PEDAGOGY, PERFORMANCE AND FEMINISM

Friday 21st May, 12pm - 2.15pm at the ICA

A rare screening of 'Interview with Martha Rosler' by Performance Saga.

Followed by a conversation between David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Sonia Dermience, Martin Hargreaves, Theron Schmidt and chaired by Mary Paterson.

• How can you communicate about past performances?

• What is it about performance that you might want to communicate?

• What roles can an artist/ art practice play in creating knowledge about the past?

• What kind of framework do you need in order to understand the past?

• What role does writing have in the debate?

MARTHA ROSLER is an American artist who works across performance, collage, video and writing. In her Performance Saga interview she talks about her work and the conditions under which it came into being.

PERFORMANCE SAGA tells and updates the histories of performance art, and has created a series of DVD interviews, essays and festivals.

OPEN DIALOGUES produced writing programmes for the Performance Saga festivals (

led by Mary Paterson, with Rachel Lois Clapham and Theron Schmidt,

2008 and 2009) that responded to its themes of history, influence and cultural exchange.

Notes on the participants:

David Berridge lives in London, and makes language works for exhibition, performance, print and on line publication. The Moth Is Moth This Money Night Moth is published by The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. Recent projects include The Shadow of a Train, a script for an exhibition at the Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh, in June 2010, and a residency at The Pigeon Wing, London, in September exploring relations of writing, exhibition and publication. Work online in Soanyway, Jacket, Streetcake, Otoliths, Rubric and fillip. He curates VerySmallKitchen at http://verysmallkitchen.com/.

Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. Recent work includes Inside Performance, a regular column for Dance Theatre Journal, Writing Live, an experiment in art, writing and performance with the Performa Biennial New York, Re- a live reading at PSL Gallery Leeds and Essaying Touch a writing residency at Islington Mill Salford. Current fascinations are the porosity of text, improvisation and live writing. She her bio page here.

Sonia Dermience founded Komplot in 2002, a curatorial collective concerned with nomadic creative practices, trends of specialisation and the infiltration of spaces. Projects such as 'Vollevox' or 'Architecture of Survival' explored new terrain in relation to objects, spaces, artists and the public. She has conducted extensive research into post '68 collaborative art practices in Belgium; organizing seminars and making two documentary films with Kosten Koper. This research is on-going with 'Marcel', a collective film and 'Y-The Black Issue', an itinerary exhibition, workshop and publication initiated during a residency at 'Far Away So Close', Sweden. Komplot founded The Public School in Brussels, November 2009, in a joint venture with a residency program at Nadine. The current committee members of The Public School Brussels are Heidi Ballet, Constance Barrère Dangleterre, Sonia Dermience, Sébastien Ricou, Ive Stevenheydens, Ronald Van de Sompel.

Martin Hargreaves is the Editor of Dance Theatre Journal and the Programme Leader of the MA Dance Theatre: The Body in Performance at Laban. His research interests lie between boredom and hysteria and he has learnt and performed Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A in a variety of contexts.

Mary Paterson is a writer and producer, and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. She is currently fascinated by metamorphosis and time travel. See her bio page here.

Theron Schmidt is a writer and performer based in London. As a solo artist he has presented work at Artsadmin, Camden People’s Theatre, Chisenhale Dance Space, and Roehampton University, and his performance collaborations have included projects with Julia Barclay, Lucy Cash, Nicola Conibere, and Chris Goode. He is currently completing a PhD thesis on theatricality and the politics of spectatorship at Queen Mary, University of London. His critical writing on live art and performance has been published in Dance Theatre Journal, The Live Art Almanac, Platform, RealTime, and Total Theatre.

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Part of FUTURES AND PASTS, a long weekend of live art at the ICA exploring the diverse pasts and possible futures of live art and performance. The weekend is curated by writer, artist and performance maker Tim Etchells with the aid of artist Ant Hampton and Lois Keidan (Live Art Development Agency)

http://www.ica.org.uk/24606/Live-Art/Live-Weekends-Futures-and-Pasts.html

Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH,

+44 (0)20 7930 3647

18:31:01/ 18:44:38 / 18:56:25/ 19:13:09/ 19:48:07. 20:45:04

By Mary Paterson

A field analysis of Art Writing Field Station according to Instruction, Memory, Performance, Quotation and Time.

Notes from Art Writing Field Station, curated by A Very Small Kitchen. Patrick Studios, East Street Arts, Leeds, Saturday 26th March 2010, by Mary Paterson

Beginning: Flourescent light over platform 8b of Leeds Train Station: 18:31:01

Instruction: When I say matter, I don’t mean it literally.

Memory: It is a white room with a high ceiling, wooden beams and tall thin windows. Performance: When he speaks away from the script he comes to life, and those are the bits that everyone remembers.

Performance: What’s it like to be a writer in public? To bring the white squares into a public space, to press the nib of the pen til it squeaks?

Quotation: She says something like improvisation is often a quotation. Something like improvisation produces what is familiar.

Time: Imagine you could regulate time. Inbetween stations, the train driver speeds up or slows down so that it always takes five minutes. You must read more or less attentively, depending on how far you have to go. You must regulate your thoughts for each period of motion.

Time: 18:44:38

Time: Rolling out of Leeds in an empty train, the suburbs are a network of gently pulsing brake lights.

Instruction: When I say journey, I probably mean travel.

Memory: It is a large room with a chill in the air.

Quotation: He talks about Mark Rothko, who looks. He looks repeatedly (he looks repeatedly), and he looks hard. She looks as well. She looks for things she can’t see yet.

Performance: What’s it like to be a writer in public? To be identified with the words that fit you badly? To invite a reading and expect it to happen right then.

Instruction: When I say write, I probably mean think.

Time: 18:56:25

Time: We regret to announce there is no trolley service. Please relax, enjoy your journey, and have a very good evening.

Memory: It is an old building that wears its modernisation lightly.

Instruction: Write, then. Write to make it matter, to understand, to give yourself an alibi, to avoid eye contact, to generate words, to remember, to make a mark, to move your hands, to hear the sound of the pencil on the page, to join the dots, to regulate time, to travel.

Time: I’m meant to be somewhere else today. This afternoon I’m meant to be in London, where politics and art are being cut into a young man’s flesh.

Time: 19:13:09

Memory: She unfolds three beautiful rhizomes flattened on graph paper, which contain or illustrate or point to or simulate maps of her practice, and maps for her practice.

Instruction: What does it mean to inhabit a text? To take residency inside it? To roll your tongue over its syllables and coat it in your own saliva?

Time: 19:48:07

Time: As the train waits, my belongings roll gently off the table. My belongings are regulating time, or they know something I don’t.

Memory: The room’s long thin windows frame a view of a carpark, a lawn and a row of cottages owned by the church.

Quotation: Perhaps quotations are resistant to oral reading. Perhaps sensory, personal memories are easier to engage with than words written on the page.

Instruction: When I say page, I probably mean screen.

Memory: He used to place his teeth on the metal rail of the seat in front of him, and feel the vibrations of the bus run through his body.

Instruction: When I say audience [ ].

End: between Peterborough and Kings Cross Station, too dark to see outside: 20:43:04

Live Writing from 10 Performances

Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg are at 10 Performances which is taking place at Roehampton University today.

Notes on NOTES...

image - Arco, Bookwork/C-type prints, 2008 © Sam Belinfante

Open Dialogues is taking part in Notes on NOTES…; a collaborative writing residency with Matthew Hearn, John Dummett and Rachel Lois Clapham

NOTES on a Return is a series of events and exhibitions recalling a sequence of live artworks which took place at the Laing Gallery in the late 1980s.

The programme brings back works by Anne Bean, Rose English, Mona Hatoum, Bruce McLean and Nigel Rolfe. Five UK and international artists - Sam Belinfante (UK), Sofia Greff (Germany), Graham Hudson (UK), Meg Mosley (UK) and Viola Yesiltac (USA/Germany) - have also been commissioned to make new works that respond to the five original 1980’s performances.

Together, the exhibition based archival recollections, new commissions and symposium are all part of an open question or in-process experiment in how to house ephemeral practice and return to or re-enact the live.

Notes on NOTES

Notes on NOTES is a writing residency in which Rachel Lois Clapham, John Dummett
and Matthew Hearne will collectively make an imperfect fiction of Notes on a Return in a series of live, drawn and public actions.

Rachel Lois Clapham ‘Scoring Notes on a Return’
Ultimately speculative, a score lies in between action and object, performance and document; it is a singular record of action past or imagined and a call to future performances.

Exploring how to compose, punctuate or re-write performance Rachel Lois will publicly make a score for Notes on a Return using materials gathered from artists and audiences over the two days of the symposium. The resulting score will be used to produce a written response to the five newly commissioned performances in Notes.

Visitors to the exhibition are invited to contribute to the composition of the score in whatever way they wish. All contributions will be acknowledged in the final published text.

Rachel Lois Clapham has a BA Fine Art/Art History (2000) and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory (2007) from Goldsmiths College. Previously editor of Live Art UK’s Writing From Live Art, and Arts Council funded Writing Live fellow for Performa Biennial, New York, her writing on performance related practice is published in the UK and internationally. She works across exhibitions and gallery education, most recently curating Nahnou-Together Now an exhibition at Tate Britain (June -Sept 08). She is currently Co-Director of critical writing initiative Open Dialogues and writes a regular column 'Inside Performance' for Dance Theatre Journal. Current interests are collaborative live writing, scores and the porosity of text. www.opendialogues.com

John Dummett ‘My very first Incunabulum’
Through working on and annotating a facsimile of Mel Bochner’s seminal 1970 conceptual artwork; ‘Language is not transparent’ John Dummett will print a text composed of the transient, ephemeral, and unstable fictions that together constitute memory. This live printing process will draw upon what is made visible and legible during the 1,050 minutes of the Notes on a Return symposium.

(Incunabulum is the Latin for "swaddling clothes" or "cradle" and can refer to the earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything. In printing, an incunabulum is a book, or even a single sheet of text that was printed— not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe.)

Working with text, writing and discussions,Dummetts' practice is a live collaborative process which performs the act of thinking and critical reflection. Over the past 10 years he has worked internationally exhibiting works at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, Irish Museum of Modern Art and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

In 2009 John has worked on bodies of writing which have explored urban green space (The Architecture Centre Bristol), the significance and value of thinking in contemporary society (National Review of Live Art) and how shared codes of behaviour mark public space (Limerick City Gallery). He is currently undertaking a 6 month research programme supported by Longhouse in Birmingham.

Matthew Hearne ‘Notes on an Index’
Whilst accepting the subjectivity of our individual response to an event, action or intervention, as we process our thoughts, polish our vocabulary and perfect our grammar the indexical link between first impression and written response both diminishes and collapses.

Within this fulcrum, this margin, this middle ground however there exists the potential to develop and rekindle this connection. Exploring the process, connection and the immediacy of the writing with the aid of type-writer – formally used by Rob le Frenais in Anne Beans 1997 performance at the Laing – and a sheet of carbon paper, the medium, like the live work itself, will become the message.

Matthew Hearn is a writer, curator and sometime artist. He is currently undertaking an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with University of Sunderland and The Locus+ Archive. Having worked with Locus+ since 2002 this current body of research led to his involvement in researching and curating the Locus+ Archive exhibition This Will Not Happen Without You and has also fed into the development of Notes on a Return.

Thinking, talking and writing about archives and the need, means and process of documenting ephemeral practices he has fed into a number of recent initiatives including, Per-Forming the Archive and Arkive City in collaboration with University of Ulster, Belfast, and Rethinking Archives, Arnolfini and UWE, Bristol.

Notes on a Return is supported by Arts Council England

Vital; International Live artists of Chinese Descent

image; courtesy Chinese Arts Centre.


Chinese Arts Centre have just published Vital; International Live artists of Chinese descent. It is a collection of stories, ssays, reviews and pictures exploring Chinese live art with particular focus on the Vital International Chinese Live Art Festivals. The UK publication launch will be on 15 Feb 2009 at National Review of Live Art, Glasgow

This exciting new publication documents the two festivals through memories, interviews, essays, reviews and images which together form a comprehensive scrapbook of Chinese live art.

Contributors include artists such as Lee Wen, Becky Ip, Po Shui and Zhou Bin who ponder the issues surrounding the practise and nature of performance art. Their personal writings also look at the specific concerns of Chinese artists working in live art and scrutinise the need for the Vital festivals.

The individual artist responses are complimented by critical essays and reviews which contextualise the art practice within the wider cultural and political landscape. Reviews of the festivals come from live art writers Andrew Mitchelson and Rachel Lois Clapham. Artist and academic Lesley Sanderson and LA-based scholar Ming-Yuen Ma both look at the pertinent question of identity. Yang Zhi Chao's essay contextualises endurance performance work, Voon Pow Bartlett looks at the role of the audience while Yuen Yan examines the power and responsibility of the artists.

This mix of critical writing and personal artist responses is accompanied by stunning photography of the incredible performances of the festivals. The images capture moments from such performances as live art rebels JJ & Cai's unique take on the Monkey King legend, Marcus Young's very slow walk Pacific Avenue and He Chengyao's deeply moving hair auction performance at Vital 06.

Contributors include:

Lee Wen is an artist, political activist, festival curator and author whose work seeks to expose and question ideologies. He performed in Vital 07 and was a speaker at the Vital Bodies conference.

Zhou Bin is an artist living and working in Chengdu, China who has been working in live performance or action art since 1994. His processes often involve the using the limits of his body.

Rachel Lois Clapham was the Writing from Live Art writer who critiqued the Vital 07 performances and Vital Bodies conference.

Ming-Yuen S. Ma is a LA-based media artist, curator and theorist. For Vital, Ma presents two open letters to live artists Ma Liuming and He Chengyao.

Softcover, 205 x 205mm, 148pp
GBP 18.95
IBSN 978-0-9545440-6-5

http://www.chinese-arts-centre.org/