PLACE PEOPLE POWER is a publication on the role of place in participatory theatre practice for theatre artists who are newly engaging with the relationship between their work and place. Artists who are working in other artforms may also find relevance in what I write for their own practices. 

You can view an extract of the publication by clicking here.
This sample offers three chapters of the publication: ‘Why Place?’, ‘Imagining Place‘, and ‘Relationships with Place, Practice, and Projects’.

Responses from Readers:
“The way you have articulated your ideas offers a new perspective for me and actually takes the conversations we have been having beyond the surface”

“It’s compassionate, insistent, political, warm, and gloriously unafraid to ruffle a few feathers”

“Timely and current: it gets to the heart of many conversations being held across organisations right now”

The intentions of this publication are to set a foundation for deeper consideration of place by sharing the application of theory as a tool for the creative practice I undertook. I hope that this may support participatory project design and processes that result in more meaningful engagements with the people who live in these places.

Across forty pages I demonstrate how place features in participatory theatre work, and how we might handle our responsibility to place more manageably. It starts by gently introducing theories of place as laid out by Doreen Masssey in useful ways for theatre artists. These build to lay a foundation offering a set of techniques for understanding the role of place in our project designs and practices, and finally moves into critical unpicking of place as more than concepts but the material conditions of peoples’ lives that we are trusted with in our art. Theatre artists may be inhibiting the development of places and not even know it.

After the impact of the pandemic, where so many artists and organisations turned to place due to travel restrictions and following Brexit which held certain arguments of tighter control of British borders and who can cross them, we have grown a heightened sense of place and its boundaries. We can think of places as areas on a map with lines around them, deciding where places start and end but by drawing boundaries around places, we can unwittingly decide who is included or excluded, flare insecurities around belonging, and we risk an insular way of working. At the extremes of thinking of places as bounded and fixed, we risk perpetuating conflict-based myths that “can so easily be yet another way of constructing a counterposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’” ^{(Massey, 1991: 27)}.

I believe a reframed understanding of how we think, speak and write about place is fundamentally about challenging hierarchies and honing the purpose of creating art with people and place in participation as fit for the next decade. 

So, can a deeper awareness, understanding, and appreciation of place and its role in projects support artists and organisations with (re)growing and strengthening their relationships with the people and places we work? 

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If you are interested in reading the full publication, please send me an email, after which I will send you PayPal link for £10. Once received, I will email you a PDF copy of PLACE PEOPLE POWER. There is a waiting list forming for paper copies of the publication to which you can add your name too (cost tbc).

I am delivering CPD and consultancy on this work to organisations across Scotland throughout 2022, so place do not hesitate to get in touch for more information.

Massey, D., 1991. A Global Sense of Place. Marxism Today, June, pp. 24-29