Crab Man
Photo: Rachel Sved
Crab Man (Dr. Phil Smith) has several backgrounds. One, large and wide, is in performance and music theatre [he has written more than 100 plays for companies including St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Opera North and Perpetual Motion, and he is dramaturg with TNT (Munich)].
From site-specific performances in South Devon beach huts, lidos, tea shops and other unconventional settings, to mis-guides in National Trust properties, to counter-tours and drifts in city streets, Crab Man has long practised what he preaches in these two books on Counter-Tourism.
He is Reader in Theatre and Performance at the University of Plymouth and a visiting lecturer at the University of Exeter.
He was paid to do interesting things for the Culture Olympiad, including this in Weymouth in August 2012.
With Signpost (Simon Persighetti) he is co-author of A Sardine Street Box of Tricks - a handbook for anyone who wants to make their own 'mis-guided' tour or walk, which is also being used regularly by university drama departments .
Singlehanded, he walked and wrote Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways and On Walking ...and Stalking Sebald.
He is one of four core member of a group of artist-researchers called Wrights and Sites, who have generated a range of mis-guides, performances, possible cities and forests and other wonders.
There's more about him here.
He sometimes looks like this:
