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This four day event, which includes two full-day field-trips, brings together Welsh performance practitioners whose work is concerned with notions of place and identity with other artists and scholars from around the world from the fields of archaeology, human geography, history, anthropology, folklore and literature studies. |
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| What constitutes 'a sense of place'? How do memories attach to places? What is the relationship between landscape, experience and identity? How do we use the past to help create a sense of identity? How can we read a landscape? How do we make sense of the multiplicity of meanings that resonate from landscapes and memories? And how can we tell about them? |  | |
| Site-visits to locations throughout West Wales from ruined industrial sites to contested landscapes, from prehistoric burial settlements to ancient abbeys, from intimate places of habitat to guided walks over Welsh mountains. | ||
| Performances and Installations by Welsh performers who share an interest in the relationship between ourselves, our bodies and our environment, and in the impact a particular location can have on our lives. They acknowledge the close link between culture, subjectivity and place without reverting to nostalgia, new age mysticism or an aggressive 'native soil' ideology.' | ||
| Scholarly Papers and Illustrated Talks from international scholars who are drawn from a wide spectrum of disciplinary fields. Through the stances of their particular expertise and the lens of their personal autobiography, we have invited them to reflect upon traditional spatial notions which describe the Welsh 'sense of place', a series of cognitive maps surrounding home and locality, and expanding to other notions of place: | ||
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| Our object is to reveal and examine broader issues of memory, identity and autobiography. Our hope is that their presentations will be more personal, intimate, reflective than the conventional conference paper. And we intend that the accompanied visits will be as performative as they are informative.
Do these Welsh notions of place and space and identity have resonance elsewhere?
Points of Contact is a continuing series of international conferences staged by the Centre for Performance Research that aims to generate investigation, critical debate and understanding of cross-disciplinary approaches to performance studies. The series to date has included 'Theatre, Anthropology and Theatre Anthropology' (1988); 'Performance, Nature and Culture' (1989); 'Performance, Politics and Ideology' (1990); 'Performance, Ritual and Shamanism' (1993); 'Performance, Food and Cookery' (1994), and 'Performance, Tourism and Identity' (1996). Future themes planned are 'Performance, Time and Space' and 'Performance, Sexuality and Gender'.
The series aims to provide opportunities for artist, critics, promoters and academics to discuss current practices and issues in the performing arts across disciplines and internationally.
At each conference care is taken to forge links between people and ideas and to create formal and informal opportunities for people to exchange information about current and future projects. Books and tapes by contributors and on related topics, often unavailable elsewhere, will also be on display and for sale.
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