Since entering the performance lexicon in the 1970s, the term Live Art has been used to describe a diverse but interrelated array of performance practices and approaches. This volume offers a contextual and critical introduction to the scene of contemporary Live Art in Britain. Focusing on the key artists, companies and organisations with a prolific body of work and which have been vital to the development of contemporary practice, this edited volume maps the landscape, illuminating the origins, concerns and aesthetics of Live Art in the UK today.
In November, 2013, I received an invitation from Lital Dotan and Eyal Perry, co-founders and artistic directors of Glasshouse ArtLifeLab in Brooklyn, NYC. Situated on an avenue bordering two racially distinctive and diverse neighborhoods in South Williamsburg (Hispanic and Hasidic), Glasshouse is a small cooperative art centre which functions as gallery and home to its artist-directors. Hallway, living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom are (equally) gallery space through which visitors are invited to negotiate the private and the public, where these two realms occupy the same location. Hosted by the directors, I in turn became a ‘guest host’ at Glasshouse for 3 weeks. Dotan describes Glasshouse as ‘a transient, autonomous zone within an ordinary domestic space, a practice heterotopia’ where performance itself becomes a transient architecture or a set of relationships offering provision.
The term ‘host’ (or the activity of ‘hosting’) summons two contrastive meanings. On the one hand, it suggests a benevolent, inviting and supportive individual or environment. In its inception the term invokes division of self/other and the coming together of those two in and through difference. Thus ‘hosting’ can usher in a more sinister set of meanings. In biological terms, for example, the host is considered an organism that harbors a parasite, providing nourishment or shelter without consent or the knowledge of being turned into unwitting host. The parasite – ‘parasite’ coming from the Greek word parastos meaning a person or thing which eats at someone else’s table - can damage the tissue of the host, effectively destroying the living organism that enables its survival.
Focusing upon my residency at Glasshouse, this research paper begins to think through some of these ideas and the rich and paradoxical meanings the term ‘host’ suggests.
'Negative Space' is the 5th full-scale original project made by performance group, Reckless Sleepers, in the last decade. Reckless Sleepers was originally formed in 1998, taking its name from a painting by the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. The Belgian/UK based company (or project) works as a collective of dancers, performers, and visual artists, and makes work for theatres, found spaces and site-responsive locations. The company, led by artistic director Mole Wetherell, was formed out of a multiplicity of ideas and concerns, mishaps, accidents and opportunities. 'Negative Space' is funded by Arts Council England.It premiered in Autumn 2014 and is touring internationally until 2016.
© 2014 Sara Jane Bailes and Nicholas Till. On the cover of Samuel Beckett’s short play, Ohio Impromptu, written in English in 1980, is a black and white photograph, a still from the play’s original production at Ohio State University, Columbus, in 1981.1 The image still captivates me, even as I recall it, as it did from the moment I first set eyes on it in the 1989 Grove Press paperback edition where the play is published along with two of Beckett’s other ‘shorts’, Catastrophe (1982) and What Where (1983), the latter the final playtext Beckett wrote. It is both an arresting image and an image of arrest: it captures the imagination for the way in which its subjects seem detained by something they are nevertheless willing to endure, compliant in their resistance. As with many of Beckett’s figures, particularly in the later works, they appear stone-like, fixed, unmovable, unmoving. My recollection of the image is this: two old men, who appear almost identical, are seated at a large, white table. Each wears a black coat. Both have improbably long white hair. Their posture is almost identical: they appear to be one and the same figure; they mirror one another though they are not the same. These two figures possess 1 Ohio Impromptu was written for Stan Gontarski, who wrote to Beckett in February 1980, asking him to write a play for his symposium and festival due to take place in Ohio as part of celebrations that would mark Beckett’s 75th birthday. Beckett responded a month later saying he would do his best and by May of that year was at work on a text. By midDecember he had finished the short play, and, according to Pierre Astier, in his account of its genesis, a typescript of Ohio Impromptu arrived in the mail. The play premiered on 9 May 1981. See Pierre Astier ‘Beckett’s “Ohio Impromptu”: A View from the Isle of a quality of reclusiveness, cloistered, as if over time and for many years they have drawn back from the everyday world, receding into a state of diminished existence. One sits at the end of the white table, the other at its side to the right of the first. Their heads are bowed, each propped up by the right hand, the same but different. The position of the hand is remarkable in that one’s attention is drawn to it: it appears to prop up the head and shade the brow and eyes, hiding each figure’s face by casting a downwards shadow that conceals the eyes. The image suggests a profound weariness and a desire to retreat from perception - from perceiving as from being perceived, and to withdraw from the light. They do not look; they listen. The left hand of each figure lies at rest on the table. Yet despite its depiction of a weariness one might associate with prolonged attention to a situation, the image also depicts a mood that is imminent and expectant: the figures are engaged in an activity that is unfinished and it is unclear when it began or how it will end. In front of the man seated at the top end of the table an unusually large book lies open on what appears to be its final pages which are lined with faint print. The figure who sits before the book looks as if he is beginning to read, or perhaps he is approaching an end. Perhaps the other listens. They are united in a state of apprehension. The presence of the book distinguishes them: it sets them apart and brings them together. It provides the bridging of a distance between them. In the foreground of the image a large black, wide-brimmed hat sits on the table.
Discussion concerning the ’musicality’ of Samuel Beckett’s writing now constitutes a familiar critical trope in Beckett Studies, one that continues to be informed by the still-emerging evidence of Beckett’s engagement with music throughout his personal and literary life, and by the ongoing interest of musicians in Beckett’s work. In Beckett’s drama and prose writings, the relationship with music plays out in implicit and explicit ways. Several of his works incorporate canonical music by composers such as Schubert and Beethoven. Other works integrate music as a compositional element, in dialogue or tension with text and image, while others adopt rhythm, repetition and pause to the extent that the texts themselves appear to be ’scored’. But what, precisely, does it mean to say that a piece of prose or writing for theatre, radio or screen, is ’musical’? The essays included in this book explore a number of ways in which Beckett’s writings engage with and are engaged by musicality, discussing familiar and less familiar works by Beckett in detail. Ranging from the scholarly to the personal in their respective modes of response, and informed by approaches from performance and musicology, literary studies, philosophy, musical composition and creative practice, these essays provide a critical examination of the ways we might comprehend musicality as a definitive and often overlooked attribute throughout Beckett’s work.
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (born Alalia Chetwynd, 1973, best known as Spartacus Chetwynd) is a British artist known for reworkings of iconic moments from cultural history in deliberately amateurish and improvisatory performances. In 2012, she was nominated for the Turner Prize.
A retrospective exhibition of her work was held at Nottingham Contemporary, 25 January 2014 23 March 2014.
This in-situ talk, between Chetwynd and Sara Jane Bailes, was held in the gallery to mark the opening of the exhibition and was recorded live for BBC Scotland. The video recording is archived at Nottingham Contemporary and online.
Within the realms of collaborative performance practice, ‘devising’ has become a commonly used term, yet it tells us little more than that an often original process of invention has been elaborated in order to make and rehearse newly composed work. How might we begin to articulate and organise this unmarked and often purposefully a-systematic terrain, one that values the individual yet emphasises collaboration, response and participation as fundamental to a more ethical approach to theatre-making? And how might such processes encourage us to rethink the term ‘training’? Written in two parts, including a scripted collaborative ‘performed dialogue’ (co-authored with ex-Goat Island member, Karen Christopher), this article speculates on questions of training, rehearsal and approaches to collaborative composition examined through the performances and Summer Schools of the now-disbanded Chicago performance group, Goat Island, and the writing and works of Belgian-born artist, Francis Alÿs. Rehearsal, suggests Alÿs – a process that aims to preserve uncertainty and deliberation – defines a condition of art practice that certain artists and groups gravitate towards for political, economic, social and aesthetic reasons. Rehearsal can propose a resistant state, reminding us of the world before it settles and the potentiality of conditions that are immanent. Performance itself is the enactment of the dream of a present moment, repeated. Part essay, part conversation, this two-part article considers some of the implications and digressions of such interests.
What does it mean to "fail" in performance? How might staging failure reveal theatre’s potential to expand our understanding of social, political and everyday reality? What can we learn from performances that expose and then celebrate their ability to fail?
In Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, Sara Jane Bailes begins with Samuel Beckett and considers failure in performance as a hopeful strategy. She examines the work of internationally acclaimed UK and US experimental theatre companies Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service, addressing accepted narratives about artistic and cultural value in contemporary theatre-making. Her discussion draws on examples where misfire, the accidental and the intentionally amateur challenge our perception of skill and virtuosity in such diverse modes of performance as slapstick and punk.
Detailed rehearsal and performance analysis are used to engage theory and contextualise practice, extending the dialogue between theatre arts, live art and postmodern dance. The result is a critical account of performance theatre that offers essential reading for practitioners, scholars and students of Performance, Theatre and Dance Studies.
Sara Jane Bailes is a writer and artist currently living in the UK. She teaches performance practice and theory in the Department of Drama at the University of Bristol. Her work focuses on contemporary and historical experimental theatre practices. She publishes internationally and is currently researching a book on contemporary performance and the poetics of failure.
Review of: Gatz. Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Created by Elevator Repair Service, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. 21–24 September 2006.