Enchantment and dissonance: walking in England’s green and pleasant land

A walking arts perspective on landscape and identity. Informed by several years practice in outdoor celebratory arts, working with the enchantment of place and landscape, I am currently hosting a series of performative walks using dissonance as provocation. The presentation offers a review of this experiment in ambulatory and socially engaged approaches to obscured and intangible cultural heritage. The presentation will offer an account of an experiment in progress and reflect on the series of walks to date with regard to the physical experience of the walker, the process and strategies of generating dissonance and the dialectic between enchantment and disenchantment. This may involve some consideration of hidden and concealed histories, memory, time and place, ecology and the body. Can a disenchanted approach enable us to step aside from the enchantment of ‘nature’ or other such constructs whilst taking pleasure in them? Can curated moments of dissonance change our relationship with the past and the land and reveal new ways of knowing ourselves in the world