Karen and David are on the road, entangling their writing and theatre practice with new people and places. Entanglements are informal hybrid events, weaving together fragments of text, film, movement and conversation. They experiment with form and offer an insight into artistic processes and the possibility of new collaborations. Each event usually involves local artists and audiences, whose own art and ideas will be entangled with the work. Entanglements combine existing artworks and publications with the dialogues, improvisations and creative responses of participants, creating something new in the moment of performance and opening a space for reflection on art, ecology and collaboration.

As Donna Haraway and others have argued, human beings are existentially entangled with the ‘natural’ world, even from the level of the trillions of microbes comprising our bodies. Entanglement has become an important ecological paradigm, which offers a mode and a method to practice-based researchers in the field. In the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Haraway describes ‘holobiomes, or holoents, in which scientists, artists, ordinary members of communities, and nonhuman beings become enfolded in each other’s projects, in each other’s lives; [and] come to need each other in diverse, passionate, corporeal, meaningful ways’. Artistic practice has often set out to enter into complex relationships with the world, recognising itself as implicated in the environments that it seeks to understand and reveal. These events explore the potential to weave together art, writing and conversation to ask how performance can create and respond to ecological entanglements.

These events were also conceived in relation to two books:
* Entanglements of Two: A Series of Duets (Intellect), edited by Mary Paterson and Karen Christopher
* Performance in the Field: Interdisciplinary practice-as-research (Palgrave Macmillan), by David Overend

David Overend is an award-winning theatre director and Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on contemporary theatre and performance, often at the intersection with cultural geography. David’s books include Performance in the Field: Interdisciplinary practice-as-research (Palgrave Macmillan 2023); Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010-2020 with Laura Bissell (Triarchy Press 2021), and an edited collection, Rob Drummond Plays with Participation (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama 2021). https://doverend.wordpress.com