Season Butler, chris+kier, Mat Fraser, Sheila Ghelani, Chris Goode, GraceLES, Helena Hunter, Dominic Johnson, Sophie Lally, Jonny Liron, Elyssa Livergant, Brian Lobel, Silke Mansholt, Kristen Norrie, Sophie Robinson, Lena Simic, Emily Underwood-Lee, UnionDocs
VIDEO LOUNGE PROGRAMME
Documentation from the Live Art Development Agency Study Room
Our video lounge features documentation of artists working with speech/speechlessness kindly provided by the Live Art Development Agency’s Study Room. Also sourced from the Study Room is a sound work by Iain Pollard and Jane Forsyth; this can be listened to on the headphones provided whilst reading the accompanying booklet. For further information on the Study Room resources please visit: www.thisisliveart.co.uk
• Chumpon Apisuk : Silence, Performing Rights – QMUL, London, 2006
• Clare Charnley / Tanja Frank: Speech – A series of collaborative performances using speech, 2006
• Guillermo Gomez-Pena – Mapa Corpo, Performing Rights – QMUL, London, 2006
• William Pope.L – Lecture Series at Live Culture, Tate Modern, 2003
• Aaron Williamson – Selection: Live Culture at Tate Modern, 2003
• Iain Pollard and Jane Forsyth – Silent Sound, 2006
Also available for viewing is the documentation of performances by Irish artists dealing with the silencing surrounding cases of institutional abuse in Ireland. These works were compiled by Helena Walsh and will become available for viewing in the Live Art Development Agency’s Study Room after the conference.
• Amanda Coogan – Medea, 2005
• Aine O’ Dwyer – Horseplay, 2008
• Dominic Thorpe – Redress State/ Questions Imagined, 2010
• Helena Walsh – Invisible Stains, 2010
BBeyond – Northern Ireland – Documentation of Performance
A slide show of documentation by BBeyond is also on display in the video lounge. BBeyond is a group of artists committed to promoting the practice of performance art and artists in Northern Ireland and further afield. The slide show documents BBeyond’s durational performances in public places that attempt to go beyond language. Chrissie Cadman, BBeyond Member, Creative Practitioner and PhD. Candidate at University of Ulster supports this work at the conference today.
Season Butler was an autodidact studying with shamans, gutter poets and generous scholars before undertaking an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in 2007, and is currently reading an MPhil in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. She is interested in experimental narrative structures in creative non-fiction and the possibilities of using narrative to invert hegemonic economies of gaze and representation in art and literature. Through her fiction and performance art practice she celebrates the contemporary savage, interrogates the myth of the civilised man and tries to discover how to be good. She lives and works in London.
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www.chrisandkeir.com
Our current work is geared towards exploring the wonderful possibilities that the comic and misbehaving body offers. In performance, the artists body is a frequently fetishised and aggrandised object; in societygenerally, there is a cultural insistence on mastering the body. We’re looking to engage with the flip side of the equation: what happens when the body isn’t revered, but a site for the comic, ridiculous and compromising. Chris is currently the very grateful recipient of a three year AHRC PhD scholarship at Birmingham City University. He is researching how deliberate and performed stupidity questions and critiques conventional notions of the artist. Keir is currently in his second year of a MAT (Media Art &Technology Doctoral Program), with the EECS school, Scholarship at Queen Mary University London.
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www.matfraser.co.uk
Mat Fraser is an actor, singer, compere, writer, voice over artist, public speaker, presenter and general performing jack of all trades. He recently played “Will” in Channel 4’s drama series “Cast Offs”, a terminally ill cancer patient in BBC’s “Holby City”, and has just played the lead character Jimmy Loveit in the new action and 1st ever Cripsploitation film “Unarmed But Dangerous”. Mat had also presented and co written documentaries for Channel 4 TV including “Born Freak” and “Happy Birthday Thalidomide”. He is currently touring his new one man comedy show “From Freak to Clique”, which is available for bookings, and is about to go back to New York to work on his collaboration with Julie Atlas Muz, a reworking of “Beauty and the Beast”, coming to the U.K. in early 2011, to be directed by Phelim McDermott. Mat is also a popular International cabaret host & artiste. His British wit, subversive lack of political correctness around disability, the sideshow style, his playful sexuality, songs, comedy and outrageous antics onstage have all added to his notoriety. He is the title holder of the Erotic Award (U.K.) for Best Male Striptease artist 2007.
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Sheila Ghelani
www.sheilaghelani.co.uk
Sheila originally trained in contemporary dance, and worked as a choreographer and dancer for several years before making the crossover into Live Art/Performance. Her solo practice addresses ideas that stem from notions of mixing and ‘mixity’. Informed by her own experience of being mixed heritage (Indian/English), she is interested in hybridity, crossings, blood, skins, skinning, carefully controlled experiments, well-oiled machinery, colour, genetics and love. Most recently she has shown work at venues and festivals across Europe including EPAF in Warsaw, Trouble#4 in Brussels, the last ever National Review of Live Art in Glasgow and Battersea Arts Centre’s (BAC) One on One Festival in London. In April she produced a book/flower-press which is currently being represented by KaleidEditions at UK art/book fairs.She also works collaboratively and is a long-standing member of Pacitti Company and a Blast Theory Associate artist. She has toured and performed nationally and internationally for both companies and regularly leads artists’ workshops for Pacitti Company in the UK, and abroad. She also teaches in Academic contexts and recently co-edited a book about SPILL Festival of Performance with Robert Pacitti entitled SPILL: On Agency.
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http://beescope.blogspot.com
Chris Goode makes theatre, live art, poetry, and varieties of sound, and thinks aloud about the places where those practices meet each other and where they meet audiences. Recent solo performances include the paired WHO YOU ARE (for Tate Modern) and WHERE YOU STAND (for Queer Up North), and THE FOREST AND THE FIELD (Camden People’s Theatre); group projects include GLASS HOUSE (for Deloitte Ignite at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden) and …SISTERS (for Headlong at the Gate). His ongoing collaboration with performer Jonny Liron includes the full-length piece HEY MATHEW (Theatre in the Mill, Bradford) and shorter works including O VIENNA (Toynbee Studios), and IN SITU and ANGRY, RED (Situation Room). He is currently touring as a performer with Tim Crouch’s THE AUTHOR. Chris is an Artsadmin Associate Artist and he blogs at Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire
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GraceLES was born in the South and reborn on Loisaida. Her fairy godmother is Jayne County. She hopes to get over whatever it is.
Grace is a compere and a champagne spiritualist. Ritual is key.
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www.helenahunter.com
Helena Hunter is a UK artist based in London; her diverse output of work includes live performance, performance for camera, film and photographic works. Hunter’s work addresses complex cultural issues relating to the politics of the body, the construction of gender, and the formation of desire. Her practice incorporates the body and movement, and utilises the body as text, site and sculptural tool. Hunter’s work has toured throughout the UK and Europe and she has delivered lectures, artist talks, workshops and professional development schemes nationally and internationally.
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Dominic Johnson
www.dominicjohnson.co.uk
Dominic Johnson is a Lecturer in the Department Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the editor of Franko B: Blinded by Love (2006), and Manuel Vason: Encounters (2007) and author of Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture (forthcoming). His performances have been presented at venues in the UK including National Portrait Gallery, SPILL Festival, Chelsea Theatre (London), Fierce (Birmingham), and National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), and internationally, in Austria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Italy, Slovenia, France and the US.
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Sophie Lally
Sophie Lally undertook her undergrad at Trinity College Dublin in Drama and Theatre Studies. She then worked as a travel writer in South America, most prominently in Ecuador. On her return she embarked on an MA in Text and Performance at Kings College London and RADA. This October she began my PhD at Kings College. Her research interests happen at the intersection between performance and technology. This most recently has taken the form of biotechnologies, genetics and the animal. She is drawn to the work of artists such as Ricardo Dominguez and CAE and artists that tackle large political questions, such as, those on immigration and human rights.
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Jonny Liron
http://sitroom.blogspot.com
Jonny Liron works as a theatre maker, a performance artist and a poet. For the last two years he has been developing an experimental practice which is as much to do with an interrogation of language as an unfastening of the body, or language only at the service of the body, your body, her body, his body, where we meet. Theatre. Jonny lives in and runs the bedroom / performance venue, The Situation Room.
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Elyssa Livergant
Elyssa Livergant is in the second year of PhD studies, supported by the Vice Chancellor of the University of London, at Queen Mary and Birkbeck. Her project, currently titled Workshop, examines the ways in which contemporary production practices of experimental theatre and performance intersect with industrial practices of neo-liberalism. Elyssa’s theatre and performance projects have been presented in North America and Europe and her ‘solo’ performance, A Kiss From the Last Red Squirrel, will be touring the UK in Winter 2011. She is currently the editorial assistant for Contemporary Theatre Review, a visiting professional at Central School of Speech and Drama and teaching associate at QM.
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Brian Lobel
www.blobelwarming.com
Brian Lobel creates performances about isolated bodies and the dilemma of community and interactivity. After being sick as a young adult, Brian became fascinated with unique bodily experience and how it is conceived, discussed and witnessed by others, leading directly into his current performance practice. Performances include Cruising for Art (Victoria and Albert Museum and Forest Fringe), Hold My Hand and We’re Halfway There (Sadler’s Wells, Shunt, and with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council), BALL (in over 70 cities internationally), An Appreciation (Duckie, PSi and Sacred) and Carpe Minuta Prima (The Basement, Brighton). He recently received a Wellcome Trust Arts Award for his project Fun With Cancer Patients, which just completed its Research and Development and received a grant from the Jerwood Charitable Trust to produce a large-scale version of Carpe Minuta Prima in Brixton Village Market this March. He is often gobsmacked but rarely speechless.
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www.silkemansholt.com
Silke Mansholt is a German born artist working in performance, visual art, writing and film-making. She has been based in the UK for the past twelve years. Her live performance works Homage to the Heart, Orphan, Die Gehängte, In Memoriam Nature and Wolfstunde and her films, which include A German Grandchild’s Funeral and d’Arc have been shown throughout Europe. She is currently the solo performer in the production of Comment ai-je pu tenir là dedans? (which like her most recent piece Wolfstunde was well received at the Avignon Festival 2010) choreographed by herself and directed by Jean Lambert-wild for the Comédie de Caen, Centre Dramatique National de Normandie. The piece is touring France during the season 2010/2011, including theatres in Montpellier, Lyon, Rennes and Paris. Silke Mansholt’s recent project is the writing of a book, which aims to bring her creative exploration of her relationship with the German WWII past to an end.
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Kirsten Norrie is a second year research student at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. She is currently researching metaphoric prosthesis in relation to performance bodies and their use of objects She has been making solo performance for ten years and as part of The Wolf in the Winter curated by Brian Catling. She has received funding from the Wellcome Trust to examine interiority, human anatomy and performance and have made desert works with an award from the Slade working with the Hopi and Navajo. Exhibitions include the South London Gallery, Modern Art Oxford, National Review of Live Art and internationally in Spain, Germany and Vietnam and Greenland withThe Wolf in Winter. She has written on perfomance for Art Monthly and Performance Research.
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www.sophierobinson.blogspot.com
Sophie Robinson is currently completing a practice based PhD in Queer Time and Space in Contemporary Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a poet, and her first book, a, was published by Les Figues Press in 2009. Her work has been included in several anthologies, including Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century. In 2011 she will be the poet in residence at the V&A Museum.
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www.twoaddthree.org
www.thefreeuniversityofliverpool.wordpress.com
Lena Simic is a co-organizer of The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, a home-based art activist initiative, run out of the spare room of a council house in Everton, Liverpool by a family of two adults and three kids. The Institute is a self-sufficient and sustainable initiative drawing from 10% of all income from its members. The Institute is concerned with dissent, homemade aesthetics, financial transparency, as well as critiquing the capitalism of culture. The Institute is interested in social transformation and has refigured a part of the family living space (the spare bedroom) into a meeting place for artists, activists and cultural dissenters. The Institute is currently involved in the setting up of The Free University of Liverpool, an alternative pedagogical model, framed as a protest against instrumentalization of higher education in the UK.
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Emily Underwood-Lee
www.factoryfloornetwork.wordpress.com
Emily Underwood-Lee is a performance artist based in South Wales. She is principally concerned with the construction of gender and how the female body can be presented and represented in performance. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Glamorgan exploring female performance, autobiography and the body where she is also a research assistant. Emily is a founder member of the Factory Floor network.
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www.uniondocs.org
Based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, UnionDocs is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization. The mission is to present a broad range of innovative and thought-provoking non-fiction projects to the general public, while also cultivating specialized opportunities for learning, critical discourse, and creative collaboration for emerging media-makers, theorists, and curators.
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