5]

If the trend in land-art practices has been from ‘moving the landscape around’ to ‘moving around in the landscape’, then site-specific performance too has shifted from architectonic engagements with significant buildings – that themselves might recommend subject matter, displacement of audience, dramatic structure – to more transient visitations. Such performance may be evocative in nature, drawing places out of the everyday through its physical presence and focussed aesthetic attention, and rendering them momentarily significant; performance may itself be place making. It need not re-enact past events: in demonstrating its indifference to, or conflict with, a place, it may be equally revealing. Performance needs neither ‘point to’ nor ‘point out’: site will always be an inescapable aspect of audience interpretation.

DM 5]

Eternal geographical questions of scale, and performative concerns for site and event, can come together through the techniques required to register the simultaneity of local, regional, national, international, global scales in shaping event and site. The Broads as international wetland, national park, national playground, regional economy, local livelihood, local playground. How to sidestep the tendency to move through the nest of geographical scales one by one, a move which can simply reinforce the very scalar distinctions which site and event might put into question? Another discipline might lend technique.

MP 6]

In an essentially expressive rather than explanatory mode, performance can assemble and order material of diverse origins: from the biographical to the bureaucratic. The resulting dramaturgy can effect dynamic articulations, jumps, ruptures, elisions, asides, non-sequiturs, illogicalities, circularities and repetitions. Performance can render miscellaneous materials – from the anecdotal to the informational – to the same order of significance; and this it does without need of citation or footnotes. Its rhetorical devices facilitate shifts in viewpoint, attitude and emphasis. Performance deals well with accounts of people and events: it can build dramos out of mundane sets of circumstance, and summon sites to emplace them.

DM 6]

For geography performance, while often put in shorthand alignment with the affective and/or nonrepresentational, also returns us to images, in the affective aesthetic work of pictorial material, and the image quality of sources not always read as such; a textbook, a letter, a bureaucratic report. In understanding the Broads we move across guidebooks, tourist photography, art photography, land use survey, maps; genres of image narrating landscape. Setting these alongside one another, taking all as documents of power, highlights their interconnection, yet also underlines their specific genre as objects with particular expressive conventions and representational devices, demanding analytical respect.

MP 7]

Solo performance has the capacity to alter tone and intensity rapidly, to mix the intimate and reflective with the didactic. It can mimic, annexing regional accent and ‘ways of telling’, drawing its modes of address from local narrative forms, and everyday discourse such as gossip. It can voice a regional vernacular, whilst avoiding ventriloquizing its subjects. In more elaborated forms for multiple voices and media, it can draw together narratives, data sets and disciplinary perceptions, both like and markedly unlike; in their juxtaposition, overlay and friction at a certain place, they might reveal its multi-temporality, and through disciplinary convergences, enhance its appreciation.

DM 7]

Gathering material around a region allows appreciation of how the sense of a region has unfolded. An old guide conducts you into historic readership, offers information of a sort, signals ways of thinking. Geography has its own historical texts for scrutiny here, the discipline a part of the regional story alongside the narratives of natural science, folklore, tourism. Thus The Norfolk We Live In, a school geography book from 1958, shows the historic narratives of the county shaping geographic understanding of the time, surveys the industry and agriculture then current, and carries a certain texture of explanation, with graphs, maps and technical drawings offering a diagrammatic vision of life, in the Norfolk I would be born into.

MP 8]

My father was a fieldsman with the Potato Marketing Board: on maps of six inches and 25 inches to the mile, he would enter acreages and tonnages in pencil. These are the kinds of documents I now seek out on eBay: maps at ‘field’ scale, through which I first learned orientation, symbol and perspective. And books and magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, in styles of writing almost disappeared, that evidence my own growing appreciation of, and allegiance to, a region. And then ephemera: postcards of the 1900s; farm sale posters of the 1920s; National Union of Agricultural Workers lapel badges … Janus-like: accumulating the detritus of a disappeared world, in preparation for performances to come.

DM 8]

In my 1970s, the Broads carried the sense of a region of special interest, a place for sailors or naturalists, demanding certain techniques of movement and appreciation. Or they were evidently a formal tourist space, the kind of area only entered by payment on a boat. The beach, though a distinctive leisure zone, was more a part of everyday life, somewhere you could walk into as easily as the back garden, staking out your own patch of sand. My childhood Broadland autobiography is fairly minimal; a few memories of rare novelty visits. Boat hire came only after I thought of it as a research site. Such close distance, a remote zone 10 miles from home, makes for a particular personal regional geographical psychology.

MP 9]

Of singular importance to a childish imagination was Mary Insull’s The Story of a Parish: A Short History of Hibaldstow published in 1958. The chapters are what one might expect from the vicar’s wife: The Patron Saint; The Parish Church and its Vicars; The Bells of the Parish Church; The Church Plate. Little though of the radical chapels in which agricultural labourers gathered or the parliamentary enclosures that radically transformed the landscape. But a revelation: that this could be written about our place, my grandmother and uncles listed as subscribers in the back. And stirring in its detail: included is an entry in the parish register of 1794, ‘Windmill blown down and Geo. Cuthbert killed…’

DM 9]

Geographical research has always been shaped by aesthetic sensibilities regarding research material; the map, the traces of life in the field. Visiting a secondhand bookshop offers particular research pleasure. My enthusiasm here links to the surprise of shelf browsing, unsearchable accumulations of material under loose categories which bring finds. Works whose title or author would not catch attention in an online search, take the eye. Thus I might never otherwise have found Hester Burton’s 1960 The Great Gale, a children’s story of the 1953 east coast floods, set in a thinly disguised Broadland, and something to set alongside newspaper reports and coastal geomorphological analyses of the disaster. I have never found a reference to this work. Browsing in situ, valuable material appears, to set alongside archive and library enquiry.

MP 10]

Of others, there are the county guides of the Lincolnshire Naturalist’s Union: Swinnerton’s Geology (1949); Smith and Cornwallis’s Birds (1955) and Gibbons’s Flora (1975) – all over time contributing to a sense of regional exceptionality. Harold Dudley’s Early Days in North West Lincolnshire (1949) that collected his experiences as curator of Scunthorpe Museum and that inspired my undergraduate thesis on the archaeology of the warrens at Risby – a landscape Abraham de la Pryme described in 1695 as bringing to mind ‘the sandy desarts of Egypt and Arabia.’ Pryme’s gossipy diary of his curate-ship in north Lincolnshire is now available as a ‘print to order’ volume, W.B. Stonehouse’s The History and Topography of the Isle of Axholme (1834) in digital form on Google Books. Obscure though long-standing points of reference now readily accessible: compositions of knowledge and its narration regional in aspect and still compelling.

DM 10]

The Norwich Castle Museum has been a centre for natural history research on Broadland, displaying regional natural history dioramas of the region, and holding stuffed specimens from the county and the world. In The Norwich Lions, a 1947 children’s fantasy story by C.B. Jewson, the animals from which Norwich streets are named (Swan, Lobster, Rampant Horse, Dove) come to life, and go to the Castle for a party organized by the Castle lions, with the come-to-life stuffed polar bear acting as doorkeeper. It is as if someone had designed a book to delight some future research enthusiast; the joy is of course that you did not make it up. The natural history gallery of the Castle has recently been restored; visiting with parents brought memories of 1940s childhood enthusiasms for the polar bear, the city children’s experience tapped into by The Norwich Lions. Geography and performance can meet around such conjunctions of childhood memory, natural history display, scientific research, literary fantasy. Eclectic (though never random) regional gathering of material takes you to a starting point.