SOAK LAB

A live art base for for interdisciplinary performance research and creative experimentation

The SOAK LAB is a space for interdisciplinary performance research and creative experimentation led by Dr Sarah Blissett . SOAK LAB runs in connection with SOAK Live Art, a platform that showcases experimental performance work by South West artists, funded by Arts Council England and now supported by The Bridge.

In June 2024, we ran our first SOAK LAB event, a three-day series of participatory performance workshops led by South West artists, which explored a range of site-based performance practices. Over the three days of midsummer, we gathered at the water’s edge across three different locations in Plymouth: Firestone Bay, Mount Batten Peninsula and Drake’s Reservoir. Each day we explored embodied ways of working with environments with a focus on listening, sound-making and movement as approaches to devising material.

The SOAK LAB facilitated conversations and exercises that gathered new insights into different creative practices working with environments. Collectively, we considered what human and more-than-human stories were revealed by our embodied encounters in these watery locations, paying particular attention to the language of seaweeds and other ecologies. We also considered how water and tides connect us with creatures, people and places in ways that might make space to nurture relationships between human expression and the more-than-human. The workshops explored approaches to sounding the shoreline using our bodies (sound walking, field sensing, deep listening, water drumming), and tools (hydrophones for underwater recording). Getting wet was optional, but there was lots of splashing about.

The creative outputs from the three days were three original new sound pieces that will air on Soundart Radio (autumn 2024). The workshops were led by: Emma Welton and Anne-Marie Culhane, Sarah Blissett and Kerry Priest, and Jan-Ming Lee. This first SOAK Lab event was made possible by funding from an AHRC Impact Accelerator Award.

Dr Sarah Blissett is an interdisciplinary artist and dramaturg working between visual art and performance. She is a lecturer in drama; her research investigates human-nonhuman entanglements and site-responsive ways of working with algae and intertidal ecologies.

Sarah is co-director of SOAK Live Art CIC, a platform for experimental performance in Plymouth showcasing work by South West artists in a regular series of events. Sarah also runs the SOAK Lab, a space for interdisciplinary performance research focusing on local ecologies, funded by an AHRC Impact Accelerator Award.

Land/Water and the Visual Arts

Land/Water and the Visual Arts is an international network of artists, filmmakers, writers, curators, scholars and researchers who embrace a diversity of creative and critical practices.

Operating as a forum for the interrogation of nature, culture, aesthetics, and representation relating to land, landscape and place, we generate work that addresses a range of issues, including environmental change, sustainability, journey, site and regional specificity. In addition, a forum for theoretical and methodological debate is constructed through research events, exchange exhibitions with other higher education institutions, conferences, symposia and publications.

Explore the Land/Water network