At its core, art is about potential. Or, in the philosopher Brian Massumi’s words, “the aesthetic has to do with the overfullness with potential of what actually happens, and the renewal that comes of it.”1 Art does not make meaning, it explodes it. Art does not tell you what to think. It inspires you to think again.
If Live Art is a strategy, rather than a medium, then this is its strategy: to think differently. Whether it takes the form of a whispered choreography of books in a library, a pop concert that never reaches its climax, or a walk through the city at night led by a teenager, Live Art intervenes in the day-to-day machinery of life. Precisely because it is ‘live’ – embodied instead of displayed, experienced instead of reproduced – the approach of Live Art interrupts the micro-performances of culture, and creates alternate worlds.
Often, when Live Art or its strategies are particularly effective, it is not known as Live Art anymore. Jeremy Deller’s Turner Prize winning Battle of Orgreave, for example, is a film and an archive of the re-enactment of a bloody confrontation during the 1984 Miner’s Strike. It is performative, multi-layered, self-critical, interdisciplinary, expansive; and known, simply, as ‘art.’ The ‘bail-in’ actions coordinated by the #ukuncut movement occupy bailed-out banks and turn them into more community-minded recipients of public funds – schools, libraries, hospitals. These protests playfully imagine an alternate world where people are prized over profit; the protests are known, simply, as ‘politics.’
Sometimes, this relative anonymity can give Live Art a spurious sense of marginalisation. In fact, it is proof of the opposite. Live Art is everywhere. Each time one of its ideas is assimilated into the language of the mainstream, it’s a sign of Live Art’s strategic success. And it’s also a spur to Live Artists to dive back into the pools of the in-between and the yet-to-be-defined, in order to invent new pockets of potential.
If there is a threat to this strategic slipperiness, this ability to disrupt meaning by swimming between established ways of thinking, it is the so-called ‘experience economy’. The experience economy is capitalism’s latest adventure in the conquest to commoditise and, like Live Art, it thrives on the generative potential of ideas and experience – or appears to. But of course, all of capitalism’s ideas are the same idea: money. And all of its performances are the production of capital. Artists, luckily, have a wider repertoire.
To return to Massumi: “The question is to experiment with modulating complicity, to learn how to inflect [capitalism] towards other kinds of emergences which, at the limit, might be capable of composing a purely qualitative alter-economy of life-value.”2 Even when potential is commoditised, then, Live Art has the power to change. This is a powerful position indeed. It means that Live Art can sit in the same warm chair as capitalism (and its trailing robes of influence and control), and still imagine difference.
Like Massumi, I’m interested in a purely qualitative alter-economy of life-value. And I’m interested in any technique that opens up spaces for difference and dissent. But you don’t have to share my politics to believe that Live Art can change the world; you don’t even have to like any of the changes that Live Artists have made, so far. The radical potential of this loose affiliation of practices we call Live Art is simply their desire to entice you and everyone you meet into the act of thinking.
What will change? It’s yet to be discovered.
1, 2 ‘Movements of Thought’ Brian Massumi and Adrian Heathfield, in No Such Thing as a Rest Adrian Heathfield and Hugo
Glendinning (Live Art Development Agency, 2013)
A provocation commissioned for the 2015 Live Art UK Associates Gathering, Feb 2015. See other documentation, including Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s key note, here:
http://liveartuk.org/activities/2015-associates-gathering-weathering-the-storm/
A walking performance for audiences, commissioned by Wellcome Collection for ‘On Light’ festival, 1 - 4th May 2015.
But you … how can I suppose that I can hand over, through language
The faintest image of a single moment’s sensation?
A series of guided, performative walks through Wellcome Collection, accompanied by poetry inspired by the Bloomsbury Group. Map collaboration with Luce Choules; performance collaboration with Alex Eisenberg.
http://wellcomecollection.org/events/travelling-lighthouse
photo credit © Ellen Friis
Photo credit: Liberate Tate, Sunflower (detail). Photo by Jeffrey Blackler
… to talk about arts funding, is to find yourself tangled in a web that includes the production and distribution of global wealth, as well as the meaning of art, and the experience of individual art encounters. No wonder, then, that most of the presenters inside Toynbee Studios (London) gave themselves a caveat – a variation of, “I’m not an expert, but…” . …
Essay commissioned in response to Take the Money and Run? an event about ethics, funding and art that took place at Toynbee Studios, London on January 29, 2015
Attended by over 200 people, the event was a day of presentations and discussion hosted by three organisations, Live Art Development Agency, Artsadmin, Home Live Art and produced in collaboration with Platform.
Read the full essay here:
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artsonline/221/take-the-money-and-run-blog
Open Dialogues’ project NOTA is included in the online Interventions for the curent edition of the journal Contemporary Theatre Review, on The Politics, Processes and Practices of Editing
“Interventions are specially developed online features that add to and extend the themes and topics explored in the print journal. They are published on the website quarterly, on the same schedule as the print journal.”
The aftermath of the writing, the notes themselves, are displayed in the performance space after each event, without any editing – typos, inaccuracies, blunt questions and all. They NOTAte the performance, translate its experiences and become its remains. And they exhibit the role of writing, as both form and action, in the production of meaning. Handmade, often unintelligible and critically unleashed from the subject that is their alleged focus, these notes appear to be exorbitant and unpublishable
Read the full article here:
A year-long programme of work by poet, performer and artist Stevie Ronnie, inspired by his trip to the High Arctic in 2013.
Arctica opens with a launch at Free Word Centre, Farringdon on 26th February 2015.
In the context of an overwhelmingly consumerist culture, paying attention to the passage of time, the relationships between people and the possibility of change constitutes a gentle but insistent challenge to the status quo. … “Why would the rich want to pay for their own demise?”
Live art performers take a hammer to arts funding debate
by Mary Paterson, published on The Guardian theatre blog 27/01/2015
LemonMelon is pleased to invite you to the book launch with improvised sounds of Lemonade everything was so infinite.
by David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Rachel Lois Clapham
Hundred Years Gallery, 13 Pearson Street, London E2 8JD
Sunday 15th February 2015, 3.30–6.30pm
For the launch, using a variety of apparatuses and improvisational techniques,Douglas Benford, Steve Beresford, Regina Blanca and Manuela Barczewski will play a selection of pages of ‘Lemonade xeverything was so infinite.’.
Special issue entitled Showing and Writing Training to be published July 2016 / Call for contributions, ideas, proposals and dialogue with the editor / Guest editor: Mary Paterson (Independent Writer: marypaterson [at] gmail.com)
Background and context
This will be the fifth special Issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT) following issues on sport, Michael Chekhov, politics and ideology and Moshe Feldenkrais. TDPT is an international journal devoted to all aspects of ‘training’ (broadly defined) within the performing arts. We are now entering our sixth year. Our target readership is both academic and the many varieties of professional performers, makers, choreographers, directors, dramaturgs and composers working in theatre, dance and live art who have an interest in and curiosity for reflecting on their practices and their training. TDPT was co-founded by Simon Murray (University of Glasgow) and Jonathan Pitches (University of Leeds) who have co-edited the journal since its launch in 2009.
Our special issues do not necessarily follow the form and structure of generic issues of TDPT and we are open to adapting our shape and form to the material received. This special issue of TDPT is concerned as much with form as it is with content. We are interested in the ways that discourse and dialogue about training affect not only training and its stated aims, but also the ways in which these methods and devices are accessed, remembered or reproduced. In short, we want to show training as well as write it.
In a still primarily paper-based journal concerned with training in Theatre, Dance and Performance – broad terms for practices that very much concern bodies in motion and in relation to space – contributions tend to come up very quickly against the limits of written language in general and those modes of writing in particular that are the norms of academic literacy. Apart from words, the main other mode used in TDPT has been the still photograph, usually reproduced in black and white. The problem, if such it is, is not new and has long been recognised in attempts to represent and critique the specificity of performance in words. We believe that there may be a distinction between attention to the singularities of specific instances of training practice and attempts to discuss genres, types or categories. The term training may always imply that any instance of training has its place in a method or system. Since methods are often set out in words, this may reduce the problem but it is unlikely to be the written descriptions of methods on their own that lead witnesses to recognise the programmatic affiliations of any live example.
Expressions of interest
We are particularly interested in submissions that explore the function of the journal as a tool for training, for example by considering the way the journal is designed, the use of image, and the disruption of academic language and/or crossovers with the digital realm (an area we hope to extend for TDPT in the next year). We want this special issue to confront the constraints of translating training narratives from the studio to the (virtual or paper) page and invite expressions of interest through one or more of the following approaches:
- articles that examine examples of the existing literature on this topic;
- articles that take a conceptual and/or formalist approach to the perceived limits (as a possible example, a consideration of the extent to which phenomenological approaches have in any respects successfully addressed the problem);
- articles that consider examples of writings that have attempted to address and perhaps transcend the problem;
- articles which explicitly cross disciplines and art forms, or which play with the accepted boundaries between them;
- experimental writings that demonstrate or test alternatives;
- interviews with practitioners and artists who have wrestled with issues of ‘showing and telling’;
- essays that are wholly or in part non-verbal and which explore the possibilities of the visual image in all its multiple manifestations.
We welcome submissions from people both inside and outside academic institutions and from those who are currently undergoing training or who have experiences to tell from their training histories. As part of our own interest in the subject, we are exploring ways that the normal peer review system can be revised to accommodate more experimental approaches to the journal article.
Questions to consider include
- What is the difference between what you do and how you talk about what you do?
- Who is unwelcome and how do they know?
- What remains unsaid? What remains undone? What gets undone?
- Would you say all this to someone you are training with?
- What kinds of discourses are (in)credible?
- What have you already assumed?
- What is impossible to explain?
- What can only be known in retrospect?
- How does it feel?
- What kind of person is produced by this process and how will they talk?
- What is (in)substantial?
- What will change if we do things the same way we talk about them? What will happen if we don’t?
- What will change if we don’t change anything that we’re doing right now?
- What is impossible to articulate in words?
- What are the secrets of your method?
- How do you know you belong somewhere?
- Who do you think you are talking to?
To signal your interest and intention to make a contribution to this special issue in any one of the ways identified above please email an abstract (max 250 words) to Mary Paterson at:
Our first deadline for these is 31st January 2015.
Training Grounds: we will also be seeking contributions for the Training Grounds section of this special issue. Within TDPT, Training Grounds represents a playful space for shorter and perhaps more provocative and rhetorical contributions. Thus in our generic issues we have postcards (Training and …), responses to an ‘answer the question’, essais and reviews of events, workshops, conferences as well as books. Our Training Grounds section in special issues does not always follow this model but please contact Mary Paterson if you have ideas or would like to discuss possibilities with her.
Approximate timelines
31 January 2015: abstracts and proposals sent to Mary Paterson
End March 2015: Response from editor and, if successful, invitation to submit contribution
April to mid September 2015: writing/preparation period for writers, artists etc.
Mid Sept to end October: peer review period
November 2015 – end January 2016: author revisions post peer review
End March 2016: most articles into production with Routledge
April- June 2016: typesetting, proofing, revises, editorial etc.
July 2016: publication.
We look forward to hearing from you.
…
As tongue-in-cheek emperor of the stage, Hoyle manages to reverse the trick carried out by “the era of the narcissist”. If the world at large celebrates individualism at the expense of the (spied upon, advertised to) individual, this show does the opposite. It aims to explore the curative nature of collective responsibility, through the celebration of different identities. Anti-individualism, perhaps, delivered via the medium of David Hoyle’s inimitable and explosive stage presence….
I am very pleased to be working with Chelsea Theatre throughout November, to interview three of the extraordinary artists performing as part of the annual SACRED Season.
The first interview is with David Hoyle. Read the full text here.
Upcoming interviews will be with Mamoru Iriguchi and Stacy Makishi.
Edit -
Can you picture Marlene Dietrich? Can you see her smooth skin, her half-closed eyes, her softly parted lips? Can you watch her turning towards you slowly, blowing smoke rings from the cave of her velvet mouth?
And how many of her films do you remember?
Read the interview with Mamoru Iriguchi here
Edit -
Having a conversation with Stacy Makishi is a physical experience. Her language is littered with bodily metaphors, “I gotta eat it …”, “I was nailed to the cross ..”, “I mean, fuck me hard …” The words stream thick and her fast in her movie-star American accent, and it feels less like she’s talking to you, than as if she has grabbed your hand and made you jump into the ocean. The effect is compelling, immersive and completely exhausting
Read the interview with Stacy Makishi here
Let’s talk about theatre and society.
Let’s make performances and discuss new ideas together.
Let’s take part in building a small community that thinks big.
Dialogue, in collaboration with Culturebot, Something Other and Theatre Bristol, presents Talking/Making/Taking Part: a two-day festival of informal discussions and interactive performances. It invites you to take a journey through the private and public spaces at Ovalhouse, encountering theatre-makers, artists, gamers and thinkers from across the UK. Come for a day, or the whole weekend, to play, chat, discover and share.
….
In Calais, they keep their mannequins in Perspex boxes and they furnish them with the same, feline faces, the same painted eyelashes, the same rose-kissed lips, the same jaunty hips, the same moulded hands raised slightly as if they might greet you with their drawn-on fingers …
Notes towards ‘Aftermath’, developed for the Day of the Dead, Rich Mix, 31st October 2014
http://imwithyouclapton.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/miraculouscontinuum_final.pdf
I recently rediscovered “Miraculous Continuum”, while googling the equally miraculous Johanna Linsley
PROPOSAL
Can you provide me with a set of three* miraculous sentences?
*SUSPICION
The miraculous is pithy. And comes in threes.
Miraculous Continuum contributors: Mary Paterson, Rachel Lois Clapham, Eleanor Weber, Tamarin Norwood, Maria Goyanes, Ryan Ormonde, Yoko Ishiguro, Alex Eisenberg, Eirini Poulaki, Nora Rabins, Marcus Slease, João Florêncio, Jennifer Tsuei, Alex Davies, Elizabeth Guthrie, Nat Raha, Ali Mansour, Julia Rios, Tim Jeeves, Theron Schmidt
Compiled and edited: Johanna Linsley; Painting: Olga Raciborska; Layout: Jan Mertens
CCLAP brings together Southeast Asian and UK/European artists for a 2-day symposium, showcasing performances, talks and a screening programme exploring gendered/feminist notions of “rites”. Presented in partnership with SEA ArtsFest 2014.
[I have been invited to talk about two projects - Mary]
Friday, 31st October 2014
11am-9.45pm
[On Friday, I will be talking about SO and our latest commission for the imaginary archive]
Saturday, 1st November 2014
10.15am-9.45pm
[On Saturday, I will be performing NOTA with Open Dialogues]
The Proud Archivist
2-10 Hertford Road
London N1 5SH
Free entry, book your place here: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cclap-2014-tickets-13805180667
“Tell me what you forget, and I will tell you who you are”
Marc Auge Oblivion (Minneapolis, 2004), p. 18
Why do you care about this?
For all or any of these reasons, in no particular order:
There is a difference between the ways in which society defines its values in thought and in action. There is, for example, a deep hypocrisy in the divide between the theories that surround publicly-funded artistic practice and the actual structures and institutions that claim to support this practice. There is a similar hypocrisy snaking through the structures and institutions of politics, law and the media. I hope Lying Fallow will be an opportunity to think about different kinds of social organization.
The last time I stayed up all night talking with a stranger was in 2010.
Whenever I have the opportunity to concentrate on listening, I am surprised at what I discover.
Have you ever seen a fox run across thirty acres of freshly fallen snow?
I would like to explore types of social organization that are based on the principle of individuals listening to individuals, and that take into account the complexities and contradictions of individual lives.
Sometimes I feel trapped inside a world of production and showing off. Produce. Network. Produce. Network. Are you trending? Are you liked? Are you worth it? Are you available at short notice and for a nominal fee? Can you grasp this opportunity? Can you tell me about it in 30 seconds? Are you busy? Are you terribly busy? Have you Tweeted about it?
I think that finding ways to communicate with people outside the manifestations of dominant cultural values is one of the occupations of art. By the manifestations of dominant cultural values I mean the stories that are told to justify and explain the passing of time in public discourse, including market-driven usefulness, individual branding, profit, novelty and the ostentatious production of meaning.
It is an ambition of mine to stop using the word ‘I’ so frequently.
I wonder if it is possible to redefine ‘professionalism’ in order to include the complexities and contradictions of individual lives.
One definition of sanity could be the ability to understand two or more opposing thoughts to be true at the same time. In this context, ‘time’ is what makes the impossible possible.
I have no idea what will happen with Lying Fallow.
It is an ambition of mine to spend time by wasting it frivolously.
I think about Lying Fallow as an artwork and as part of my artistic practice, which is concerned with meaning, communication and social organization.
This morning my one year old son spent twenty minutes carefully and delicately emptying my wallet and placing all of its contents, receipt by receipt, penny by penny, outside the window.
It is difficult and important to do things that have an unknown outcome.
Have you ever seen a double rainbow in an indigo sky, heavy with rain?
I have more books and bookmarked web pages than I have time in my life to read them. I have more ambition than I have talent. My eyes are bigger than my intellect.
I’m not sure I believe in knowledge anymore. Not in the acquisitional sense, anyway. I don’t know anything. I circle things. Return to them. Find out later what they might have meant. Change my mind.
A few years ago I sat in a bookshop and asked people for their questions. One of them was, “Will I ever have enough time in my life to read all the books I want to read and listen to all the music I want to listen to?”
I wonder if I there is enough time to understand the complexities and contradictions of any individual life, even your own, or if the occasional glimpse is the best we can hope for.
It is an ambition of mine to use the word ‘we’ more often, but without sounding pompous.
I think that glimpsing into other people’s lives is one of the occupations of art. It is a type of recognition that also recognizes the unseen.
I have not found a way of communicating that does not presuppose knowledge or destroy meaning. But I am ambitious.
I like to think of ‘we’ as a contingent and temporary state of being, and a request for somebody else to hold my hand.
Lying Fallow is a project for Rajni Shah Projects, led by Mary Paterson, Rajni Shah, Susan Sheddan, Tiffany Charrington, and Mark Trezona (facilitator). It will take place over seven months, over three meetings.
For more information and to take part, please visit this page: