A long weekend of Live Art at the ICA, curated by Tim Etchells. 21-23 May 2010
“I worked with Ant Hampton last year to produce a provocative virtual season of events for the ICA when they closed their Live Art department, so it's an odd thing to be invited into an institution of which one has been publicly critical of. However the chance to help hold the doors of the ICA open to Live Art for a while is too good to miss, especially considering the ICA's historical role as an important supporter of live work.”
With contributions from leading artists, academics and writers in the field, Futures & Pasts is a long weekend at the ICA, London exploring the diverse pasts and possible futures of Live Art and performance practise. Curated by writer, artist and performance maker Tim Etchells with the aid of artist Ant Hampton and Lois Keidan (Live Art Development Agency) this ambitious event combines marathon lecture performance with a rolling scheme of conversations, interviews and archival investigations alongside speculations about the future of this vigorous and vital area of contemporary art practice. Futures & Pasts culminates in a day long Open Space discussion event or public meeting, framed by Phelim McDermott and inviting practitioners, curators, audiences to identify and explore key questions and ways forward for the Live Art and performance scene in the UK.
Futures & Pasts comprises four main strands. You can join as an audience member or participant anytime over the long weekend, moving between parallel events and discussions.
Some of the Pasts
Friday – Sunday 21-23 May. Lower Gallery, ICA. 12 – 7pm.
Over three days the gallery is transformed as the site of an ongoing investigation on the power of performance, as a succession of invited artists, curators and writers linked to the field frame investigations on the exuberant and influential past of the form. Audiences can arrive anytime, stay, leave and return at any point. Conversations, interviews, slideshows, mini-performances, video-screenings and all kinds of playful hybrid interventions unfold in the gallery as different perspectives on the archive are explored. Personal recollections sit next to attempts at authoritative time lines, inexplicable images and sounds sit next to narratives and interactions of different kinds.
Some of the Futures
Saturday 22 May. ICA Theatre 12-10pm.
Throughout the day audiences for this marathon event can arrive anytime, stay, leave and return at any point. More detailed timetable of who’s speaking and when available in due course.
A ten hour durational performance lecture in which artists, academics and writers connected to the field of live performance make independent thirty minute presentations on the topic of the future. From diverse artistic futures, to the future of arts institutions and funding regimes, to the future makeup of audiences or participants in Live Art these presentations show contemporary artists and thinkers leaping forwards to the challenge of what’s next. Expect speculation, polemic, optimism and pessimism in distinctly unequal measures.
Open Space Discussion & Action Event: WHAT ARE THE WAYS FORWARD AND THE URGENT QUESTIONS AT THE HEART OF LIVE ART IN THE UK TODAY?
Sunday 23 May. ICA Theatre and breakout spaces. All day. All welcome. Facilitated by Phelim McDermott.
This Open Space Discussion Event is open to anyone interested and concerned about the future of performance and live art in the UK. The day will begin from the questions above and below but will rapidly develop to address new questions proposed by those attending the meeting.
What are the particular draws or necessities of making live work now? And what might these be in the future?
Iconoclastic, idiosyncratic and yet deeply connected to questions of public and social space Live Art and performance exists at certain fault line in the relationship between the individual and the collective. What are the tensions between independence and the institutional realm? What does each approach or context offer that the other cannot, are they irreconcilable and/or mutually exclusive approaches to culture? What are the possible advantages and possible pitfalls of acting collectively as artists? What roles can artists and arts institutions play to help support the development of radical art practice?
If any of these issues interest you or there are any other issues you want to raise and work on please come to this event. All are welcome practitioners, academics, audience.
We will be working in Open Space, which may be new to you. It has been used successfully all over the world since 1985 for dealing with wide ranging issues from redesigning aeroplane doors, creating shows, to strategising social activism. It is an open-ended event that enables a self-organising group to use its collective imagination to deal with complex issues within an incredibly short space of time. By the end of the event the following will have occurred:
- Every issue of concern to anybody will have been raised, if they took responsibility for doing that.
- All issues will have received full discussion, to the extent desired.
A full report of issues and discussions will be in the hands of all participants.
And you will have taken part in making it happen.
Performing Wikipedia
Friday – Sunday 21-23 May. 12 - 7pm. Public Spaces, ICA.
Performing Wikipedia project will set up camp in the bar area at the ICA from 12-7pm each day. Please join us with laptops, reference materials and your writing skills.
Performing Wikipedia invites participants to collaborate on updating the on-line encyclopedia with materials about performance and live art. A marathon attempt to write the legacy of performance into electronic public space, Performing Wikipedia is at once a mediated collaborative performance, and an intervention which propels the history and representation of Live Art into this significant on line encyclopedia/resource.
The lovely Vlatka has a new website. Looks great. Take a look here.
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Times Online article about interactive theatre here with quotes from me in slightly grumpy mode - also talks about my new text messaging work - A Short Message Spectacle - for Norfolk & Norwich Festival. An SMS lasts 16 days and consists of a series of 80 or so text messages sent out - about 5 messages a day on average. Participation is free. You can sign up for the project by sending a text saying NNF, your postcode and your age to 60777. (+4460777 if you are texting from Europe - it should work. Sadly does not work in USA). UPDATE: If you don't live in UK and don't have any luck texting 60777, try
+447786200690 with NNF, your country and age. Unfortunately no coverage
in the North America though.
One and a half weeks to go. Presently the front end and back ends of the two hours that make up The Thrill of it All which I'm making with Forced Entertainment are fixed (or log-jammed) but the middle remains quite a question, moving and changing, shifting weight and emphasis as we make adjustments and try to figure things out. The order of the material in the run through changes pretty much every time we make a rehearsal during this last phase. Long conversations about how things might work in a different order. Long conversations about the narratives (or logics) of each of the individual performers.
I think one of these days it's likely that the whole structure will shift again - the knot of 'things that have to be linked' or the long braids of 'things which supposedly lead to other things' will be unshaken, made loose again and the whole sequencing process will be free to take a different emphasis. We'll see. The moments just before a run through contain all kinds of talking, 'warmups' plus the inevitable queue for the solitary toilet. In this pre-run-through picture performer Jerry Killick checks the a2 flipchart pages taped to the front edge of the sound-mixer. On these sheets are written out the running order for the day.
I'm making a new text-messaging performance to be presented at Norfolk & Norwich Festival in May. Lasting the duration of the festival, the new piece - A Short Message Spectacle (An SMS) - is an imaginary performance lasting 16 days, with each of its scenes described by text message, relayed as virtual events taking place through the day and night in diverse locations across an equally imaginary city. The audience for the work are subscribers to a special phone number (see below), and the events of the performance are summoned by text message alone, described and unfolding via a series of missives each day.
Receiving the texts that make up the project A Short Message Spectacle (An SMS) is free - to sign up as an audience member for text NNF, your postcode and your age to 60777.
A Short Message Spectacle (An SMS) follows my earlier SMS projects Surrender Control(2001) and 39 Or So To Do (2008).
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My existing 2008 neon works (see here for pictures of a previous installation of them) are also on show as part of NNF at locations around the city, alongside five or six new neons specially commissioned for the festival.
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Also in Norwich I'll be performing in the Forced Entertainment durational piece Quizoola! on Saturday 15th May from 6pm to midnight. More details here.
The world brings strange gifts sometimes. Friends or lovers, afternoons of conversation or late nights wandering in some city or books you chance on or songs in foreign language you overheard from an open window. Best of all perhaps, sometimes, if you are very lucky, the world will bring zebras.
You're walking, not alone, down in the no-mans land which follows the ring-road roundabout, on a street of boarded up buildings. That's where the zebra appears. And after it the lion.
It's maybe 9.45am. A spring morning on this abandoned street, the light bright, air sharp crisp and just ahead you see the two mini-cabs parked in the wide curve of the bend, the cars pulled up drivers-window to drivers-window so that the guys inside can talk whist waiting callouts for a job. Opposite from this, outside the boarded up cutlery factory (smashed windows/rusted metalwork/faded signage), there are six or seven guys loitering the pavement, sporting dirty green overalls, all chatting, some smoking, laughing as if on a break, or else maybe waiting for a van to take them off to some distant construction job. Impossible to tell of course, but you notice them anyway. And that's more or less the same moment where you notice the zebra just above them in the air. It's in the form of a tinfoil helium balloon 60-80cm long, and trailing a long grey ribbon from its tail. You and your companion stop to watch this zebra dance softly in the air above these same guys (apprentices? guys on some kind of training?), guys who are also watching it, skeptically, their eyebrows raised as the creature buffets lightly this way and that in the wind, its general direction a kind of awkward but steady upwards. For a moment you wonder if one of the guys might reach for it; try to pull this lighter-than-air-zebra down to the earth as it turns there, head over heels, marking irregular cartwheels just above their heads. But no, instead they just watch as you do, bemused and partly mesmerised. Time slows a little and the zebra turns softly. You wonder if perhaps one of the guys in the overalls released this zebra/balloon as a prank - but they show no signs of ownership of this event, staring just as puzzled as you. One of them laughs.
That's when the wind takes the animal thoroughly and the sky zebra really rises, its legs fixed stiff in a Muybridge arrested-gallop, turning over itself at leisurely pace but really ascending now, crossing the road and passing directly over your heads, upwards so that you have to crane your necks, the lost creature going up and over the hoardings, still turning, passing twenty feet above you then really going higher, up against the clear sky. You watch the zebra tumble its strange irregular route, surmising that this trajectory must be caused by its fantastically un-aerodynamic shape - the trotting legs, the tail, the outstretched head, the streamer of ribbon - all counteracting the air in their own different ways as the helium floats the creature into the wind. A zebra is a black and white animal. Certainly. You see its stripes and its shiny metallic balloon flank and it's rising and rising, and you are saying the same words over and over - 'wow' and 'amazing' - as it heads - upwards and inexplicable - high over the wasteground, tracing a jagged graph line on the sky. Amazing you say. And that's when the lion appears - a smaller balloon, also filled with helium, and also rising. The lion - in posture that's more like sleeping than prowling - seems at first to have come from behind the hoardings or from the derelict building beyond them. You can’t be sure though. Maybe these two balloon creatures are from miles away. Or they were launched from a vehicle. Or they were blown here by some freak of the winds. In any case the lion follows the zebra, upwards. It's not a scene you can photograph. You have your camera in your bag but you don't even reach for it, don't hardly even think of it. The lion chases after the zebra like some pursuit on the plains and you wonder for a moment if the lion will catch up with its prey but no of course there is no drama beyond that of the simultaneity. The two of them are rising, getting smaller - the sky is kind of taking them - turning them to small shapes, then just dots, almost nothing, then nothing, against its blue.
That's all it is really. The lads over the street were watching too but now they're leaving. The taxi-cabs are still there and the drivers don’t seem to have been that engaged - their radios are muttering on and only one leans out of his window to watch the last part of the ascent as you and your companion depart. The zebra and the lion its pursuer are vanished now into the sky and it's time to continue your journey. There are times, and this is one of them, when you feel that the world brings you strange gifts, as valuable and as temporary as they are impossible to understand. On a morning like this one – vivid, complex and beautiful in all of its ways - it's like that for sure.
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