Today, we had another site visit, and our reflections returned to the transient nature of the South Holderness landscape. As arts researchers, we’re increasingly aware of how this fragile environment is not merely a backdrop to our work, but rather a living entity in constant negotiation with forces beyond our control—forces that are both longstanding and natural, and that have also more recently been deeply affected by human activity. Rather than seeing this region’s unique geomorphology as static, we are beginning to understand just how precarious its own dance is between permanence and impermanence – a site in which the Earth’s frailty is exposed, and the weight of our actions as humans must be reckoned with.
This coastline, a space where land, sea, and human endeavour intersect, is a testament to the impermanence that Bruno Latour warns us about when he speaks of ‘our common world’ – a place continually reshaped by both non-human and human agents. The tides, wind, and gravity that shape the South Holderness coast now do so in what seems to be an ever-accelerating rhythm, hastened by climate change and our neglect of the planet’s fragility. As Michel Serres notes, ‘we are tenants of a world we continue to mistreat’, and this coastline bears the scars of that mistreatment—up to ten meters of land lost each year due to rising seas and more violent storms, shaped by a warming atmosphere.
The land here is ancient, its indigenous foundation built on Cretaceous chalk, with boulder clay layered above it from the last Ice Age—a geological history so vast that it humbles any human conception of time. Yet, this is a history that – in the minutes and seconds that are now – seems increasingly vulnerable. The erratic boulders scattered across the site are profoundly symbolic reminders of distant places and ancient forces – first displaced and moved here from their sites of origin by the immense power of glaciers tens of thousands of years ago; and before even that astounding ice-bound geo-relocation, they were first of all formed up to 300 million years ago, when molten magma or lava cooled and solidified, or from deposition, compaction, and cementation of prehistoric sediments, or when existing rocks transformed due to intense pressure and heat from plate tectonics or magma intrusions. Yet despite this long history and symbolic heft, they are, in the here and now, equally ‘moved’ by the modern consequences of human activity. These stones wear down to sand more quickly now through faster abrasion, more severe hydraulic action, greater attrition, new chemical weathering, harsher wave action – transforming larger fragments into smaller, rounded sand grains over less time. They are therefore both resilient and fragile, and reminders of the interdependence that Bruno Latour has championed in his recent calls for a new ecology—an environmental awareness that forces us to reconsider our place in the fabric of nature, and brings us to a point at which we can see the ‘fragile threads’ that bind humans to the non-human world.
Our performance cannot therefore simply occupy this space, or happen on/in it; it must engage with it. The rocks, clays, and sands we encounter here cannot be stage props, or pieces of some theatrical set—they must be actors in their own right, embodying the idea of impermanence and speaking of both the immutability and the fragility of the natural world. In handling these materials, our audiences (be they octogenarians or young primary-age schoolchildren) will also, in differing ways, have to confront the slow erosion of cliffs and the relentless advance of tides, mirroring our shared vulnerability. As Michel Serres so abruptly said: ‘The Earth is fragile, and so are we.’ We want this interaction with nature to evoke a deeper awareness of the quiet, inevitable processes that shape the world, as we try to grapple with the impact of human actions on these delicate systems.
This is because the constant erosion that we witness here is not merely a natural process—but rather it is an acceleration of age-old processes that have been augmented in recent years by a narrative of human complicity in our planet’s fragility. We’re not just observing here; we’re implicated. As the land erodes, so too does the illusion of human dominion over nature. Our performance, shaped by these forces, will be an acknowledgment of the very thin line between resilience and collapse, permanence and impermanence.
Today’s visit reminded us that our role as artists is to engage with this landscape ethically, to create work that speaks to the frailty of the planet. This coastline is evidently evolving, and so must we. In our research and development, we are striving to capture the tensions that Latour emphasises—the need for human beings to recognise their responsibility within our ecosystem, not as owners, guardians or controllers, but as vulnerable participants in a world of mutual fragility. We hope that our performance will embody this tension, becoming more than just a ‘dance on a beach’—it will instead serve as a meditation on the vulnerability of our shared world and the urgent need for us to protect it by changing what we consume, where we go, and what we do.
