Wrights & Sites: people

Stephen is an interdisciplinary artist who draws on scientific method, visual imagery, found material, fragmented texts, intervention and walking practices. His performance work is structure led: time tends to be the controlling force, rather than narrative or character. Practice outside of Wrights & Sites includes Headland (1991, In The Big Room), for piano solo (1994, National Review of Live Art, Glasgow) and 2⁶ (1997, Spacex Gallery, Exeter).

He is a member of the Centre for Intermedia and a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter, where his teaching and research focus on contemporary performance (site-specific performance & performative practices, and live/performance art). He was a co-ordinator of Site / Sight <-> Source / Resource (2004), a two-day symposium for artists and academics engaged in site-based practices.

Stephen is a member of the New Theatre Architects (formerly the Experimental Theatre Consortium, initiated by Arts Council England in 2003), a board member of New Work Network and the Theatre, Dance & Live Art Curator at Exeter Phoenix. His avatar is the curator of 2ND LIVE (exploring live performance in Second Life®).

Simon has a background in community arts and touring theatre including work with Gog Theatre on their epic tour of Cameroon, West Africa. He taught visual arts and drama in Zambia, and is currently a part-time Lecturer in Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts. His research focuses on performance in and of place, cityscape and landscape, and he is currently completing a PHD (Practice) entitled, Mis-Guided exploration of Cities: an ambulant investigation of participative politics of place.

As a core member of tEXt Festivals, involved in the planning and programming of an annual multi-media writing platform (2002-present) he engages with writing in many forms. His BBC radio play Maps (1985), Edinburgh Festival production of TRAIN and the more recent Love Bites, performed in Berlin and Munich, all have threads of travel and journey at their heart.

Phil comes from a background in performance and music theatre, working as a writer and dramaturg with companies including TNT (Munich), St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Opera North and Perpetual Motion.

From site-specific performance-making with Wrights & Sites he began to explore the possibilities of walking as a performance practice. Recently he wrote and performed companion pieces on his walking, The Crab Walks (2004) and Crab Steps Aside (2005), in South Devon beach huts, lidos, tea shops and other unconventional settings, with directorial assistance from Anjali Jay and Sue Palmer, and with accompanying mythogeographic maps and cards by visual artist Tony Weaver. The texts of these two shows are to be published by Intellect in 2007. In 2006 Phil created Mis-Guided tours for Beaminster, UK, with Simon Persighetti A Michael Chekhov Mis-Guide, led two days of the Present Generation workshop in Naples, and mis-guided a number of walks in South Devon, UK, creating with the walkers the Atmospheric Maps to be published in early 2007. Also planned for 2007, Phil will be following a 150 mile walk in 1909 of the acorn-planting engineer Charles Hurst as research for a play based on this walk for New Perspectives, Nottingham, UK for 2008. He will also create a performance on the move: Mobile Machinoeki and an A La Ronde Mis-Guide.

Phil teaches at the universities of Exeter, Plymouth and Winchester, and at Dartington College of Arts. He has published a research paper on Street Performance and Public Ritual in Exeter, 1830s-1930s in Studies In Theatre and Performance, Vol. 24, No. 2 and his paper on 'spaces', A Taxonomy On Its Toes, is published in Performance Research 11:1.

Cathy is a writer, performer and academic. Her work is concerned with performance writing and new dramaturgies, as well as site-specific performance.

Alongside her site-specific practice, her theatre-based work includes an Arts Council funded project in 2003, comprising three pieces made in collaboration with Dorinda Hulton and Peter Hulton (Air), Jane Munro (I Am Just Going Outside And May Be Some Time) and Julia Barclay (An Alliance). Each of these looked at a different approach to integrating writing and performing. In 2002, she took part in a durational performance of And On The Thousandth Night... with Forced Entertainment at the KunstenFestivaldesArts, Brussels. In the past, she has also written extensively for rural touring theatre and other theatre contexts.

Between 2000-2003 she held an AHRB funded Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Exeter's Department of Drama, researching writing processes within contemporary performance. She is currently is a Lecturer in Performing Arts at the University of Winchester and is working (with Synne Behrndt) on a book on the work of the contemporary dramaturg.