Performative interventions in managed landscapes: Enhancing visitor engagement with the Waun Las Nature Reserve.

There is an urgent need to shift our cultural engagement with the complexities of climate change, species conservation, and land management. We need to connect the macro with the micro and encourage a greater sense of our ecological connectedness. The central aim of this project is to explore how performance can reveal, enact and embody ecological relationships in the managed landscapes of the National Botanic Garden of Wales (NBGW).?? Visitors to the NBGW are most familiar with the formal gardens and the picturesque elements of garden design, but the estate has areas of key contemporary ecological and cultural importance including the Waun Las Nature Reserve and a 150-ha organic farm. Greater visitor engagement with these areas and understanding of their connection to vital species-level conservation work, will benefit NBGW by increasing the ecological literacy of its visitors.? Using the critical concept of ecodramaturgy, this project will develop public performance interventions that enhance visitor engagement with the ecology of the Waun Las Nature Reserve and the species-level conservation work of the living collections, seed bank, and herbarium at NBGW.?? The project will explore practically how this can be done by applying the critical lens of ecodramaturgy to develop performative interventions. Coined by Theresa J. May (2012) and significantly developed by Lisa Woynarski (2020) the concept of ecodramaturgy analyses how performances “enact or reveal ecological relationships” (Woynarski 2020, 18). Importantly, Woynarski’s intersectional approach to ecodramaturgy attends not only to nature and other species, but to issues of injustice and inequality and the eco-social complexity of colonial histories. The grounds of NBGW are situated on the remains of the Middleton Estate whose owner's wealth was linked with the work of the British East India Company. Plant collecting, botany and arboriculture are also historically integral to the expansion of the British Empire. Climate change comes with its own set of global inequalities and injustices, and often, it is in those places once colonised by the British that these are most apparent. Ecodramaturgy works in the gaps between science and culture. By developing ways of working at a micro, local level, with plant species, historic, cultural landscapes and plant collections, alongside the more challenging narratives of historic inequality and injustice, this project will link the micro and the macro; connecting a local landscape to the broader complexities of climate change and conservation. Performance offers innovative ways of engaging visitors with ecological relationships and managed landscapes through embodied encounters and affective experiences. Adopting a practice-based research methodology, this studentship aims to develop new critical and practical approaches to ecological performance, generate and enact a series of performative interventions at NBGW, and potentially benefit other conservation and heritage organisations by producing transferrable principles for application in other sites and locations.