WHAT'S NEW
CURRENT SHOW
Goat Song is our current show.
For all booking enquiries, please contact us via the contact page.
WORKSHOPS
Movement and Text Improvisation Workshops
coming up soon...
Haunted Modernities, Present Pasts and Spectral Futures conference
Mary will present a paper entitled 'Things are not what they seem: Embodying the Eerie in Performance', which examines the eerie as a dramaturgical concept in performance-making. The conference is delivered by DESA (Dark Economies Scholarly Association).
Wednesday-Friday July 16-18 2025
Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK
TaPRA 2025
Mary will present her work at the prestigious TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) annual conference at Warwick University in August 2025.
The talk entitled 'Embodying the Eerie: Performing Beyond the Known' will be presented as part of the Bodies and Performance working group, based on the 'Haunted Futurities' theme. The concept of the Eerie as a lens examines how theatrical elements of space, objects, the performer's body, and technologies are 'unsettling things'. Eerie materialities that disturb dualisms of subject/object, absence/presence, and material/immaterial to create an ‘egress' (Fisher, 2016), which Colquhoun describes as ‘latent acts of exit’ (2020, p.10) that offer ‘passageways of the outside’(2020, p. 11). Exploring an eerie theatricality where things are not what they seem.
Imagining Beyond: The Eeriness of Place
a talk with Mary Steadman of Dust Ensemble
Thu 25th September, 2025
7pm-8.30pm
Front Room, Weston Super Mare.
The recent “Folk Horror’ revival is gaining momentum, and Dust Ensemble’s work, although not ‘horror’ per se, draws more on the Eerie to ask: What is unsettling things? Why are things not what they seem?
By sharing extracts from our performances, inspired by the eeriness of place —such as a derelict mansion in Dwelling, unsettling landscapes in This is The Land, and in our recent performance, Goat Song —which exlores themes of death in a town that has fallen into an eerie silence. The talk will explore the eeriness of place, opening to you the audience to share your stories as a starting point for imagining the Eerie; by involving you in various activities and interactions about stories of ‘place’ that have an eerie presence of the past, which unsettles - Weston-Super-Mare (and beyond).
What is mysterious about these places? How can the eerie inspire stories that deal with the mysterious and the unknown - and why is this so relevant now?
Mary’s recent PhD research examines the Eerie in Performance, through her work with her company, Dust Ensemble. Exploring the current resurgence of the Eerie, which Robert Macfarlane wrote about in Tthe Eeriness of the English Countryside’ (Guardian, 2015) and Mark Fisher’s ‘The Weird and the Eerie’, written one year later. Fisher unpacks the ‘weird’ as ‘horror’ - as the presence of something that should not be - and the ‘eerie’ as an unseen presence of absence or absence of presence in places.
Join me for an evening of strangeness in the intimate space of Front Room. Afterwards, there will be opportunities for questions and a drink at the bar to get a bit spooked!