Performing Landscapes and Pluriversing Homescapes with Sally Mackey

We are pleased to invite you to this hybrid research event which acknowledges Professor Sally Mackey’s editorial leadership of the groundbreaking, international scholarly series, Performing Landscapes, and celebrates Mackey’s recently published, co-edited collection, Performing Homescapes (Springer, 2025, co-edited with Adelina Ong). This research event was planned and co-curated by Mackey before her recent passing and it is an honour to deliver it in her absence.

The Performing Landscapes series, which Mackey co-founded and co-edited with Prof. Dee Heddon, provides an international and leading platform for the comprehensive critical study of generic but complex sites of performance landscapes. With its unique focus on particular and singular sites, Performing Landscapes has developed in strikingly novel ways the debates concerning performance's multiple relations to environment, ecology and global concerns. In 2020, the Performing Landscapes series published the first of its monographs, Performing Mountains by Jonathan Pitches, which has been followed by Performing Ruins by Simon Murray, and Performing Farmscapes by Susan Haedicke, alongside the collections Performing Ice, edited by Carolyn Philpott, Elizabeth Leane and Matt Delbridge, and Performing Homescapes, edited by Sally and Adelina Ong. Forthcoming monographs include Performing Gardens by Cathy Turner and Performing Beaches by Diana Looser.

With the recent publication of Performing Homescapes (2025), Mackey proposed an expanded understanding of the performance of home/scapes as a new intervention into the fields of performance and home scholarship. In this edited collection, a pluriverse of homescapes offered from international voices and practices engage with the social, political, ecological and cultural landscapes that shape and sustain affects related to the notion of home, unhomeliness and migration. Often situated outside a conventional home-as-house and intimate dwelling, this curated collection encourages intersectional, pluralist, migratory and hybrid understandings of home beyond individual house-homes and asks how performance might refract, adduce, represent, challenge, enlighten, enhance and negotiate homescapes. The chapters suggest a colloquy, a formal conversation of performance specific to work with homescapes that represents an interlacing and meeting of certain constants or features of performing homescapes, running through all of the chapters: precarity, participation and ecology.

Performance precarity is evidenced in Sara Matchett and Phoebe Mbasalaki’s reflection on the precarity and ‘homelessness’ of South African sex workers; Mackey interrogates precariousness of site and the concomitant aesthetics of practice in UK areas of unrest and potential conflict; Jill Carter reminds us of the historical precarity of ousted Indigenous groups in Canada; Adelina Ong reflects on the precarity of forests in Singapore and explores ways of becoming-homescape through the observation of landscape with trees.

Without claiming ‘micro-topias’ or benevolence, various forms of participation, ‘immersion’ and socially engaged work are critical aspects of performance in Alexandra Halligey and Kabwe’s discussion of African Exodus which reflects on the impact of lab-based participatory projects; Lisa Woynarski and Lucy Tyler immerse themselves in Canada’s The June motel to critique presentations of neoliberal lifestyles; Paola Abatte-Herrera writes of adults in Chile participating through Zoom workshops, and Natalie Lazaroo reflects on how performance can create an undomesticated ground to disturb common spatial metaphors of home and the “domesticated” female body.

Ecology as oikos is a reference point for several chapters. Tanja Beer and Ingvill Fossheim’s interview and discussion about the use of home-based sustainable materials for theatre production offers a fascinating account of practice in the emerging field of ecoscenography. Migrancy is determinedly part of homescapes in this collection of work and Jerri Daboo and Smriti Haricharan’s chapter explores diasporic homescapes as ‘multiple, coexisting homes’. In other chapters, the erasure of Indigenous homescapes and the disappearance of the more-than-human are also highlighted. Performing Homescapes invites you to respond and begin new conversations about homescapes, beyond conventional conceptions of the house-as-home.

At this event we’ll hear from:

• Prof. Dee Heddon (co-editor with Mackey of the Performing Landscapes series, in-person)
• Prof. Carl Lavery (advisor to the Performing Landscapes series, online, live)
• Contributors to Performing Homescapes
• Sara Matchett and Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki (video)
• Tanja Beer and Ingvill Fossheim (online, live)
• Paola Abatte-Herrera (in-person)
• Natalie Lazaroo (video)
• Jerri Daboo and Smriti Haricharan (video)
• Alexandra Halligey and Mwenya Kabwe (online, live)
• Jill Carter (online, live)
• Dr Adelina Ong (co-editor with Sally for Performing Homescapes), Dr Lisa Woynarski (contributor to Performing Homescapes) and Dr Cathy Sloan reflecting on how Mackey, as our doctoral supervisor, has shaped our practices (in-person).

Following these brief sharings, we invite responses from attendees who would like to reflect on the themes raised by Performing Homescapes and the Performing Landscapes series.

We hope those attending in person will be able to join us afterwards for drinks and conversation, where we can further celebrate Performing Homescapes and acknowledge Mackey’s profound influence on place-based performance scholarship and practice.

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama will host an event celebrating Sally Mackey’s wider contribution to the school and the field later this year.

Biogs

Paola Abatte-Herrera is an Applied Theatre and Applied Arts researcher and practitioner. As an artist, she has worked nationally and internationally with original puppets and mask theatre and writes in Performing Homescapes of how adults in Chile express their emotions participating through Zoom workshops.

Tanja Beer is a Senior Lecturer in Design at the Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University, Australia. She is an ecological designer and community artist, and the author of Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design for Perfomance (2021).

Jill Carter Based in Tkaron:to where she was born and largely raised, Jill Carter is an Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi theatre-practitioner, researcher and educator at the University of Toronto. She is an active member of the Talking Treaties Collective, founder of the Collective Encounter and serves as a researcher and tour guide for First Story, Toronto, with which she also devises land activations, mapping interventions and personal cosmography workshops.

Jerri Daboo is Professor of Performance in the Department of Communications, Drama and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research moves across theatre, dance, music and popular culture, and her publications include the monograph Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra on the British Stage (Routledge, 2018).

Ingvill Fossheim is doctoral researcher at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture with the thesis BioCostume: Experimental Costume Design with Biobased Co-Actants (2020-). Through her artistic work and research, she seeks to orient performance-making praxis towards more environmentally responsible, resilient and regenerative material approaches.

Alexandra Halligey is currently a senior lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Culture Studies Department at Wits University. Her research is concerned with theatre and performance as research tools and conceptual lenses for exploring everyday urban place-making.

Smriti Haricharan is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT-Bombay, Mumbai, India. Her research explores areas of cultural heritage, landscape archaeology and contemporary and experimental archaeology.

Professor Deirdre Heddon is the James Arnott Chair in Drama in the School of Culture & Creative Arts (University of Glasgow). She is co-editor (with Sally Mackey) of The Performing Landscapes series and has researched and published across many areas of interest including autobiography, walking art and devising practices.

Mwenya Kabwe is a theatre-maker, dramaturg and senior lecturer at the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, Cape Town, South Africa. Her creative practice and research is focused on contemporary African theatre and performance, migration, collaborative and interdisciplinary art making and re-imagining African futures.

Professor Carl Lavery is Professor of Theatre and Performance in the School of Culture & Creative Arts (University of Glasgow). He has published numerous articles and books on theatre and ecology, most recently An Idea for a Theatre Ecology (Manchester University Press, 2025).

Natalie Lazaroo is a Senior Lecturer in Education (Drama) at Griffith University. Her research interests lie in cultural citizenship, socially-engaged performance, arts-based research and decentring methodologies.

Sara Matchett is an award-winning Theatre Director and Associate Professor at the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town. As a co-founder of the Mothertongue Project women’s arts collective, Sara has experience in theatre and performance as a maker, performer, director and facilitator.

Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki is a lecturer in the department of Sociology and Director at the Centre for Intimate Sexual Citizenship at the University of Essex. She has published numerous chapters and journal articles on critical race, gender, class, sexuality, creative activism, public health as well as decolonial thought and praxis.

Adelina Ong is a Singaporean, independent applied performance researcher. Her synthetic applied performance practices and placemaking practices are inspired by Sally Mackey’s anatopic performance practices, parkour, graffiti, skateboarding, street dance, Death Cafes and Dungeons & Dragons.

Cathy Sloan is a Senior Lecturer in Applied and Socially Conscious Theatre at the London College of Music, University of West London. Her theatre-making practice and research focuses on recovery-engaged artistic practices.

Lisa Woynarski (she/her) is Associate Professor of Theatre in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. As a performance-maker and scholar, her work connects performance and ecology, from an intersectional lens, foregrounding decolonisation.