Artists' Conversation #7 Smooth Space meets Phil 'Mytho' Smith

Free Event in Torre Abbey's Learning Lab
Tues 28 April
6.30pm

all welcome, but booking advised - please contact info@smoothspace.org to reserve a place

Our next Smooth Space Artists' Conversation at Torre Abbey is with Phil Smith (Crab Man, Mytho), a performance-maker, writer and ambulatory researcher.

We are delighted to welcome artist Phil Smith to Torre Abbey for April's Artists' Conversation. Phil specialises in creating performances related to walking, theatre, dance, site-specificity, mythogeographies and counter-tourism.

For this ‘Conversation’ he will begin the chatter with a description of his work in post-dramatic theatre; how he shifts between conventional theatre (with audiences of over 3 million people worldwide) through rough theatre, grotesque performance, attention to the place of performance, and that ‘putting on a show’ that everyone makes in everyday life.

He will describe his work on ‘counter-tourism’; using conventional heritage sites as the stages for extraordinary explorations of self, past and what to do with what we feel makes us what we are. He will talk about his ‘mis-guided tours’ which gently and uneasily subvert official historic sites.

Then Phil will reveal three new projects:

firstly, with the site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites, authors of the company’s various ‘mis-guides’ (‘An Exeter Mis-Guide’, ‘A Mis-Guide To Anywhere’), Phil is developing ‘ambulatory architectures’: the means to create new experienced towns and cities from the ruined banality of the present ones.

secondly, he reveals just how profound the new radical walking movement has become, with a huge increase in participation in the last fifteen years, particularly from women walkers, and how this movement is about to step into a new dimension of responsibility and effect.

finally, a move to common dance. In the face of an assault on individuality and personality, Phil is working with choreographers to develop dance scores that anyone can use to develop and protect their subjectivity, imagination and irrationality.

For more information visit http://www.torre-abbey.org.uk/visit