Keeping with precarity: Engaging with Europe’s fastest eroding coastline through time-specific performance

In May 2024, at low-tide on Easington Beach in South Holderness (East Yorkshire, United Kingdom) students and researchers from the University of Hull shared a time-specific performance exploring the unique entanglement of the transient geography and human occupancy on this ever-shifting coastline. Undertaken as part of the ‘Applied Arts Ecologies and the Resilience of Coastal Communities: South Holderness Project’, this performance formed one part of the multi-stranded research outputs produced by its team (Christian Billing, Anna Fitzer, Toby Horkan, Ellen Jeffrey, Magnus Johnson and Mark Slater) in collaboration with nineteen final-year students from the BA Drama and Theatre Practice degree at the University of Hull. Working across a variety of artforms and practices to engage with the temporality of this place, the research outputs of this project – including a cycle of eight poems produced in the co-making of the live performance (Christian Billing), and ‘Coastal Process’ a musical composition in nine parts (Mark Slater) – were crafted alongside (and in response to) the project’s growing archive of oral history; a series of recorded interviews which sought to document the voices and perspectives of a community-in-transition.