Twelve women farmers from all over the UK were interviewed over 2017-18 for this practice-as-research project by Sarah Harper and Dr Susan Haedicke. Their filmed interviews were the foundation for the creation of a performance:
Who’s Driving the Tractor? Conversations with Women in UK Agriculture
performed by Sarah Harper and integrating excerpts of filmed conversations of the women, so that they ‘performed‘ with Harper onstage. The three verbatim performances in which the women’s voices were interpreted but also participants through their video presence in dialogue with the live actor, concluded with a recorded live discussion with differing audiences: on a farm, in a university setting and for the National Farmer's Union.
Susan Haedicke used this performance-as-research as the foundation for several published articles on performance and food production and for her monograph on this topic, Performing Farmscapes, as part of Palgrave Macmillan's Performing Landscapes series. In this book she looks at plays, site-specific performances and a range of other experimental performance projects that ‘perform’ farmscapes and food production. Her next project will take this research further in a co-edited collection of essays on performance and food production from around the world.