This text was performed in August and October 2023 at the Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh as part of the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas. It is an argument for interdisciplinary collaboration, with some stories of Making Routes fieldwork at Knepp Castle Estate and Gully Cave.
Joke
Hi. I’d like to start with a joke. Seems appropriate…
A scientist, a geographer and an artist walk into a bar…
The barman asks them what they want and:
- The scientist asks for an aqueous solution of ethanol, sugars, amino acids, minerals, flavonoids, and other organic compounds, resulting from chemical reactions of mashing, boiling, and fermentation. [he doesn’t get out much]
- The geographer orders the product of the skilled labour of farmers and artisan brewers, who cultivate local and global ingredients deriving from diverse environmental factors. [she doesn’t get out much, either]
- The artist requests a liquid celebration, a symphony of flavours that dance upon the tongue, a frothy masterpiece that delights the senses and elevates the spirit. [he gets out too much]
And the barman looks at them all blankly for a moment, then says ‘so that’ll be three pints of beer, then?’
Ok, so it wasn’t a funny joke. But if you’re here expecting an hour of comedy, you’ve maybe misread the blurb…
And something comedians never do is analyse their own jokes (unless you’re Stewart Lee). But my background is in theatre and performance studies, so I can’t help it.
I want to note that moment when the barman looks at these disciplinary characters ‘blankly’.
[Some of you are looking at me quite blankly right now]
That moment of blankness is what often happens when specialists forget that they spend most of their time up their own arses.
But I want to suggest that this space of not quite getting each other – of misunderstandings and miscommunications, between people who don’t usually talk to each other – holds tremendous potential for transformational change.
When we generate, organise, categorise, and share knowledge, so much of our efforts go into eliminating those spaces of perplexed bafflement from our work.
My suggestion is that we actually need to embrace them and cultivate them. This talk is going to tell you how to do that.
Field
I’m standing in a field in West Sussex.
There is a gentle rain creating ripples in a dark pond. Oak trees shed their acorns. A herd of cows – long horned mega beasts – stare at us from afar. Purple emperor butterflies flit about the tangled wildflowers. A cacophony of birdsong – blue tits, robins, blackcaps. Rabbits bound through the hedgerow. Buzzards circle overhead.
And the reason I’m standing in this field is that I’ve invited a group of scientists, geographers, and artists to work together for a couple of days at an experimental rewilding site.
My idea is that if these people spend some time together, exploring their different takes on nature and conservation – then something else will emerge. Something that we don’t yet understand or recognise. Something that might change the way we think about the world and our place within it.
And one of the group – a Quaternary Scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London – looks at me blankly for a moment and says ‘What do you actually want us to do?’
Can I have a volunteer to play the part of this scientist?
You don’t have to do much – just join me up here and read aloud from this short script, so only come up if you’re comfortable doing that in front of all these people!
Script 1
Scientist: What do you actually want us to do?
David: Um… well, I’m hoping that will emerge as we work together here.
Scientist: How are we going to do that, though?
David: Well, I thought we could use some of the methods from my training as a theatre director and collaborative performance-maker to – you know – explore the more-than-human world here and kind of… create an assemblage of ecological practice…
Scientist: Right.
David: So, maybe we could start by just finding a place to sit and writing a little response to the things you observe there – like, the sounds and the feeling of being here – that sort of thing.
Scientist: Ok. How many words?
David: Well, there’s no word limit as such.
Scientist: So we can just write whatever we want?
David: Yes. And then, if you’re comfortable to do so, we might read those to each other and then see if we can weave them together somehow – create a kind of multi-authored text from our time here? It could even include some movement if you wanted.
Scientist: Yep.
David: Does that sound ok?
Scientist: … I think I’m going to need an aqueous solution of ethanol, sugars, amino acids, minerals, flavonoids, and other organic compounds, resulting from the chemical reactions of mashing, boiling, and fermentation.
Rewilding
Rewilding requires a willingness to let go of some of the things that we think we know.
I was drawn to it because it offers a new way of working that moves us into a radical space of possibility, in which we don’t know how to behave, we have no language to explain what is happening, and we just have to trust in messy, unpredictable processes.
That is not how most of us currently work.
But I do think things are changing.
Word
There’s a word that has surreptitiously infiltrated the modern university: sneaking its way along dusty, book-lined corridors; slipping into shiny new research laboratories; and even cementing itself into renovation and construction projects across campuses. It is a word that threatens the very foundations of higher education. It demands new ways of working and raises difficult questions about how we should work together, share ideas, and respond to the big challenges facing our world today.
That word is… [any guesses?]… ‘interdisciplinary’.
I want to take up the offer of interdisciplinarity and suggest that we all need to become less disciplined – that’s my dangerous idea.
Shaking off the mantle of traditional, discipline-bound knowledge, I want to suggest that the only way to respond to an increasingly complex and challenging world is to stop playing by the rules. We need creative, experimental, and messy spaces where new approaches can be developed.
I’m going to take you into another of these messy spaces now.
Cave
You’re in a cave in the Mendips in Somerset. The cave mouth faces west with far-reaching views over a gorge and westwards across the flat floodplain of a river. The ground is covered in bright blue tarpaulin. You are at an excavation site, where the scientists have discovered bones, teeth, and fragments from tens of thousands of mammals and birds. It is raining. Wild pony, auroch, arctic fox, wolf, and hyena all lived here once. Your encounter with deep time makes you feel sick.
When I visited this place in November 2021, I brought some of the same collaborators with me, who worked together in the field in West Sussex.
It was encouraging that they had come back.
What made this place quite different from the rewilding site was absence.
In the field, we had seen the pigs, cows, butterflies, and oaks.
Here we encountered an unassuming opening in a cliff face that had been hollowed out over a decade of careful excavation work.
I really needed to understand more about what I was seeing.
Ok, now I need another volunteer – same deal, you’re playing the part of a geographer.
Script 2
Geographer: The cave was filled with a red, limestone-rich deposit, which accumulated through the inwashing of material down the gully above and through a large fissure feature within the cave roof. This was then capped by a densely-cemented carbonate flowstone, sealing the deposits below. That essentially created a deep time memory box for us to discover…
David: … Wow!
Geographer: The breccia has proved to be richer with fossils than we ever could have imagined. So much evidence of past inhabitation and clues to their behaviours, which can inform our understanding of future conservation possibilities.
David: Amazing!
Geographer: What we’re seeing here is a window into the Quaternary. I’m sure you’ll have loads of thoughts about how we can work together to understand all this.
David: Just… Wow. It’s er… vast, isn’t it?
Geographer: What’s your initial response? To what you’re seeing here?
David: … er… Wow. It makes me think… um… It’s amazing.
Geographer: … I’m going to need the product of the skilled labour of farmers and artisan brewers, who cultivate local and global ingredients deriving from diverse environmental factors.
Final
Thank you to our geographer. Thank you to our scientist.
And that leaves me, I suppose. The artist.
On the walk back from this cave through the gorge, I shared my worries with one of the participants, Helen.
I said that I felt a bit overwhelmed by the scale of what we had just encountered.
I said that this didn’t feel like the right time for our usual methods and experiments.
And Helen replied: ‘You have to breathe in to breathe out’.
I think that’s the most difficult part of all this: spending time together, sharing ideas and experiences, learning from each other, and then very slowly starting to find ways to collaborate.
We need to resist the urge to know everything and control everything.
We need to let a little more wildness into the process.
And that’s where I think art and creativity have a lot to offer.
Entering into these unknown and perhaps unknowable spaces, I have felt challenged, bewildered, moved, and inspired.
What I was able to do was then channel those experiences into very small scale, tentative responses…
Creative writing, performed actions, makeshift films, and installations – these offered me ways to bring together the disparate perspectives and responses of the participants.
Art became a glue holding it all together. Or rather, a thread, weaving things together.
For me, it unlocked something quite profound – an insight into a wilder, messier, unpredictable world that exists outside the academy, and of which we are all a part.
That doesn’t need discipline.
Perhaps we can talk about that for a bit.
Then you can join me for a liquid celebration, a symphony of flavours that dance upon the tongue, a frothy masterpiece that delights the senses and elevates the spirit.
Thank you.
