As part of the Sensory Landscapes panel of the Landscapes: Performing Space and Culture conference, Megan Pitcher will present her performance piece work Always There. The conference, scheduled to run this weekend April 5–6, is hosted by the Theatre History and Criticism program department of Theatre at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Those active in the arts, humanities, and social sciences have been invited to explore the concept of landscapes as spatial and cultural sites with particular interest in elements that are theatrical and performative.
The culminating event of the two-day conference will be an evening of presentations and discussions with invited conference guest presenters Heather S. Nathans (Department of Theatre, University of Maryland), Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson (Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern University), Jodi Byrd (American Indian Studies Program and Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Dianne Harris (Director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and Departments of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art History, and History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Moderator Valleri Hohman of the U of I Department of Theatre will moderate the discussion series.

Pitcher’s 2012 piece Always There draws attention to floor and location. It layers the movements of could-have-been with the hesitations and actualizations of live viewers. It is a temporal landscape, a site-specific performance, and an audience-activated installation, all in one.

An Excerpt from Always There by meglouise.

Pitcher’s presentation of Always There is supported in part by a Lya Dym Rosenblum Award from Columbia College. For more information on the artist, click here.