This website offers information and resources about two closely related projects: Challenging Place (2011-2014) and its follow-on project, Performing Local Places (2016-2017). Information on the latter is separately located using the specific link on this home page. The remainder of the website, including the text below, relates to Challenging Place.

Our relationship to ‘place’ is critical in contemporary lives. How we are placed or how we place ourselves has changed – and is changing - significantly. Performance-related activities can help the way we relate to place, through reformulating our relationships with the places we know and providing approaches which aid emplacement in new or unfamiliar places.

This site can operate as a resource for a range of applied practices engaging with place. The exercises or activities are offered as a structured approach to working on a place-related project or as a set of practices which can be drawn on individually or in combination to address issues of place within the context of workshops, lessons or other similar contexts.

This website is for arts practitioners devising work around ‘place’ with community groups. It uses three linked projects as examples of practice (Half Moon Theatre, Cyrff Ystwyth, Oldham Theatre Workshop). These were at the heart of a three year research project looking at how performance-related practices can affect people’s responses to their locations.

‘About Performing Places’ offers background through focusing on the theory which underpins the work and the people who have been part of this project. It also suggests navigation routes through the site as a whole and is therefore a good place to start.

‘Place Practices’ is the main section of the site, offering examples of work carried out with community groups in the three linked projects.

‘Other Places’ offers links to examples of additional work in this field.

Click here to view Prof Sally Mackey's TED Talk "Keeping a Sense of Place in a Disrupted World" (opens a new window).

Click here to view a video that summarises the projects and focus of the entire project (opens a new window).

Click here to view the launch symposium for this website, and some of the work attributed to it post-symposium.

For an overview of the research project that led to this site, see: www.challengingplace.org

If you do use this website resource, please just let Sally Mackey know by email - so that we can have a sense of how the work is being used.

Lead investigator: Sally Mackey at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. Co-Investigators: Margaret Ames and Mike Pearson from Aberystwyth University

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