Paper short abstract:

Red Earth’s performance work in prehistoric landscapes can be contextualised as an experiential, phenomenological exercise, stimulating new interpretations of archaeological research materials and possibly offering an insight into the mindset of our predecessors, with implications affecting our analysis and assessment of prehistoric cultural mores. In order to illustrate this idea, Red Earth co-director Simon Pascoe invites delegates to take part in a participatory performative experience, taking place outdoors and in response to a selected location. Unlike a similar public experiment at WAC in Dublin, artist and delegates will create this event together.

Paper long abstract:

Performance introduces us to other possible worlds. It catalyses the imagination, inducing an atmospherically charged non-rational response to physical and imagined space, removing us from our preconditioned mindset, and freeing us to engage experientially with a liminal meta-reality. Sound, voice, gesture, and fire, all affect our subconscious perception of space and, in contrast to our normal intellectualised response, help reveal an alternative communicational reality.

Many Neolithic sites indicate ritualistic activity, liminalities embedded with meaning, possibly reflecting an ancient pattern of unbroken human interface with a sacred landscape. Fixed as we are in our 21st century mindset, performance/ritual can nevertheless take us to similar boundaries: standing between physical and invisible realities, conscious and subconscious, the mundane and the Other.

In this session, delegates will be introduced to the liminality of performance/ritual, by together developing a simple public manifestation, a ritualised response to site. Using a selective vocabulary of sound, vision and action we will explore shifts in perception via sensory immersion in a transformed landscape.

The exercise articulates the essence of unwelt : that all human and non-human animals have their own specific worldview, in which mind and world are inseparable. By analogy we may begin to build a reconceptualised world-model paralleling our predecessors' mindset.

If we remember that performance in whatever context is categorically a contemporary experience, and avoid any erroneous assumptions, site-specific performance may provide an effective methodology for analogous interpretation, enabling us to better imagine prehistoric cultural responses to both the physical and the imagined landscape.