PerformaRachel Lois Clapham, Rebecca May Marston, and Mary Paterson are supported by Live Art UK's Writing From Live Art and are currently Writing Live Fellows at the Performa 07 Biennial. Look out on this site and on http://07.performaarts.org/performa_live.php for reveiws, opinions, interveiws and general behind the scenes reports on New York's Biennial of Visual Art Performance. In addition, Writing Live: Writers Hub, is the education programme devised and led by myself, Rebecca and Mary to develop and support a community of writers who are engaged specifically with elements of new media, time based work and visual art performance.

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WRITING LIVE: WRITERS HUB FEATURED AS PART OF PERFORMA 07, THE SECOND EDITION OF THE BIENNIAL OF NEW VISUAL ART PERFORMANCE TO BE HELD IN NEW YORK CITY OCTOBER 27 – NOVEMBER 20, 2007

Building on the success of NOT FOR SALE, the dynamic education series initiatedin 2004 in anticipation of the first PERFORMA biennial in 2005, PERFORMA is pleased to announce WRITING LIVE.

This peer review forum has been specially designed in support
of a new generation of artists, authors, and critics engaged in discussions around prescient issues in performance and new media, and the related task of writing about art and artists whose work encompasses several disciplines at once.

WRITING LIVE will involve an international group of curators, critics and emerging writers,bringing together a unique mix of different voices in a network of critical writing and debate around PERFORMA 07.

Throughout the biennial writers will participate in WRITING LIVE: WRITERS HUB a rolling program of practical writing workshops kicked off with keynote remarks by RoseLee Goldberg and David Levi Strauss (Tues 30, Oct, 11am – 3pm). Writers Hub will also comprise collective peer review platforms (Tues 13 Nov, 12 – 2pm & Tues 20 Nov, 12 – 2pm) designed with a longer-term aim of sustaining conversations around art writing on contemporary performance. A special session will take place at Freemans Restaurant (Nov 9, 1 - 3pm) to coincide with 'Bring Me The Head of…' a sculpture by Serkan Özkaya co-presented by PERFORMA and Freemans. In addition, writers will contribute to PERFORMA07 Writing Live blog by posting entries of reviews, daily round-ups, behind the scenes previews, opinion and interviews with
biennial artists and curators.

See the Writing Live blog at: http://07.performaarts.org/performa_live.php

WRITING LIVE is directed by RoseLee Goldberg and Defne Ayas, and coordinated by
PERFORMA 07 Writing Live Fellows Rachel Lois Clapham, Rebecca May Marston and
Mary Paterson. WRITING LIVE has been planned in collaboration with the SVA Graduate Art Criticism and Writing Programme with in-part sponsorship by Arts Council England.

Clapham Junction

An Audience of One by 'Ladder to the Moon Laboratory'
Sunday 21 October 2007
Clapham Junction Area
London

This is the story of a very strange Sunday that started with eight audience members sitting in shop doorways and concluded at a dining table set up on the busy St John’s Road near Clapham Junction. We went through a lot together – a phonebox, a cashpoint, a wedding in a piss-sodden alleyway, a funeral in a car park and then this surreal Sunday lunch. We were family by the time Barry broke his sad news on the street corner over tinned mushroom soup. And we were devastated. If there’s one thing An Audience of One did well, it made us empathise like no other theatre production. We lived the lives of the Hart family. We had to: we were playing them.

Cast members Caroline Garland and Oliver Langdon performed an extraordinary feat in this piece of street theatre. The entire performance was devised and rehearsed on the actual streets around Clapham Junction in nine chilly days; they played main characters Barry and Rose flawlessly, effortlessly involving the audience as themselves or in character. Audience members were one by one assigned a Hart family character and were incorporated into the drama as it unfolded, moving around the streets with props and prompts to learn more about our characters.

Our group’s aunt Maggy was particularly in character, constantly needing a drink. 16 year-old Luke was played with slightly less gusto, due to his tiny baby (not scripted). This was also incorporated into the performance and references were made to Luke's "school project" whenever the baby needed a pause in the action. We were all so drawn in to the Hart family's unravelling, that we happily charged around the back streets of Clapham Junction playing our parts regardless of our acting abilities – the Ladder to the Moon Laboratory accommodated how little or how much we participated and yet still presented a complex, hard-hitting drama about three generations of a family facing hard times. It was like a live action Mike Leigh movie: improvisational, tense and realistic.

Unlike the companys' Moonwalking in Chinatown, in which the Soho streets became magical and mythical; removed from the reality of Soho at night, in An Audience of One we were grounded firmly in the grubbiness of South-West London on Sunday afternoon. Though we were asked to imagine that the eight of us were all members of the Hart family, we were not asked to imagine there was anything romantic or mystical about our surroundings. By placing us each in individual shop doorways at the start, making us hang around awkwardly, the performance was saying "You are here. You are really here. And it can be hard." Being uprooted, disbanded, displaced and made homeless was explored with the most immersive empathy possible. The ghastly silence at the end as the soup sat uneaten was as real as any "difficult" family dinner we have all experienced. An Audience of One will continue to be developed and will be presented again soon. This is real street theatre, on the streets, about the streets and unforgettable.

Written by Hazel Tsoi-Wiles

This review, as well a review of'Moonwalking in Chinatown'
is posted on http://londonist.com

http://www.laddertothemoon.co.uk/

http://www.anaudienceofone.co.uk/

A Live Art Take-Away MicrowaveGreat Eastern Hotel
14th September 2007

The theme of Live Art UK’s Annual Networking event was ‘audiences’. Fifty programmers, critics and curators – all interested in promoting Live Art and supporting Live Art UK - were gathered together to discuss, as our event notes put it, “the various and rich approaches to audience made possible through Live Art.”

As a group, the attendees made up a fairly specific audience themselves – or so the helpful staff at the Great Eastern Hotel led us to believe. They spotted us individually as we entered the foyer (or even, in my case, as I was walking down the street) and led us into the plush surroundings of a first floor conference room. This was our base for the morning’s speeches – from John Wyver, head of production company Illuminations, and Helen Marriage, co-founder of Artichoke and instrumental in bringing the Salisbury Festival to a world stage - as well as a performance lecture from (nobleandsilver). In the afternoon, we held break-out discussions that were interrupted by a performance of Yara El Sherbini’s pub quiz.

The day was a mixture of industry advice and refreshing reminders of what Live Art UK is there to promote – the work itself. John Wyver began by flagging up his ambivalence towards audience size and the capacity for communication. On one hand, he is disappointed that ‘network media’ has reduced audience share and forced traditional broadcasters to retreat to the middle ground – an arts series like the 1990s Tx would be ‘inconceivable nowadays’. On the other, although the audience for Illuminations’ DVD Series, ‘The Eye’ is small, it is also enthusiastic, measurable (as opposed to countable) and capable of giving feedback.

Helen Marriage also stressed the advantages of knowing your audience. She recommends identifying your audience and finding out the ways they communicate – be it through the Daily Telegraph or the Church of England. When she programmed the performance artist Bobby Baker to appear in the Bishop of Salisbury’s kitchen, she didn’t just provide a suitably domestic interior for Baker’s work - she also gave local residents the chance to look inside the Bishop’s kitchen. (It turns out they also loved the show.) This tactic is not confined to local audiences. On a much larger scale, the lack of pre-publicity for Royal de Luxe’s Sultan’s Elephant, a magnificent animatronic performance that took over Central London last year, meant that viewers ‘discovered’ the show, and spread the news through texts, pictures and word of mouth.

But while Wyver and Marriage talked about the ways in which audiences can be enticed (or otherwise) through how work is shown, it was left to (nobleandsilver) to ask what an audience ‘takes away’ from a Live Art event. In their case it was a microwave, for one lucky audience member, as well as the chance of a lift home in their new initiative ‘Drive Art UK’.(nobleandsilver)’s lecture was a reminder of the artwork all these endeavours are there to promote, and it was also a parody of some of the ways that audience development is pursued within the art industry. One audience member was given an audio guide, another was asked to contribute his home to the continuation of this lecture the following day; (nobleandsilver) showed a compilation video of some of their work – it included them interviewing their grandmothers, and footage of a man ejaculating over a radio – and an animation of the day’s event that characterised the attendees as angry sponges. Their lecture answered the kinds of questions often posed in the quest for audience development (what is the work? who is the audience? how will they benefit?) and their ludicrous answers examined the value of the questions themselves.

Yara El Sherbini’s pub quiz also made the assembled audience examine their motives. Her questions – interspersed with the kind of trivia you’d find in any pub quiz – asked this group of artworld insiders to think about the ways in which cultural diversity is addressed in the arts. And there was nowhere to hide – El Sherbini provided limited, multiple choice answers which meant that everyone was implicated in the contradictions, hypocrisies and injustices she identified in ‘cultural diversity’.

So where did this leave Live Art UK? The messages were not clear – should we be courting large audiences through traditional media, or celebrating the dynamics of communication with a small group of people? Should we cater to an audience or challenge them? And if institutional policy is inherently flawed anyway, what’s the point in trying? All these contradictions surfaced in the afternoon’s break-out sessions, in which groups were asked to design a publication that addressed audiences and Live Art. Suggestions ranged from commissioning a supplement in The Guardian to creating a ‘living newspaper’ through word of mouth; content was drawn from the politics of the artwork to the experience of watching other members of an audience. The suggestions varied, in fact, just as much as Live Art does. Used to describe a wide range of practice, Live Art is always a problematic term, and the day proved that even a group of people connected through their affiliation with Live Art UK can’t agree on what it means.

This inherent diversity in Live Art practice was elided slightly by the commitment of the guests at the event – we were all happy to watch an animation of a piece of meat, followed by a DVD of a giant puppet in Trafalgar Square, and accept them both as successful examples of Live Art. But the speakers and discussion showed that this variation is not always understood by audiences. It may be difficult to describe what a piece of work ‘is’ but, as Marriage pointed out, you need to be able to tell people why they should see it.

There seems to be no way around identifying both the artwork and its potential audience – although that does not mean that there can’t be multiple definitions for both. As Bryan Biggs, director of the Bluecoat in Liverpool, suggested in his closing speech, if anywhere can be a site for art, then anywhere can be a site for an art audience. Likewise, if Live Art covers a variety of work, then its audiences will be just as various and diverse.

Written by Mary Paterson

For more details on the artists and companies mentioned in Live Art UK’s Annual Networking Event check the links below. Links to all the Live Art UK partner organisations can be found on the left hand side of this site.

http://www.yaraelsherbini.com/
http://www.nobleandsilver.com/
http://www.artichoke.uk.com/index.htm
http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/