BETHAN DEAR THE LAND IS MY BODY

 TALKS AND GATHERINGS - A LIVING FIELD
OF INQUIRY

In conjunction with
Once Upon a Time – Incarnation of Place
by Linda Zambolin & Francesco Tori

THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES WITH GUEST ARTISTS 

As part of Talks and Gatherings – A Living Field of Inquiry at El Nido, we are also sharing Q&A exchanges with artists who live and work at a distance from us geographically, yet remain deeply connected through shared inquiry. Last week we featured a conversation with India-based artist Ipshita Maitra.

This week marks the final installment in this arc of the series, where we’ve been reflecting on the luminous values within our relationship to the natural world and to lived human experience. I’m glad to share a talk with Wales-based theater-maker, writer, and performance artist Bethan Dear.

I spent time with Bethan last summer during a residency program in Northern Italy, and I deeply appreciated learning more about her creative world and process. There is so much insight in the way she speaks about nature, embodiment, and the many cycles that shape both life and artistic practice. I captured these photos of Bethan last summer while she was doing one of her water rituals. When I first began this series, I knew she was someone I wanted to include in a Q&A.

What continues to move me is how, regardless of where we live or what landscape surrounds us, each person honors their inner landscape in a uniquely personal way. I’m truly grateful for all of the artists who have taken part in these conversations, beginning with Linda Zambolin and Francesco Tori.

PHOTOS BY VICTORIA CHAPMAN

Q & A WITH BETHAN DEAR - THE LAND IS MY BODY 

Bethan Dear is a Theater maker, writer and performance artist based in Wales

VC: When you think about landscape in your work, does it feel more like a physical
place, an inner terrain, or something you’re in dialogue with.
 
BEATHAN DEAR: I love this question. And my immediate answer is all three. I very much relate to the idea, concept or feeling of my body, as a landscape, both the terrain of my physical body, as well as the landscape of my emotional, energetic and spiritual body, my soul body. 
 
Landscape as a physical place or multiple places, is also a key feature in my work; the physical, tangible landscape, of my homelands. The mountains, valleys, rivers, woodlands and oceans of North Wales, where I was conceived. The soft rolling fields, tall hedge rows and wild rugged coastlines of Cornwall, where I was born. And the mythical landscapes of Ireland, where my father’s family come from, and which I was told about as a child. The vast, bleak, unnerving and powerful moorlands of West Yorkshire, where I grew up. These are my literal and physical homelands, and the landscape of these places is in me, heart, body, mind and soul. Connecting with these physical lands has been a big part of my healing journey, as a woman and also a big inspiration for my work as an artist. These landscapes Birthed be, hold me, heal me, allow me to return to myself, root me in my lineage and ancestry. They strengthen me when I feel lost, ground me when I feel untethered, inspire and nurture me and my creativity. I am always in dialogue with these lands, whether I am physically with them or away travelling, these lands live within my inner world as well. I also speak directly to these spaces, lands and landscapes when I am in them. I talk to the trees, asking them for their wisdom, their words of reassurance or support. I speak to the rivers, ask them to wash me, re-birth me, cleanse me, renew me, refresh me. And the land itself, the rocks, the earth, cliff faces. I am always in dialogue with them, asking them for their teachings, listening deeply for their responses, which come in many forms. The land is my body and my body is birthed of these lands. The landscape of my physical, muscle, bone, blood, organ, tissue, body. The landscape of my native homelands, woodlands, waterfalls, moss. The landscape of my mind, imagination, soul, memory, psyche. And how these different landscapes are in constant connection, and dialogue with each other, inside of me and around me, speaking to each other. My work is often an exploration of how these different landscapes relate to and inform one another. How they can support one another, hold or heal one another, if we will allow them too.

VC: Water seems to come up often in your thinking and practice—what draws you to it,
and what does it offer you?
 
BEATHAN DEAR: I am rarely happier than when I am in water, near water, or working with water. It's so truly humbling and invigorating, all at once. I would say I am in a lifelong love affair with water! She's the one for me. Rivers, waterfalls, streams, the ocean, my bathtub!
 
Someone did my Birth chart for me once, and they laughed looking at it, because I am almost all water! My sun sign is Scorpio, which is a water sign, and I have always been drawn to water. The Ocean is my absolute happy place, she teaches me so much, daily. She is never the same, the Ocean, she is always changing and shifting, rearranging, responding, reacting, creating, destroying. I feel we can get rather fixed as humans, stuck in ideas of having to be a certain something, and then stick to it, rigidily. And whilst there is a time and place for rigidity, structure, and solidity, I find that when we can be fluid, as people, and as artists or creators, then the real magic can happen. Water reminds me to stay flexible, in myself, in my being, in my ideas. And it's so powerful, the most extraordinary force of nature, life giving, and unstoppable. You literally cannot stop it from flowing, it will always find a way, and even if you contain it, it will continue to move, slosh around, spill, splash, water refuses to be still, it's the most vivid and vital embodiment of life, life force and energy. So, I guess water offers me everything. It is literally my life, I could not exist without it, it is my being and makes up a lot of me. Within my work and creativity, water is a constant source of inspiration, and an endless reference point for me to check in with, whether I am allowing myself to truly flow, and find the path of least resistance in my life, and or the energy to smash through something, as and when that is needed and or required. This is what I love the most about water, it's soft and will take the easy route when it can, and if needed, it will smash, crash, tear, force its way through, to get to where it needs to go. Without any kind of violent intent, simply because it cannot, and will not, be contained, it must flow, it must reach where it's going, it must find its way through. These themes are deeply and profoundly anchoring for me, in my life and in my work.
 
As a way to always remind myself, how to keep going, if I want to give up, or how to find a way through, if I feel stuck. I can always come back too, what would water do? How would she navigate this? How would she find a way though? How would she low? How would she break through this? How would she survive? She's my guide.

VC: You’ve spoken about ruminating with the landscape. What does that process look like in your day-to-day studio practice?
 
BEATHAN DEAR: Yes. I ruminate a lot, with and within, the landscape of wherever I am.  I find a lot of resources from being out in nature or having nature in my home. I live by the ocean, so my day-to-day life often includes walking on the beach, swimming in the sea, or sitting looking at and listening to the sound of the waves. The land speaks, if we are willing to listen. 
 
The land is so vast, so incomprehensibly old, deeply wise. Be it the ocean, a woodland, a mountain, or a park in a city centre. When I sit and or spend time within the landscape of where I am, it allows me to connect more deeply to myself, and this is turn allows me to feel my own creativity, hear what is bubbling in me, what wants to come forth, what I’m curious about, what’s ruminating within me. Although I have just done a google search to check if my understanding of the word ruminate is correct, as I was curious, my online thesaurus tells me that 'ruminating' is a ‘negative’ self-practice.

I would certainly not agree! For me, rumination is sitting and deeply considering, and or feeling into, thinking about, or connecting with a space. Be it via thought or feeling, it is an entirely positive experience of being, for me. So, me and the internet are not aligned in this understanding of this word! Rumination feels quite active for me, as I often sit, lie or bury myself into the landscape I am in; curling up in the roots of a tree, digging myself into the sand, sinking into the river, or ocean, covering myself in leaves, hands in the soil, hugging a tree trunk, holding onto a rock, these day-to-day immersions into and connections with the natural world around me, keep me sane, energized, happy.
 
Day to day, I have to spend time outside, and even if I am in an urban space, finding at least a moment to look up at the sky, or feel the air, is part and parcel of me existing. It is a part of everything I do, make, create, think about, ruminating with the landscape is to me, like breathing. It is a necessary part of my being alive, as a woman and an artist.

VC: How does your body take in a place before words, structure, or performance begin to form?
 
BEATHAN DEAR: Performance art and theater need the space to be with them, to work for and alongside them. 
 
Some of my favorite actors kiss the floor of the stage or of the spaces they will perform in, as an acknowledgment that this space is facilitating your arts ability to take shape, exist and be shared. So, I guess my body takes in a space with as much reverence and respect as I can, because the space needs to welcome me in, for me to be able to use it. We’re in a direct relationship with each other, me and the place.

My relationship with space, as a performer, is a deeply spiritual one, the space will always inform what I am doing, be it creating or developing something, or performing work. I am fascinated by the idea or notion, in our Western culture, that we can ever be separate from an environment, a space, from nature, or from any place that we are in.

In my experience this is not only never the case but is in fact impossible. We are within the space, and so the space is also within us. My body takes in a new place somatically and sensorially. Feeling the energy of a place, in me, allowing it to merge with me and meet my own energy. Smelling it, touching it, sitting within it, silently, or playing within it. Rolling around on or lying on the ground. Tracing my fingers along bark, the surface or the floor, the texture of the walls. Visually, looking at and exploring the bigger view or picture of a place and as well all its details. The cracks in the walls, or balls of dust gathering. Taking it all in, meeting and greeting it all, in me. I like to use children as inspiration for a lot of things in my life. They are in connection with a body based, intuitive, heart-led way of connecting, exploring and interacting with the world, that holds a deep and profound wisdom. Children soak up the essence of the spaces they enter, they explore them, play with them, meet them. I aim to do this, with as much genuine and open curiosity as I can, and as little rational or mind created judgments.

My being and my body are deeply intuitive spaces, and I allow myself to take in a place on these planes and from these realms, as much as I do from an intellectual space. To feel and sense a space as much as I think about it. When I was on tour with my show, I needed to land and make a connection with each new place, before I could perform in it. Find my animal senses and connect this way. Sniff it out, check it's safe, make sure it's welcoming, explore it, make friends with it, find what I like about it. Spaces have a personality of their own. I aim to take them in with as much of me as I can, so that the space can work with and for me, and I for it. So that we can co-create, in togetherness.

VC: In what ways does landscape shape how you work as a theater maker, poet, and
performance artist?
 
BEATHAN DEAR: In so many ways. If I am creating a new piece of work, the landscape that I am in, for this process, will inevitably affect the work I make. If I am in a city, in a studio, where I can feel the buzz of millions of people nearby, this will feed my process and affect the work I create.  If I am working in solitude in the wilderness somewhere, where all I can hear is the sound of birds, this affects the work I make. What I can see out of the studio window, what I can smell, what I can touch, around me or near me. If I can walk out of the studio on my lunch break and feel the earth under my feet, or I am surrounded by the hustle and bustle of different languages being spoken, food being cooked, it all feeds in, immediately and directly, into what I can create, make, write or find that day.

Or subconsciously, subtly, sometimes much later, the image of a view, the memory of a sound, or smell, will swoop in and feed, inspire, initiate, something in me, a poem or a song, a series of gestures or a movement sequence. There is a core of me, that is the same, that is me and mine, and then there are layers of me that are in a constant state of change, flux, movement, adaptation. These outer layers will dance, play and explore when I am making or creating my work. So, if they are tickled by the joyous laughter of a person outside on the street, or moved by the kindness of a staff member in the cafe, or exhausted by the lack of light in a space, all of this informs what I can, want to, feel drawn to, or able to write, create, make or perform. When I perform, the landscape of the audience is crucial. It does not define whether I can perform, but it can either support and encourage the performance to grow or excel, or impede its ability to thrive. The relationship between the performer and audience is a delicate landscape that must be trodden, respected, sensed, cared for, nurtured and deeply listened to.6. Are there forms of care or responsibility that feel important to you when working so closely with place?
 
Definitely. At the very least, I feel a healthy sense of responsibility to express my gratitude for and directly to, any place I work within. Be this thanking the staff at a venue, or thanking the river after swimming in it. I have a habit of blowing a space a bunch of kisses when I leave, of spreading them into the air of the place, with love.

For me, the expression of gratitude for what a space, or place or landscape has given us, offered us, gifted us, is vital to maintaining a healthy relationship with it. I always endeavor to live by the "Leave a place better than you found it" ethos, and ensure that a space or place is left in the same state I found it in, and with something extra. Even if that extra is as simple as words of kindness, flowers, left cleaner than it was when I was invited into it, with less litter than when I arrived there. I am forever collecting and picking up other people's litter. I can't walk past it, because it feels irresponsible to me.

Bigger than this, I feel a sense of care and responsibility to all spaces, and all places. I know that I cannot individually hold sole responsibility or care for all spaces, but I do believe that we are, all, responsible, for everything, and everywhere, that we visit, or live within, work within, spend time in. If we can connect with this, softly, lightly and each do our bit, then we can all collectively care for all our spaces and places. I feel excited by this as a way of living, humbled by it, and healthily responsible for my bit of the world, for the places I walk within, swim within, or perform within, for my impact *