Pearson|Shanks – Autosuggestion

Mike Pearson and I have a new work of theatre/archaeology, to be premiered next week – Friday 28 June. Here’s how we describe it: Just what is an automobile? In this new work of theatre/archaeology — the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real-time event — Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks reflect on an…

Pearson|Shanks – theatre|archaeology

A decade after our book Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge – [Link]), Mike Pearson and I have started a new series of collaborative works. Here is a prospectus: Pearson|Shanks – theatre|archaeology – return and prospect Twenty years ago Mike Pearson, performance artist, and Michael Shanks, archaeologist, opened a dialogue and collaboration through the theatre company Brith Gof, of…

photowork >> performed photography

As a skeptical young archaeologist back in the early 1980s I was fascinated by the connections between archaeology and photography, in archaeology’s project of documenting the remains of the past. Skeptical – I thought, and still do, that archaeology’s long links with the identity politics of nationalism and colonialism and its role in the growing…

Mike Pearson Coriolanus

Coriolan/us, Brecht, site and intervention

Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes are directing another wonderful and extraordinary site specific production of a classic dramatic text. A couple of years ago it was Aeschylus’s Persians set in a simulation of a German village used for military training in the Brecon Beacons of Wales [Link]. Currently running is Coriolan/us – a hybrid of…

Mike Pearson | The Persians

Classics and the contemporary past Mike Pearson and his new production of Aeschylus Persians (National Theatre of Wales) gets a superb review in the Guardian today [Link] This is site-specific theatre with a vengeance. High up in the Brecon Beacons, in a mock-up village used by the military as a training-base, National Theatre Wales is…