Holding Back the River

Holding Back the River Stephen Scott-Bottoms (bio) Creative research can take you many places you never expected to be. One of my strangest ever moments of "how did I get here?" was when I found myself, in the spring of 2017, standing on the raw mud of a river bed in the middle of a major industrial city. The river was still flowing past, far above head height, but I stayed bone dry because I was standing inside a coffer dam—a box of metal sheeting that has been pile-driven into the bed of the river and then drained of water so that construction work can take place at ground level (figs. 1–2). As I stood there in my hard hat, heavy-duty industrial equipment was swinging around just overhead. So, how did I get there? Well, naturally, because my latest theatrical collaborators were engineering contractors responsible for installing a collapsible dam mechanism. This was being built in the middle of the River Aire, as it flows through Leeds, England (fig. 3). A little of that story of how I came to be working with the contractors, BAM Nuttall, is told in my essay, "The Rise and Fall of Modern Water: From Staging Abstraction to Performing Place," for the December 2019 special issue of Theatre Journal (71.4). But among the things I do not mention, there is that they invited me inside the coffer dam so I could really get a sense of what we were talking about.1 I was hosted by a site foreman named Mark, who turned out to be not only a lovely and helpful man, but also completely fascinating. So I turned him into a theatrical character and had one of my students play him, in our piece Weir Science. These are the joys of PaR (Practice as Research). Let me back up a little. This special issue of Theatre Journal is about water. I have been working closely with the stuff now for nearly a decade, and it is the gift that keeps on giving. My fascination began during 2010–11 when I ran a research network project for fellow academics and artists, which was concerned with the possibilities of using site-specific performance (that is, outdoors, away from the theatre building, in non-climate-controlled environments) as a way of reflecting on questions of environmental change.2 The network (funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research [End Page E-61] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. BAM Nuttall's site foreman Mark Pheasey descends into the coffer dam holding back the River Aire. Leeds Flood Alleviation Scheme weir works (May 2017). (Photo: Steve Bottoms.) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Crown Point Bridge, Leeds, viewed from just inside the coffer dam. (Photo: Steve Bottoms.) [End Page E-62] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. The otter habituating the Crown Point weir works, photographed by local resident Jim Willson (reprinted with permission). Council, or AHRC) met in three very different locations over the course of a year—a world heritage site, a nature reserve, and one of the busiest, most built-up areas of London—in order to think through some different types of environment and the ways they have changed, or are changing (fig. 4). And for me, the thing that kept presenting itself was water—as ornamental ponds, as streaming rain and rivulets, as the majestic River Thames. I would say that water found me rather than that I found water. It just started calling. Water seemed, suddenly, the most clear and obvious example of the way that the environment itself is constantly active and dynamic. We are brought up to think of the natural environment as a "backdrop" for human activity. Backdrop is, of course, a theatrical word but it is a dated one, and so are our ideas about the environment: it is not just the space in which we humans do things, but is constantly active and constantly shaping our behavior (just as we shape it). And water is the very epitome of "vibrant matter" (even if Jane Bennett's wonderful book of that

Civil engineering · Geotechnical engineering · River bed · Engineering · Innovations in Concrete and Construction Materials · Theatre and Performance Studies