In the ‘Right to Return Pre-text’ we travel back in time to the year 1967 when Israel opened the border for the first time in 20 years to Palestinians who fled in 1948. Husband and wife Said and Sofia are arguing in their living room in Ramallah, Palestine about whether or not they should take this chance to visit the house for which they still have the key, but which Israelis would now surely be living in. Finally on a sweltering hot June day they set out in their old grey Fiat to make the journey to Haifa to face the un-faceable. Based on Ghassan Kanafani’s (1936-1972) novella ‘Returning to Haifa’ this pre-text explores the consequences of political and military occupation from a deeply human perspective. A series of questions are posed through three scenes that take participants from the known in to profoundly de-stabilising unknown territories.

A snapshot paper concerning values, approaches and modes of practice in higher education performing arts. This paper is contained in the 2011 report, Collaborative Arts Practices in HE: Mapping and Developing Pedgagogical Models by Christophe Alix, Elizabeth Dobson, Robert Wilsmore.

This paper will present drawing as a knowledge generating activity that integrates perception, action and cognition. It will do so with reference to a range of theory that champions the epistemic significance of perception in knowledge generation, with particular reference to contemporary theories of ‘situated cognition’, as well as the related work of contemporary theorists like Mark Johnson and Alva Noë. The absorption of art and design education within the broader university presents many advantages, however a principal drawback is a phenomenon the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu recognises as the exclusion of métier, that is “the material determinations of symbolic practices” – including drawing – from such “scholastic universes” (Bourdieu, 2000, p.20). This, it will be argued, is a key factor in what James Elkins describes as “the incommensurability of studio art production and university life” (Elkins, 2009, p.128). Perhaps due to its neophyte status within the university, the discipline of art and design has been remarkably ineffective in countering the negative repercussions of this phenomenon. This paper will argue that it is magnified by a tendency – as outlined by Johnson – within the mainstream of Anglo-American analytical philosophy to “retain an exclusive focus on the conceptual/propositional as the only meaning that mattered for our knowledge of the world” (Johnson, 2007, p.9). This view presents language, and textual argument in particular, as representing the ‘gold standard’ in terms of a model for knowledge generation within the university. By way of counterweight, this paper will present ‘situated cognition’, a theory indebted to both Phenomenology and American Pragmatism, both of these philosophical movements run counter to mainstream epistemology. In short this paper will, in this way, make a case for the rehabilitation of drawing as an important way of knowing.

A public exhibition of the work of 19th-century cartoonist and actress Marie Duval.

ETV (Estonian Television National Channel) Interviewer and Arts Commentator Andrus Vaariku asks ‘Can Theatre Change the World?’ An Estonian National TV documentary focusing on three artists in three contexts: Contemporary Performance Practitioner Ene-Liis Semper, Applied Drama Practitioners Allan Owens & Katrin Nielsen ‘Hidden town: Silamae and Hendrik Toompere illusioonl Ugala Theatre Director UGALA.

The Echo of Dreams Pre-text allows for consideration of sudden changes in life, the unpredictable , unforeseen and unknowable to create a space for the exchange of such understandings and to allow for a celebration of the human spirit in the face of loss

Outputs of an artists' residency at Kirkleatham Museum.

A public exhibition at the Walker Arts Centre, Minneapolis

Catalogue essay in exhibition catalogue.

The concept of return is at the heart of ‘My Old Home Pre-text’, but in a very different political context, that of China in the 1920’s. A man whose name we never know, braves the freezing cold to make the journey by boat from Peking (now Beijing) with a clear purpose in mind, to sell the old home he last saw twenty years ago and to bring his mother and niece back to the big city with him. He travels resolutely, but is unprepared for the wave of emotions that wash over him as he meets his old friend and questions the lives they are living. Lu Xun (1881-1936) wrote the story on which this pretext was based in 1921 when 2000 years of imperial rule had just ended. Revolts and uprisings had taken place, modernization had begun, but society had not changed and he criticizes this. Through a series of detailed frames participants engage with the mans’ search for hope.