My name is Sharon Smith. 


I am a performance maker and a performer and I teach and write. I live in Devon and work between here and Berlin. I am a member of the arts collective Gob Squad and have been collaborating with them since 2007.  


I am a senior lecturer at Plymouth Marjon University. I teach in the Performing Arts department and am moved and challenged and honored to participate in the artistic articulations of The Future. 


From 1994-2005 I worked with Felicity Croydon and earlier also with Phil Collins in Max Factory


I also learned so much (kind of everything I know) over these years from studying and performing with improvisation artist Katie Duck.  Our latest project together is called Abandon Human. 

http://www.abandonhuman.com which is an ever-evolving performance-research-dialogue-improvisation discussing women, icons, motherhood, death...


I have made several works with family members,  The Do, staring four generations of woman from 9yrs - 95yrs, An evening with Margaret McDonnell, which is a performance lecture about popular music weaved together with the life and times of my grandmother Margaret, her experiences growing up and how she met and married my grandfather. They spent their lives singing popular songs in the pubs and clubs of north England. 


The Blue Stocking Social Club was developed with Vincent Cacalano. Quite simply it emulates the working mens clubs of Northern Englands' past, is multi-generational, lo-fi and always includes hotpot and beer. 


I worked with Tom Parkinson on a project called 'We Might As Well Live', which grew out of a solo project called Lured,  supported by BAC, London and Forest Fringe, The World. The work mixes fiction with autobiography (mythography). The performers believe everything they read on the internet, using browse histories as a means to 'knowing' someone and pseudo-science as an attempt to understand how humans work - the feeling of what happens. 


I collaborate with Louise Stevens on life... and on an animation project called Little House. It is the funniest thing you ever might not see.


In my work and here on this site, I want to say something via collage and collection and process and not knowing and live writing - rather than writing out of me, because writing out of me usually betrays the collision of ideas or observations that drove me to write in the first place. 


I want to use humor to explore darkness and some sort of light touch to unveil awkwardness and fragility. I am vulnerable by choice. It's a political position. I know that I don't know everything. I am interested in how things happen and want the how to inform the what. I don't end at the surface of my own skin. 


I am a feminist. My experiences as a woman bring me here to this writing. I often have a sense of being unrepresented, misunderstood in media culture, in the-real-world-out-there. And, I often find that language doesn't serve me well, words fall short of what I think I mean, they are tricky. 


I imagine this site sits right at the back of a very crowded, smokey www.bar. I am well hidden but in public none-the-less. This site dares me to share out loud the thoughts and the stuff, even if it is, for now, very quietly in a dark, noisy place. I want to gather and somehow, going public is maybe a way to experience myself more clearly.


This is work, as always, in progress.


Lured, BAC, 2009

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