TALK: Embodying the Eerie: Beyond the Known in Performance Making (Mary Steadman) (part of doing together 25)

TALK: Embodying the Eerie: Beyond the Known in Performance Making7th April 2025This performative presentation explored methods and processes through which we can engage with the eerie. Conceptually drawing from ‘the effect of place,’ (Heholt and Downing, 2016), participants were encouraged to engage in embodied and somatic participatory exercises that can enable an imagining ‘beyond’ the known. In this presentation, participants investigated questions including ‘What is tangible as presence?’ and ‘How can the intangible ‘affect’ of a presence or absence be felt?’ to stimulate imaginative responses to the eeriness of place?By sharing stories that arise in certain places where the eerie is ‘still running under the surface’ (Marshall, 2022), participants explored how the creative process that begins with the mundane can lead us to the sense of eeriness felt in those places.doing together 25doing together is a yearly two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by the Art Research Centre (Bath School of Art, Film and Media) in collaboration with Bath School of Design and the Centre of Cultural and Creative Industries.doing together is a platform to connect staff, students, and the community through making, collaboration and experimentation.Workshops, delivered by staff and PGR students from across the University, share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice. doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with colleagues from a range of different Schools.Throughout the symposium, facilitators – alongside participants – test out ways of doing together in an effort to make their practice-based research explicit, rather than simply describe it.