Shuttle: mobile desert performance

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: 'Shuttle: Returns' was a live performance installation resulting from the collaborative project 'Shuttle' initiated by Mick Douglas and Beth Weinstein (University of Arizona). The project gathered an international group of creative arts researchers into a mobile laboratory to undertake a 3-week investigative journey through desert ecologies of the American south-west, to investigate how creative-practice research can explore ecological concerns. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: The project demonstrates how a creative research process can engage in the flux of socially collaborative and ecologically embedded conditions through privileging the mobile and performative qualities of contemporary art practices. The mobile laboratory format adopts movement as a methodology to engage with the dynamic nature of ecological and social systems and provoke awareness of human livelihoods being dependent upon understanding ecological systems. The research contributes a new form of hybrid art performance to an emerging field concerned with performing mobilities. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: In addition to being invited to present a performance at the Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona USA, Shuttle was reviewed by the University of Arizona Institute for the Environment online magazine 'Proximities'; was a presentation accepted at the peer reviewed Performance Studies International #19 conference at Stanford University June 2013 and reviewed on the conference's blog; the subject of an arts feature segment on Arizona Public Media broadcast on television and accessible online, and a newspaper review in the Tucson Weekly; and was the focus of 21 online publications by UK writer David Williams (Roehamption University).