Is it a bird? A study room guide.

In (W)reading Performance Writing writer and Co-Director of Open Dialogues Rachel Lois Clapham has assembled twenty practitioners from diverse fields of poetry, theatre, visual art and performance on the topic of Performance Writing. This unique guide comprises of syllabuses, manifestos, scores, personal testimonies and practical exercises, many drawn from resources available in the Live Art Development Agency study room. It also includes a detailed subject area index. This publication is highly speculative and encourages an active read. A note on its reading can be found in the section Invitation to (W)read.

Authors included are Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Mark Caffrey, Alex Eisenberg, John Hall, Claire Hind, Richard Kostelanetz, Johanna Linsley, Claire MacDonald, Rebecca May Marston, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Joshua Sofaer, Danae Theodoridou, Peter Walsh and Simon Zimmerman. Design by Marit Munzberg.

A one-off hard copy edition of the guide is available to be assembled/disassembled in the Study Room, or can be downloaded as a PDF from the Live Art Development Agency website.

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The Live Art Development Agency houses a Study Room as a key resource and is a free, open access research facility used by artists, students, curators, academics and other arts professionals. The Study Room can be used to view artist’s work, read publications, undertake research projects, find out general information about Live Art, opportunities and networks. The Study Room houses one of the largest publicly accessible libraries of Live Art related videos, dvds and publications in the UK and for many people the resource is one of the only opportunities to view documentation of performances that they were unable to experience ‘live’. As part of the continuous development of the Study Room the Agency commissions a range of artists and commentators to write personal Study Room Guides to help navigate users through this resource. The idea is to enable Study Room users to experience the materials in a new way and highlight materials that they may not have otherwise come across.


Click here find out more about the Live Art Development Agency Study Room and download other available guides.

A room with a view

"As part of the A-N Interface series on critical writing Rachel Lois Clapham has produced an experimental text which explores the nature of the Interface online writing community. What does it mean to write within Interface’s green and white walls? Writing, for Rachel Lois is a process that should look at itself as much as its object of study. This text is in three ‘takes’ and can be read in any order >>>>TAKE ONE<<<<, >>>TAKE TWO<<<< or >>>>TAKE THREE<<<<"


Rosemary Shirley
Editor A-N interface
Visual arts exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface

Seeking Administrator

Live Art Development Agency, London
Seeks new full-time Administrator

The Live Art Development Agency is the leading development organisation for Live Art in the UK, offering resources, schemes, projects and initiatives for the support and development of Live Art practices and critical discourses in London, the UK and internationally.

The Agency is seeking a new Administrator following Maria Agiomyrgiannaki’s imminent departure to develop her work as a producer and project manager.

This is an exciting opportunity for a dynamic individual with strong organisational skills to join the Agency and contribute to its future.

The Administrator coordinates the Agency’s office and resources, and contributes to the effectiveness of its programmes and activities including the Study Room and Unbound, an online shop. The Administrator is responsible for the day-to-day running of the office and company bookkeeping, and works on specific projects and schemes.

This is a full-time position, offered at an annual salary between £18,000-£20,000 depending on experience.

Please email info@thisisliveart.co.uk or phone +44 20 7033 0275 for the full job description and application requirements, or download them as a PDF from www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk

The Administrator post includes a broad range of responsibilities, and as potential applicants may not have had past experience in all of these areas, the Agency may be able to take a flexible approach as to how this post and its responsibilities are best filled.

Deadline for applications: Wednesday November 4, 2009.

www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk

Live Art Almanac - Vol. 2

Call for recommendations and submissions for The Live Art Almanac - Vol. 2 An international publication of writing on and around Live Art

Deadline: 31 December 2009

The Live Art Almanac Vol. 2 is a publication produced and published by the Live Art Development Agency (London, UK) in partnership with Live Art UK, Performance Space 122 (New York, USA), and Performance Space (Sydney, Australia).

The Live Art Almanac Vol. 2 will be published in 2010 and will draw together recent writings about and around Live Art* – from reviews, interviews and news stories, to cultural commentaries and “private” communications. It aims to be both a useful resource and a good read for artists, writers, students and others interested in Live Art.

Recommendations for, and submissions to, The Live Art Almanac Vol. 2 may be any length up to 5,000 words. The material must be engaging, provocative, and thoughtful writing on and around the contemporary cultural landscape in which Live Art practice sits and must shed light on the various debates and ideas in circulation within that landscape. You may submit your own writing but we really want you to tell us about interesting material you have read. The submission must have been written between July 2008 and December 2009.

The first Live Art Almanac primarily contained material about and by British-based artists and writers. The Live Art Almanac Vol. 2 will be published in English, but encourages international submissions as well as texts in translation previously published in other languages.

Details of the first Live Art Almanac >>>here<<<<

For more detailed information on this call for recommendations and submissions visit www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk

Recommendations should be emailed to contact@thisisLiveArt.co.uk with ‘Almanac’ in the subject line. The deadline for all recommendations is 31 December 2009.

Please also contact contact@thisisLiveArt.co.uk if you have any questions.

The (first) Live Art Almanac is available to purchase from Unbound - www.thisisUnbound.co.uk - for only £5.00.

*The term Live Art is not a description of an artform or discipline, but a cultural strategy to include experimental processes and experiential practices that might otherwise be excluded from established curatorial, cultural and critical frameworks. Live Art is a framing device for a catalogue of approaches to the possibilities of liveness by artists who chose to work across, in between, and at the edges of more traditional artistic forms.

Please also refer to “What is Live Art?”: www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about_us/what_is_live_art.html

CALL OUT FOR UK WRITING LIVE ARTISTS

Are you an artist, performer or writer engaged in live and interdisciplinary art?

Are you interested in collaborative and experimental approaches to writing? Would you like to be part of a trans-Atlantic art writing community?

If so, you could be part of Writing Live UK.....



ABOUT WRITING LIVE

Writing Live is a trans-Atlantic contemporary critical writing programme developed by Open Dialogues, Performa09 and the Space Between Words. The programme launches in New York during Performa 09 and moves to the UK in 2010.
Writing Live is an equal community of peers who understand the importance of intergenerational dialogue, artist communities, collaborative process and unknown product

US Based Writing Live Fellows are Rebecca Armstrong, Rachel Lois Clapham, Tyler Coburn, Patricia Milder, Mary Paterson, Ryan Tracy, Kenny Ulloa and Peter Walsh. As a group they will participate in workshops, develop work together in order to put pressure on how to critically compose, punctuate and re-write performance and Performa 09.

Please read more about Writing Live programme here http://open-dialogues.blogspot.com/2009/09/writing-live-launch.html.

GETTING INVOLVED

We are currently looking for expressions of interest from 8 UK based art writers to join the Writing Live community for an experiment in trans-Atlantic working for Stage One of Writing Live. UK writers will share work with the US based Writing Live Fellows and take part in task based writing commissions during Performa09. By inviting people to test this relationship we want to collaboratively explore how Writing Live can develop in the UK in 2010.

The a UK Writing Live artist you will;

- Gain access to the work of Writing Live
- Become part of a Trans-Atlantic art writing community of peers
- Participate in a series of creative task based writing commissions in November
- Be instrumental in shaping Writing Live UK 2010
- Take an active role in Writing Live UK 2010 (meetings, publishing, public symposia)


We are looking for 8 experienced UK based art/writing practitioners; artists with portfolios that include critical/creative art writing projects, skilled collaborators with a proven knowledge of performance, Live Art and its history.

To participate, you will need to be able to:

- Inspire the Writing Live Community
- Commit to the overall aims of Writing Live
- Dedicate time to sustaining relationships and developing new task based textual work with other members of the Writing Live Community
- Document and upload any work in progress onto the Writing live website.
- Commit to being an active member of the constituency for Writing Live in the UK in 2010, alongside Performa, Open Dialogues and Space Between Words

Being a UK member of Writing Live is a long term collaborative commitment, your participation will help us shape what Writing Live might be in the UK in 2010. As such, it is not possible to predict exactly what will happen in the long run, or how much time you will need. But for now, we need UK Writing Live artists to dedicate a few hours thinking and writing time to Writing Live every week over the month of November.

TO APPLY

To apply, please send no more than one A4 page biography (not CV). Include links to and/or samples of your art writing projects to opendialogues@gmail.com by 26 October 10am.

BACKGROUND

Open Dialogues

Open Dialogues is a UK based writing collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces critical writing on contemporary art. www.opendialogues.com

Space Between Words

Founded by Claire MacDonald, Space Between Words is an international collaborative network engaging with writing across the expanded field of literature, art and performance – including visual and language poetry, digital writing, performance, theatre, film, music and dance. http://www.thespacebetweenwords.org/

Performa

Performa, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization established by RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, is dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century.

Writing Live Background

Writing Live brings together an international group of young critics, curators and artists to generate writing material related to PERFORMA07. Writing Live is a continuation of the ongoing Not For Sale public education series, which features artists, authors, and critics discussing the current issues in performance and new media, and the related task of writing about and art and artists whose work encompasses several disciplines at once. Writing Live develops previous Not For Sale activities including Writing on Performance and New Media - a two part symposium during PERFORMA05 and the PERFORMA Summer Workshops of 2006. Directed: RoseLee Goldberg & Defne Ayas. Co-ordinated by: Rachel Lois Clapham (Writing Live Fellow), Rebecca May Marston (Writing Live Fellow) and Mary Paterson (Writing Live Fellow). Writing Live 2007 was part funded by Arts Council England.

Writing Live 2009: US Director Defne Ayas (Performa), Associate Patricia Milder. Curators Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson in association with Claire MacDonald.

Writing Live 2009 is hosted by Cooper Union University and The Bronx Museum and is supported by Arts Council of England

AN ASSEMBLING #1

AN ASSEMBLING #1 is now available for free PDF download at www.scribd.com/ESSAYINGESSAYS

AN ASSEMBLING #1 featuring experiments in essaying from:

David Berridge; Rachel Lois Clapham; Emma Cocker; Alex Eisenberg; Fiona Fullam; Alex Hardy; Éilis Kirby; Jenny Lawson; Patricia Lyons; Pete McPartian; John Pinder.

Assembled by David Berridge as part of ESSAYING ESSAYS: A TEMPORARY COLLECTIVE OF READERS, one of seven projects by the FREE PRESS collective exploring economies of ideas and alternative modes of dissemination and exchange.

Proposals, provocations, projects, scores and ________ for the always to be emerging, shifting constellation(s) of future ASSEMBLING's are welcome, inparticular proposals which come with their own form and method of distribution.

Contact essayingessays@gmail.com

ESSAYING ESSAYS IS A >>>FREE PRESS<<< case study

10 PERFORMANCES

Image; Sto Theatro, courtesy 10 Performances

26 November 2009, 12:00 p.m., Jubilee Theatre, Roehampton University, London

10 PERFORMANCES is a text-based performance project that explored the nature of performative writing and its relation to the staged event of performance. 10 artists will contribute one written work each. Sharing a concern with language “not as a text, but, as an event”, as Tim Etchells*, the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, has aptly noted, the project explored the notion of writing as a way of performing as well as the ways that performance is being elaborated through linguistic and writing processes. The main aim of the artists participating in the project is therefore to expand the forms and ways that one can “make writing perform” (Della Pollock, 1998:75).

The day consisted of 10 text performances by;

Mark Caffrey (Queen's University, Belfast, practice-led research student)
Barbara Campbell (Australian based visual and performance artist)
Robin Deacon (UK based performance artist, writer and filmmaker)
Matthew Goulish (USA based artist, funder member of Goat Island company)
Akillas Karazisis (Greece based director, writer and actor)
Johanna Linsley (Queen Mary University of London research student)
Cathy Naden (UK based performance artist, funder member of Forced Entertainment company)
Tamarin Norwood (Goldsmiths University of London, MFA student Art Writing)
Theron Schmidt (QMUL research student)
Danae Theodoridou (Roehampton University research student)

+1 live response by Rachel Lois Clapham (Writer and Co-Director Open Dialogues) and performer Alex Eisenberg.

See our +1 performance here


Also here



And on Scribble Live here


10 Performances is curated by DanaeTheodoridou and Justin Hunt
[AHRC Beyond Text Student-led Initiative Grant] www.beyondtext.ac.uk. To view the scripts of all the live works click here.