Temporary / mobile / everlasting in London...2

The studio congregated at Pontoon Docks, and just 15 minutes east from the bustle of the City the difference in landscape was quite incredible; the view from the DLR station was of derelict factories, disused land, and an unwanted, windswept feel to the place. Here we met Rowan a can-do type of guy who was responsible for helping to consult local people on the up and coming London Pleasure Gardens. LPG is the brainchild of a group of companies led by people behind Shangri-La at Glastonbury, and is looking like the project most likely to be realised out of the winners of the Meanwhile London competition launched by Nehwam Council.

The site is a fantastic historic dockland but surrounded by an unusual context; the Listed (apparently untouchable asbestos-laden) mill building, out of scale suburban housing, the dominant Excel Centre that will host a number of Olympic Events, and further afield the Thames and the towers of Canary Wharf. In the face of a seemingly impossibly complex set of site conditions (including 40000 a day crossing the site during the Olympics) LPG proposes a light-touch semi-permanent carnival, which will be open the public at times and ticketed for weekend and events. Their model is 100% privately backed, and includes a music stage in a geodesic dome, a temporary hotel made of caravans, 'wilderness park' with 'architect-designed' pavillions (Rowan seemed confused when asked if architects were involved for most of the other temporary elements!).

The proposals are certainly ambitious, especially given the requirement to be ready by June (a condition of the free lease), but LPG did not appear phased by the tight timescale. This reflected a key aspect of the project; coming from the tradition of festival-making the team behind LPG are expert at programming, haggling and borrowing, getting in the right expertise to 'get on with it', and doing the right amount to 'put on a spectacle' within the limited budget they have (such as the construction techniques of scaffold and hoardings). Whilst these skills are clearly centred around 'event-driven' architecture, they are all skills that many architectural practices could benefit from.

From Pontoon Docks, another DLR ride northwards through Newham took the studio to Stratford, where the impact of the Olympics is immediately apparent from the colourful panel-clad blocks that have sprung up along the main high street. Within the broad spectrum of the architectural profession/discipline it would be hard to find a much greater contrast than between these speculative commercial blocks and the nearby warehouse taken over by the architecture collective 'Assemble'. Here we met Lewis and Louis, our enthusiastic guides to the work of Assemble and two of around 20 young designers and makers that make up the collective, which is predominately Part 1 architecture graduates who met in Cambridge. After graduating and all desperately wanting to do 'something' (note here that working as a Pt 1 CAD monkey for a large practice was not considered as something), they brainstormed derelict space in London, found a disused petrol station and designed and built a temporary 'Cineroleum' all for a miniscule budget of £6000 (mostly their own money!). Directly of the back of this (and Louis' contacts in MUF), they also completed Folly for a Flyover, which won great acclaim within architectural circles for its witty design and cheap DIY construction ethic.

Perhaps the most interesting part of a long (and generous) discussion was the current status of the group; having taken on the warehouse on a temporary (free) lease from the ODA and also having just won a ‘real’ commission to reimagine New Addington High Street, Assemble were in the process of reshaping themselves as a functioning practice, with salaries, invoices and proper decision-making. It was obvious that this process runs the risk of tarnishing their chaotic but defining characteristics (bargain recycled construction, volunteer builders, ‘do anything’ mantra, and pub meetings), and might make the group think hard about whether this type of practice can be maintained as a lifestyle beyond the ‘student days’. However it was fascinating to see a group of 19-20 year olds ‘doing something’ that many in the architectural profession dream about but are too fearful of leaving the security of an established practice.

The third appointment of the day saw us meet up with SSoA Studio 15, who are investigating self-organised practices within the creative melting pot ‘wasteland’ that is Hackney Wick. Beginning as a research project into other self-organised communities, and several of the students seemed to be grappling with the idea of a kind of ‘architectural manifestation’ of a community that didn’t actually require top-down architectural design. To get to the meeting point, a newly formed ]Performance Space[ studio converted from an old plumbers merchant, we traversed the incredible site of the Olympic construction. The scale and pace of change in this area is quite astounding given its proximity to (and often built right over the top of) so much rich history and ‘stuff’. The impact on Hackney Wick is also clear, with the artists in Performance Space already talking about the next cheap and empty area that people were talking about moving towards. There was also the idea raised that the commercial and residential developments being built off the back of the Olympics becoming a future slum, although the almost constant pressure for private housing in London seems to make that unlikely. After a busy visit, the day was appropriately rounded off with a presentation from Andreas on public works, accompanied by fantastic supper (and vodka) by our hosts.

Compass Festival of Live Art, Leeds

Held over three unfortunately miserably wet and windy and days in late November, the Compass Symposium and accompanying live arts festival is a new venture by East Street Arts, festival curator Sarah Spanton and director Annie Lloyd. The programme of events, workshops and discussions set itself apart from other similar arts festivals through on two fronts; its setting in Yorkshire (and the Humber) an area keen to expand its realtively small live arts community, and a strong focus on socially engaged practice. Both of these aspects appealed straight away to the research agenda of RECITE PhD one, and with links between Compass and the Sheffield School of Architecture already established through MArch tutor / fellow researcher Carolyn Butterworth, the decision to attend this exciting-looking 3 days of art just up the road (or train line) seemed like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, other commitments in Sheffield meant that I didnt see a huge amount of performers, and as a result this review focuses on the symposium half of Compass.

While I have a genuine appreciation / interest in live art as a spectator, I sometimes feel that the elusiveness of the language that is often used to describe some the practice is a little difficult for other academic disciplines to access. This was certainly one feeling left by Intimacy and Generosity, a workshop held to question issues around how willing people are to share their deepest feelings, public & private space, one-to-one encounters, and the awkward relationship between contemporary society and the 'intimate'. Although the coordinator Rajni was very skilled at creating a real sense of intimacy within the group, I felt the personal level conversations perhaps restricted a more interesting debate about the wider social context of the issues.

This theme continued at the late afternoon Show & Tell session (where the Pecha Kucha style format quickly broke down reinforcing the cliche of artists being unwilling to stick within the rules). While I was not really in a place to be too critical of the presentations (having failed to find the time to produce one myself) there seemed to be several practioners who either failed to either gauge their audience or were just simply not interested in socially engaged practice! Fortunately many of the others were fascinating, and both Rita's smartphone dance documentation and Rich from Invisible Flock sparked really useful conversations and plenty of ideas.

The trade-off for a friday night back in Sheffield was a very rushed Saturday morning to get to Sensing the City, and after the first day full of discussion it was nice to be told that the workshop would commence with a silent walk. The walk is of course a well used tool for the urbanist-artist, and there was little embellishment here other than the suggestion of a 'perfomative' single file parade, and an instruction to really focus on the relationship between your body and the soundscape. Artist Bob Levene suggested that experiencing the sometimes harsh urban environment in this concious method enables an 'awakening' from the dominant passive modes of experience. A number of aspects of the sound walk, not least the intrusion of the somewhat in-your-face documentor, meant that it somehow fell short of providing an immersive subjection by the environment. I think the fairly linear route to Patrick Studios (and with most of the attendees having already walked there yesterday) made it feel more like a 'route' to a destination rather than a journey or drift. The tone was (dramatically) shifted by Bradley Garrett's ethnographic research into the (sometimes literal) underworld of urban explorers, venturing into Victorian sewers and to the top of half-built skyscrapers. A well-paced delivery of fascinating anecdote and theory mixed with hyper-real photography was well-received, with the suggestion that this activity, apparently 'useless' in capital terms, was a meanwhile use that fell outside or subverted the sensory experiences normally 'on offer in the city. Some of this grandstanding stood him for criticism, particularly the some strong critiques of his method, the overt 'masculinity' of the explorers and the underplayed ethical / political implications of this type of work, particularly when disseminated via the stylised imagery.

Sennet's idea of the regulation and pacification of the body in 'public space', very often for capitalist consumption, is one strong theme that emerged from several of the workshop and informal discussions, and one of the key contributions that can be made by art/performative practices is to be critical / transformative of this situation. Coming from an architecture background (and SSoA in particular) participatory practice, social engagement, intervention, mapping, site, space and are second nature both in terms of design and research, and the wide range of other disciplines that engage (or are now engaging) with the same set of issues is therefore very interesting and may open up space for more collaboration. From the point of view of an architecture trained researcher/practioner, one potential criticism of artists working in urban public space that struck me over the weekend (albeit perhaps a generalisation)is that there seems to be more of a concern about making an impact and not so much interest in following up or developing the situation to develop a more tangible legacy. Legacy could be in terms of feeding back responses to inform policy, establishing new programmes, or proposing wider projects off the back of a performative intervention. Perhaps there just needs to be a better understanding of just how much an architectural toolkit of skills can contribute; it was perhaps telling that the architect-dominated conversations in the third workshop, Intentions and Unitentions, architecture was still thought of by most as being concerned only with static / permanent buildings designed for a paying client.

Ways of Looking Festival, Bradford with Donovan Wylie, Daniel Meadows & Invisible Flock

Its always a pleasure when my somewhat obsessive phd interests happen to coincide with my girlfriend's more regular ideas of how she'd like us to spend the weekend together. Last weekend Bradford was the setting for this fortuitous coming together of interests at the UKs newest photography / arts festival 'Ways of Looking'.

The festival had an ambition of attracting internationally renowned artists while retaining a clearly sense of locality, and of the exhibits that we saw for one day in the city, it seems to have achieved this. But we began by making our way from Forster Square via the 'hole in the ground' - the disaster that was to be the half-excavated Westfield Shopping Centre, which now dominates a huge part of the city centre to the north west. At least they have now taken down most of the signs promising 'urban energy' and other nonsense (ridiculed in Owen Hatherley's new ruins of Britain). A particulalrly half-hearted attempt at an 'urban garden' occupies the section that isn't a huge hole, but at the moment (and even in the bright autumn sunshine) this 'temporary' intervention only serves to depress the spirits further. We also later found out that this was in fact one of the sites of the festival - but the photographs stuck onto blue hoardings hardly shouted out 'outdoor gallery space'.

At the one of central sites for the festival, the national media museum, we were distracted by the hugely popular exhibition of retro computer games in the foyer before making our up to the Donovan Wylie exhibition. Having been awarded the 'Bradford Fellowship' he had meticulously documented the everyday and mechanical nature of sites of conflict, in Northern Island and Afghanistan. The landscapes photos, almost all of military outposts, are packed with incidental detail and were fascinating to stare at, with the scale and lack of people making the photos appear more like intricate scale models of battlefield gun emplacements and radar posts.

Next up, the Gallery 2 at the NMM had a retrospective of the early work of Daniel Meadows. As a newcomer to his work documenting British life (particularly in the 1970s and 80s), I was enthralled by human portraits of people on one Manchester street, the colourful moments captured at the Butlins holiday camps and documentary videos of the 'Omnibus' tour around Britain, undertaken in his early 20s. For me, this (apparently well known) piece of work got to the heart of the 'Ways of Seeing'; both in the political spirit of this free portrait service, and the subsequent documentation of the moments captured - then reunited with their owners 30 or so years later, which often left a sad trace about the passing of time and snatched memories.

Leaving the NMM and heading via a fry-up in the sunshine, we got to the relatively newly opened 'Impressions Gallery'. This forms the 'cultural bit' of a slightly uninspiring arcing commerical development that forms one edge to the 'regenerated' Centenary Square (ie its going to have some new granite paving, funky shaped seats and a new lighting scheme). The urban realm has yet to be finished, but the given some of the other occupants of the new units (budget drinking establishments) the future 'success' of this public space is still in doubt. Our arrival at Impressions coincided with one of the festival talks - on curating photography - but unfortunately (not being particularly interested in this subject) the lack of a dedicated event space here meant that it put the rest of the Red Saunders exhibition out of bounds - not too good for a Saturday afternoon!

This wasn't too big a deal, because the aspect of the festival that first drew me in was the four interactive 'adventure games' created by Invisible Flock, which also began from the base in Impressions. These games, each designed around mobile phones and semi-scripted treasure-hunt style routes across the city centre are another good local precedent for the work I hope to be implementing next year. Unfortunately this event also began with a let down. As the artist's assistant at the gallery explained - the augmented reality / QR technology for our preferred route only worked on Android phones and even then was prone to be 'buggy'. Sure enough, 5 minutes outside of the gallery and the first tile (hidden on the exterior of the crumbling Odeon cinema opposite) failed to scan. Undeterred, we opted to try out a different route that relied on far simpler SMS technology and 'physical clues' scattered across the museums and public spaces of Bradford. Structured around John Ruskin, early Daguerreotype photography, and a riddle about the sea this became a hugely enjoyable 2 hours, and even though it took us back into places we had already visited (the bloody Urban Garden) it demonstrated many of the pervasive / immersive elements that make this art form 'work' so well in the context of urban exploration and forcing you to stop and think about your surroundings. The 'showstopper' moment and perhaps the most memorable aspect was the culmination of the riddle back in Centenary Square, where for a fleeting moment (and if they solve the clue), players get to 'control' the big TV screen normally reserved for rolling BBC sport. Great fun, but while it was perhaps meant as nod to the idea of being able to become an 'author' of your environment, a look around at the rest of the public realm in the city centre (especially the big hole) is a stark reminder that the citizen has very little say outside of the rules of the game.

A quick skirt around the nearby popup gallery (complete with slightly condescending red sign declaring its 'PopUp' status - in case the people of Bradford haven't yet heard of the concept) and we headed home.

"This House Believes Schools of Architecture Should Be Dissolved"Project Context / SUAS Debate

Its hard to know exactly what Project Context stand for, if indeed they do have (or need) an overarching political motivation. Their manifesto is deliberately fuzzy or fluid, and their recent impressive efforts in reviewing graduate output are self-titled as both a 'research project' but also a 'mirror'. It is this second aspect that might be most interesting. By making a much bigger noise about what talented graduates of architecture end up doing (or not doing) post-part 2, hopefully some of those responsible at the top of architectural education (heads of school, course leaders and those in admissions) might begin to think more about why so many students feel unequipped for current practice, and why so many are unemployed.

Fluidity is a theme that cropped up again and again in the Project Context & SUAS-organised debate "This House Believes Schools of Architecture Should Be Dissolved". It was interesting that this debate was held at Sheffield, a school that has a reputation for challenging traditional models of architectural practice, though in reality is still part of a red-brick institution, and is still very much bound to conform to the requirements of the RIBA and ARB.

In the event, both sides on the debate began to meld into one, as it became quite apparent that the proposition team very well knew the value of the school of architecture and its graduates (especially in the sheffield mould); lateral thinking, spatially & socially aware, polymaths that developed a huge range of design skills and critical thinking over the 5 or so years they spent in architecture school. In terms of reshaping this model, the consensus was built around the idea that (especially given the construction crash) the route through architectural education needed to be more flexible and much less tunneled towards to become an employed 'architect'. Instead we should be offering different routes (and valuing those routes) to become writers, entrepreneurs, developers, planners, councilors etc. In order to achieve this clearly more work also needs to be done at the top (perhaps wholesale changes at the RIBA) to communicate the value of architectural skills and pull down the artificial barriers that are suffocating the profession. As put forward in the debate by the proposition panel: 'if we are so good at designing buildings, why are only 2% * of new constructions designed by architects?'

Alastair Parvin (Sheffield alumni now working for 00:/) robustly critiqued of the social disconnection in student projects, along with providing the evening with some typically memorable soundbites: 'we don't need active dissolution - if things carry on the way they are Schools of Architecture will dissolve themselves'.

Several other people picked up on the potential contradiction illustrated by this point, which to me became one of the most telling aspects of the evening. If there is a genuine feeling amongst graduates (such as those within Project Context) that the current pedagogy in schools of architecture and the relevance of the skills we acquire for todays market needs questioning - why is the celebration of the 'best' of the graduates (as demonstrated in the Project Context exhibition) still represented by a gallery of beautiful but abstracted representations, or to quote Alastair again; 'Trout farms on Mars'?

(*the source for this stat wasnt given)

A Machine to See With - Blast Theory

However nice it is to visit a city with a partner, friends or family, there is something undeniably joyful about spending time wandering alone - there are no compromises on what to eat, no discussions on whether do shops or museums, and no agreement needed on which direction to drift. There can be few things more pleasurable than doing all this amongst the excitement of an unseasonably warm late summer day in Brighton.

This was the situation I found myself in recently while visiting to take part in Blast Theory's 'A Machine to See With', which had been redesigned for the Digital Festival in their home town, following a critically acclaimed run at Edinburgh. So while in a way it was a shame to drag myself away from the market stalls & people-watching in the Lanes, I had high expectations for the experience - it cam off the back of taking part in the excellent 'Ulrike & Eamon Compliant' in Sheffield, and I was trying to see as much of their work as possible with a view to a possible future collaboration.

With all their expertise in this form of performance, it was no surprise that Blast Theory are very skilled in arranging the setup, instructions and meeting point. Phone messages - a week before and morning of my allotted time - gave clear instructions as to the meeting place and that I was to come alone with my phone and cash. As the moment approaches (and then passes) and I am stationed nervously underneath a railway bridge, I begin to think that there has been a mistake - perhaps Im in the wrong place? But then the phone buzzes, and Im engrossed in the details; Im not to answer my phone to anyone except the automated voice. Im responsible for my actions if I get arrested. I am going to be robbing a bank.

Much like the experience of other 'single-player' interactive walkabout performances (surely a new term needs coining), Blast Theory immediately exploit the participant's state of excitement and anticipation to make the everyday come to life. Simple instructions for the precise route to take mix banal details into a more poetic urban narrative - and suddenly, walking down a street or back alley becomes a gripping experience. The walking element form roughly half of the overall performance, with the rest made up of carefully timed interactions as it becomes apparent that this isn't a solo mission after all, but I am undertaking the heist as part of a team. The first hint of this is when directed into a pub toilet cubicle - "lock the door behind you" and answer a series of questions on my personality (here it does feel a bit like being on the phone to a customer service desk), which later transpires to affect what role I will play in the robbery. Meanwhile I must hide all of the cash I'm carrying "somewhere on my person". The experience of being enclosed heightens the stress - blurring the tension built by the fiction with other questions wondering if the pub are in on it - are people queuing to use the toilet?

Back out in the bright sunlight Im behind schedule - I must hurry to the meeting point at the NCP car park with cash rattling around in my trainers, and the phone is beginning to feel hot on my face. A place in the city that is associated with another everyday activity - parking for the shops - takes on an altogether different filmic association (a deliberate choice Im sure). We have all seen enough Hollywood heist or spy films to fill in the gaps of the vague plot of AM2SW (for the whole hour I have imagery from the Bourne series and Un Flic running through my head), and in part of my brain the rooftop of the car park becomes a set - or maybe - just for a moment- even a 'real' meetup point prior to a 'real' heist. Either way, the Silver BMW I am supposed to get into already has 2 of my 'partners' inside, so instead I am instructed move off the bank itself.

Once more, the timing is calculated and very carefully explained - so that as the voice counts down from 10 you must be inside the bank ready to reach the counter.

This type immersion takes a very different from other media - it could be argued that depth of experience is all of your own making with the audio narrative simply as a tool to prompt the imagination. Depending on the will of the participant, at any point the fiction can be questioned and stopped by taking the phone away.

But its too late - I am walking into the bank heading towards zero when I hear THE HEIST HAS FAILED GET OUT OF THERE.

After the adrenalin of escaping a 'near-miss' the finale takes place nearby, outside another location that stirs the emotional imagination of cinema and youth - the arcades. Here the participant is faced with a choice; the heist went wrong but there is still a chance to make a difference, to somehow have an effect on the city. "It is not a personality test" but an opportunity to make a connection. I am instructed to take out all of the cash and give it to a stranger. This is something that on one hand sounds like a theatrical sleight of hand - while it is unrelated to the plot - it is an instruction that gets you thinking hard enough not to immediately question this. Can I do it? What will they say? Will they think I'm actually a 'real' criminal? After an hour or so invested really trying to feel the experience, the deliberate car crash of real and fiction is disorientating, not to mention the personal questions it raises in my (frugal) head about giving away £20. In Sheffield, a previous Blast Theory outing called for a similar choice (albeit without the financial sting), and agreeing to enter the story resulted in a final interrogation scene, so part of me wondered whether if I could do it, I would somehow carry on the adventure.

In the end, I don't and its over. And anyway its nearly time to get my train back to normal life. But for such a simple final question, it makes me think for a long time about myself, the nature of immersive theatre, and how suddenly I don't want to be in the city alone any more.

City Futures Conference, Sheffield Hallam University

Subtitled 'New Perspectives on Placemaking', this one day conference at the other Sheffield university looked like a timely opportunity to open a specifically local conversation about urbanism wide range of practioners, arts and environmental organisations. The two Universities don't often have much to do with one another (I was the only delegate from TUOS), particularly the two architecture departments which are often characterised as being at opposite ends of the spectrum. While SSoA prides itselfs on its independent critical approach and social/political awareness, while Hallam's architecture course sits within the department for the built environment and arguably has a greater focus on the commercial and technical aspects of the profession.

My own interest in the subject of 'city futures' is at least threefold; the RECITE research project is very much interested in how people define 'places' and how this knowledge might aid designers, as an architect and design professional I am interested in the other side - how best practice current and planning policy are being using in urban design, and from a personal political level I have a keen interest in the direction the city is headed after the mini boom and subsequent failures of Sevenstone and Housing Market Renewal.

The conference - essentially made up of 5 keynotes and a series of afternoon workshops - kicked of with Kevin Murray of the Academy of Urbanism, an independent British think-tank for urban regeneration that seek the development of progressive, sustainable, economically viable and attractive cities. Though they promote that they are a-political, there was a clear belief that better cities are achieved in the Scandinavian model; top-down, with progressive government and long-term, creative strategies - in partnership with designers, planners and businesses. A telling moment of this engaging run-through of principles of urbanism was in the discussion of the AoU award for outstanding city. This annual prize was intended to alternate between a British and European example - but they had already run out of British cities. Even the most recent British example - Glasgow - felt a bit thin now that the New Labour millennium money has run dry (and they are building yet another motorway through it). As a result the presentation borrowed heavily from the lessons learnt in Freiburg - which essentially seemed to be that at least 30 years of clear strategic committed policy and investment were required. Unlikely to be happening here any time soon!

Next up the new Head of Planning for SCC, David Caulfield. His talk - about how important 'quality of place' (which roughly seemed to be equated with plenty of tended grass and granite paving) was for the economic competitiveness of the city. To crudely summarise what was a fairly crude argument - if we give lawyers and financiers a nice place to eat their sandwiches and go for after-work drinks they will be more likely to move their HQ here rather than say, an M1 business park or Leeds. This same economic argument was then able to be reused to explain why we need more car parking, why we need to 'regenerate' the markets and various other controversial decisions. However, thanks to the broad range of Sheffield voices in attendance, David had a much more difficult Q&A than he might have expected, especially in relation to the politics of keeping the station bridge public and the increased difficulty of access that have resulted from the much lauded revamp of the train station.

With many of the workshops appearing to follow on from the morning's theme, I opted to take part in the one that sounded most different - based on some of the entries to the Forgotten Spaces exhibition. Unfortunately the structure was not well thought through - and two short presentations (akin to 'provocations') from the speakers left the rest of the group unsure how to participate. However, the essential thrust seemed to be that cities are not all about the commercial and main public spaces, but the other lifeblood of urban areas is the terrain vague and in-between bits; spaces that people might colonise, daydream about, or simply pass by on their way to work. This is a conversation that has been going on at SSoA since Jermey Till's Softspace in 2005 (and probably for many years before that)!

Fortunately a much more resonant tone (though pre-judged as 'alternative' by the chair and Head of department) was struck by Owen Hatherley, who took us on a romp through the failures in planning and design of the 20th century, some the most notable of which were identified in Sheffield (the student flats by Park Square - a slum in waiting). Though Owen seemed unafraid to heavily criticise the politics of regeneration in the UK, it was interesting that his critique of Urban Splash's Parkhill was not nearly so strident as in his Guardian article a few days later.

The day finished with a very brief but fascinating sales pitch from Martyn Ware (formerly of the Human League & Heaven 17) and his new venture in 3d sound interventions. Though he couldn't say exactly why, he was sure that these installations 'somehow change the way you look at the city' (I have paraphrased). After a day severely lacking in the subtle nuances of what 'place' is and the uncertainty and delight of cities - this was good note to end on for my own research interests.

TaPRA Annual Conference, Kingston

The TaPRA (theatre and performance research association) annual conference in Kingston was packed in between arriving home from a month-long stay in France (a working holiday!) and the chaos of moving back into the Arts Tower, launching the new SSoA website, and writing up my first year research.

The conference was a first chance to have the work done over the first year of RECITE properly critiqued by an audience who really knew the subject area. TaPRA is structured around the 'working groups', which form the bulk of the conference programme and provide a platform for smaller-scale, specialised discussion within the conference sessions as well as helping to foster a close-knit network one the conference has finished. Coming from outside the field I was initially unsure in which working group my project would be most appropriate, but given my interest in the effects and legacy after performances (and the lack of specific group for site-located theatre), the 'Documenting Performance' group seemed to offer the best fit.

The documentation working group was making its reappearance at TaPRA after disappearing for a few years, and referring to this absence Toni Sant (co-convenor) suggested that a mentality had set in in performance research whereby ‘if everyone is documenting now so why do we need a specific group?’. However he felt that it was the interdisciplinary nature the group (with presentations covering web media / mapping / information design / archival studies) that made the new direction distinct. Though from a personal perspective it was very useful to be part of a cross-disciplinary dialogue, it will be interesting to see if the working group has a long-term future, given this fragmentary nature of documentation research.

Perhaps a product of this new mentality across the discipline, there was surprisingly little questioning in the working group about the fundamental philosophy of why we to document live performance and the ‘secondary’ nature of documentation. The majority of the presentations assumed that you would document ‘as much as possible’ - with the debate then about how you create access to archive (digital, social media documentation, wiki etc) and how to ‘activate’ archive material (re-embodying, inspiration). Perhaps therefore the debate has moved on - there is an assumption that ‘documentation’ will happen whatever on youtube & flickr (with performance being subsumed into the mass media) so the aim should be to discover methods of doing this in a way that will be useful for future performers & academic study. The panel session, where delegates were more free to move between working groups, saw Heike Roms (Senior Lecturer in performance studies at Aberystwyth) present her long-term research project into Welsh site-specific work from the 1960s and 70s, which employs an admirable array of methodologies and techniques to uncover how these performances became embedded in the cultural memory of a place.

Beyond the working group, we heard interesting keynotes from Ian Brown on Scots playwrights and Louise Jeffreys, director of programmes at the Barbican. However these sessions (and much of the other discussion around the conference) only really served to highlight the marginal of performance research that interests me and that I am able to engage with to any kind of informed degree!

Overall I came away from TaPRA with mixed feelings; one the one hand very pleased that the presentation went down well and the the first year pilot produced results that appear valuable to theatre research community. That said, I couldn't help but come away considering the disadvantages of crossing disciplines - that its easy to miss out on significant attitude changes in performance research and end up covering ground that is well-established (albeit with an architectural spin), or worse - that the audience don't know enough about architecture, urbanism or the research questions to feel able to criticise.