water[war]s

water[war]s represents the long term development of a collaborative performance and installation project by Jill Greenhalgh and Mike Brookes; their second major performance collaboration, having conceived and created the performance and installation work child, produced by The Magdalena Project, in 1996.

Again they attempt to address and debate the intuitive personal responses arising from an overtly political concern, through the production and presentation of performance work, and the construction of specific durational environments - as sculptural intervention, context and temporary forum for this address.

They propose to develop the work across a progression of commissioned residencies; structured to allow the inclusion of local practitioners and an appropriate response to the requirements and realities of each individual platform.

Biographies

Jill Greenhalgh has been a professional theatre maker for 27 years. She has travelled and worked extensively within Europe, Australasia and the Americas. Her career across this period - as a producer, director, performer, and teacher. In 1986 she founded the Magdalena Project International Network of Women in Contemporary Theatre and has remained its artistic director since. Her current performance projects include The Water[war]s - a long term investigation in collaboration with different groups of women performers across the globe and Las Sin Tierra - & attempted crossings of the Straits of Gibraltar which she directed for Nomad Theatre of Spain, in collaboration with Mike Brookes. She has recently taken up the post of Lecturer in Performance Studies at the University of Wales - Aberystwyth. She is married, has two young daughters and lives on the west coast of rural Wales.

Mike Brookes is an artist, and designer. Born in the north of England, where he lived and studied until moving to South Wales to further his training in the early eighties. Here he continued to develop a studio based practice of object and time based media centred around his activities as a painter; while increasingly reconnecting with the immediate possibilities of performance through contact and involvement with the experimental contemporary performance practice of companies such as Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, Moving Being and Brith Gof.

In recent years his performance work has focused largely upon the holistic production of durational objects, environments, and contexts for the staging of contemporary performance work; most currently concentrating both artistically and practically on the proposal and development of effective experimental practices and strategies within the form, function, and placement of live art.