You might have encountered Nic Green’s work through Trilogy, where, alongside a varied group of women, she examined the poetics of the female body. Or perhaps you’ve encountered her deep in the woods of Woodchester Park in Gloucestershire, enacting a ritual of solitude and a candid dialogue with the natural, after spending a year in a remote area of Scotland. As an artist working at the intersection between performance and ecology, place and people, her work is rooted in the natural whilst also delineated by a particular social and political responsibility.

In Fatherland, Green engages with and questions the connection between our familial roots and those embodied bonds with place; she speaks of blood lines, cathartic dances and the dance of drum and moustache, in a desire to engage with folk and the mythology of place through the vehicle of autobiography. Fatherland is based around the artist following the traces of her paternal bloodline , with the body as site and vehicle for this quest. At the same time, Green is presenting A Cock and Bull Story, a scratch performance that sees her moving to even more political territory- bankers.

With work that is very much situated at the meeting point between the social, the political and the topological, Green makes certain connections visible, whilst in search of the embodied and ancient. She thus seeks both a construction and an awakening; she considers time of essence in the making of a perspective and work, as well as places particular emphasis on listening as both method and mode. Here we speak to her about the poetics of place, the identity of her work and the processes that lie behind it.

Run Riot: Your work engages and explores a certain poetics of place, locality , people and communities. Navigating ecological performance practice, pedagogical strategies, socially engaged practice and a certain poetic radicality, you seek to both make connections but also engage and seek meaning and energy in the natural. Can you tell us a bit about the journey of your practice? What do you think continues to shape your work?

Nic Green: I think one of the fundamental aspects of my practice is working with what is already there. In this sense, I see myself as a listener, or 'noticer', rather than an artist as speaker or creator.

I believe in a depth of process which allows the unconscious to become conscious, or the quiet to become heard, or the buried unearthed. For me, often this requires a long process of learning and life living, as this shift in perspective can be slow and can also require slowness as an approach in itself.

Often it feels that I’m not actually engaged in making, but more the act of listening for what is already there, which likely requires a change in perspective on my part. I talk about listening as a practice being at the centre of my work. This suggests that there is something to be heard (beyond the narrative of self-hood) and, to listen to one thing clearly you may need to quieten others.  At many points, this is the case with my own ‘voice.’ In order to pay attention to what is around me - be it communities, environments, materials or species - there is often a period of time when I try to quieten any unnecessary dominant voice I may hold, which can so easily drown out the ‘voices’ of others. In this sense, I believe that all of the above hold and yield agency, and my job is to listen out for it. Sometimes I hear the phrase ‘giving voice,’ which I like, however I would say simply, ‘listening,’ since I feel whatever is to be heard is already there and it is not for me to give. This can sometimes feel difficult, like a complete re-learning of how to experience and interact with the world. I work towards experiencing the world around me as vibrant, ‘live’ and as having agency, rather than as dead matter, purely for our disposal. In this sense I aim to challenge my own sense of anthropocentricism to make space for an experience which recognises the self as interdependent with and in relationship with all that is around.

Run Riot: Your work quite often – as was the case with Trilogy – seeks to understand ways in which action might unleash agency, be it within a community, in relation to people or engaging with a particular issue. You undertook an MSc in Human Ecology which allowed you to develop an ecological art praxis that centres around a particular position in regards to performance and its place socially and culturally. Can you tell us about what is at the heart of your processes, and how you engage with agency in your work?

Nic Green: Well, I think I started on this in the above question and as I said I call it ‘listening’, although I think it could be called many things.  I suppose making space to develop an acute practice of listening is at the heart of my process and, for this to be effective, I often feel there is quite a bit of work for me to do in making the unconscious responses to the context I am working in, conscious. This reflexivity for me allows a sort of ‘clearing’ which in turn gives space for hearing others (in the broadest sense) more clearly.

Often I focus on the work as being in service to something, and my self as in service to the work. It is fundamental to question any sense of self-importance I may hold in the context of service. In all of this I do find a very difficult balance between recognising what’s around me as vibrant and with agency whilst also recognising and acting on one’s own agency within the given context. In this sense I think I see my own sense of agency as fluid and responsive. It is easy to want to disappear when trying to listen for something outside of the conscious self, but this does not reflect the relational context that really is at the centre. This is the work really - the relationship that exists/emerges between myself as the artist and the material of the work.  

Having said this, although not so much in the case of Fatherland, more and more I am finding ways to experiment with being ‘quieter’ in the work and sharing the space much more equally with perhaps place, weather, sound, light-many things really.  I have an interest in how these can become central in the dramaturgy of the performance, rather than playing supporting roles.  I love people like Marie Cool in this sense. Her approach helps you to see the vibrancy in every material she works with. It is (re)enchanting.

In Fatherland there is a particular focus on space and notions of spaciousness, along with the space itself, and in this sense I see ‘space’ very much as the material of the work-along with sound and vibration, ‘Scottish-ness’ and the technique and rhythms of a traditional Scottish Jig.

Run Riot: Fatherland is part of a diptych that was started in 2012, alongside Motherland. In both instances you connect family and place, engaging with a complex psycho-geography that starts with following your paternal line in Scotland and travels to wooded Yorkshire, where you grew up with your Mother.

Nic Green: I began Fatherland a long time ago, when I tried to capture a brief and singular encounter with my Father. I was unable to remember much about the experience, but felt it must be of significance in some way - that family and the sense of ‘where you come from,’ or grow from are some of the ways in which people create identities.  

Run Riot: In Fatherland, you engage with and question the connection between our familial roots and those embodied bonds with place. Slowlo developed out of a communion with an isolated part of Scotland, where you lived for a whole year, and engaged with embodied rituals developed from a certain kind of listening. Can you tell us about the process of creating Fatherland?

Nic Green: Well, as mentioned above, I’ve been working on Fatherland for a long time. The first experiment was in September 2010 and, since then, it’s been a long process. My main stumbling block was that I kept looking only at human-to-human relationships and trying to create something from nothing (as I only met my Father once, very briefly so, in a sense, it wasn’t a real story).  I think, for a long time, I was missing what it was really about – that the gift I have received from my paternal line is not a relationship between two people, but between a person and a place. Because I didn’t grow up with those influences, I didn’t know if I was ‘allowed’ to use a Scottish identity in my work, and I felt quite bashful about using the traditional songs and other elements. But in finally recognising paternity in the land itself, I now claim what I want to. For example, in Fatherland, I have borrowed the patterns and techniques of a traditional Scottish jig, and the rhythms of Gallic poetry.    

'Fatherland'
by Nic Green
at Battersea Arts Centre
Lavender Hill
London SW11 5TN
Book tickets at bac.org.uk

More about Nic Green nicgreen.org.uk