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, with over a hundred of his plays and libretti performed professionally.

From site-specific performance-making with Wrights & Sites Phil began to explore the possibilities of walking as a performance and writing practice. Among the companion pieces to his walking he has written and performed The Crab Walks (2004) and Crab Steps Aside (2005), in South Devon beach huts, lidos, tea shops and other unconventional settings, Rescued From The History Hut (2007, with Katie Etheridge and Anoushka Athique) and The Fabulous Walks at Teign Village (with Nicola Singh, Katie Etheridge and Fumiaki Tanaka). The texts of the 'crab' shows will be published by Intellect in the summer of 2009 in Walking, Writing and Performance: Autobiographical Texts by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith, edited by Roberta Mock.

In 2006 Phil created a mis-guided tour for the Beaminster Festival, with Simon Persighetti he performed A Michael Chekhov Mis-Guide at Dartington Hall and in 2007 he organised and created, with numerous walkers and visual artist Tony Weaver, Atmospheric Maps. In 2007, Phil retraced the 200 mile walk in 1909 of acorn-planting engineer Charles Hurst, seeking out his almost century-old oaks as research for a play - In Search of Pontiflunk (2008) - which was performed by New Perspectives, Nottingham. In 2007 and 2008 he created mis-guided tours for A la Ronde (National Trust) and in 2008 performed Manchester, Mythogoegraphy and Mobile Machinoeki for the TRIP Conference and a 'twalk' at the Royal William Victualling Yard, Plymouth for The Hidden City Festival.

In 2006 Phil led two days of the Present Generation workshop at Palazzo Delle Arti in Naples (PAN) organised by Organic Theatre.

Phil is Senior Research Associate at the University of Plymouth, and also teaches at the University of Exeter, and at Dartington College of Arts. He has published papers in Studies In Theatre and Performance Research.

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.