Joanna Loveday

COPY unfold now for sale

2012-01-31T02:06:00.001-08:00

If you would like to buy an edition of COPY unfold, they are £3 + £1.50 postage and packaging.

Simply log in to Paypal and send the payment of £4.50 to:

criticalwritingcollective@gmail.com

Compass Live Art Symposium Review

2012-01-31T01:54:00.000-08:00

For those that didn't see it, here is my review of the Compass Live Art Symposium held in Leeds November 2011:

http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1764721

COPY unfold

2011-11-28T02:17:00.000-08:00

Launch Event Saturday 3rd December 2011
6.30 - 7.30pm
S1 Artspace

Alain Ayers / David Berridge / Julia Calver / Paul Carr / Rachel Lois Clapham / Emma Cocker / Laura Davidson / Joanna Loveday / Flatten the Mountain / Daniel Fogarty / Sarah Frydenlund / Derek Horton / Tamarin Norwood / Flora Robertson / Terry Slater / Richard Taylor / JDA Winslow / Paul Wright

Special presentations from Emma Cocker, Daniel Fogarty, Joanna Loveday, JDA Winslow & Paul Wright.

We are pleased to invite you to an informal launch event for the second edition of COPY, a publication which explores writing within visual art and performance practice.

COPY unfold proposes a tension between the resolved and unresolved, drafted and rewritten, finished and unfinished through works which explore, respond to or enact a state of being ‘in process’.

Following a short introduction to the publication contributors Emma Cocker, Joanna Loveday, Daniel Fogarty, J.D.A Winslow and Paul Wright will present their work through readings, video and print, followed by an informal discussion involving CWC, further contributors and design collective Dust, with the chance to ask any questions.

The launch provides a great opportunity for late viewing of the S1 Members Show 2011 for anyone who hasn’t seen the exhibition and a chance look around the S1 Open Studios (3-7pm). The S1 Christmas event Metallic Merryfest starts at 9pm and we welcome you to join us for the event, we will invite any guests to join us for drinks and food in the interim period. Find the events on Facebook here.

For details on the venue please visit the S1 Artspace website and find it on Google Maps.

COPY//unfold Call for Submissions

2011-08-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

Critical Writing Collective welcome submissions of experimental/art writing for our forthcoming edition of COPY, produced with design collective Dust.

COPY // unfold suggests a tension between the resolved and unresolved, drafted and rewritten, finished and unfinished through works which explore, respond to or enact in their own form a state of being ‘in process’.

Submissions may heavily employ text, image or design, contextualised as writing within the field of visual art and performance. Text may be 1-1000 words.
Due to the size of the publication, we may not be able to use all relevant submissions but will consider them for future issues.

Email criticalwritingcollective@gmail.com for more information or with abstracts or loose proposals.
Final deadline for submissions is Tuesday 16 August 2011.

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CWC Degree Show Coverage

2011-08-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

Critical Writing Collective have worked with AN Degrees Unedited, to cover degree shows in Yorkshire this Spring Summer 2011. See the final cluster of reviews and interviews online here.

AN Interview with David Richmond

2011-07-16T02:11:00.000-07:00

See my interview with David Richmond, Head of Programme BA (hons) Theatre at York St John University on Interface here. Discussing 'Create' and the participation theatre students have in this annual public platform.

This forms part of Critical Writing Collectives coverage of degree shows in Yorkshire, for Degrees Unedited.

Update to NAN Research blog

2011-06-10T02:23:00.000-07:00

Read my latest entry to the Critical Writing Collective blog on research in London as part of our NAN Bursary here:

http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1189547

More updates coming soon.

NAN Go and See Bursary awarded to Critical Writing Collective

2011-03-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

Critical Writing Collective thank a-n for awarding us a NAN Go and See Bursary for research and development. We’ll be embarking on our research and reporting back very soon. We will also be blogging on our research project at a-n.co.uk/link/CriticalWritingCollective In other news, you can now also follow Critical Writing Collective on twitter here and me here.

COPY// understudy in now online

2011-01-17T07:12:00.000-08:00

COPY // understudy from Critical Writing Collective launched at The Plaza Principle, Leeds in October 2010. Images of the installation and an online copy of the publication are online here.

Edited by Joanna Loveday and Charlotte A. Morgan

OUI Event #1 Response

2010-11-24T07:10:00.000-08:00

Responses below to O U I Performance Event #1 Saturday 13th November 2010 presented by OUI Performance. O U I Event #1 was a collective action by Judit Bodor, Victoria Gray, Mark Greenwood, Justin McKeown, Kiki Taira and Nathan Walker. The activities of the artists fold into and out of each other, they implicate, reciprocate and affect one another as the artists work alone, together in the Basement of Bar Lane Studio’s. Nine hours of action was responded to live by artists Judit Bodor and Justin McKeown, presented as an interactive live multimedia archive: Dysfunctional Labour.

Flying in Circles
Documentation Process Frame

COPY // understudy

2010-10-18T09:16:00.000-07:00

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COPY // understudy
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First Edition of COPY to be launched at The Plaza Principle, Leeds, Thursday 21 October 2010, 6pm – 9pm

COPY is a new low-tech publication of critical and experimental art writing based in Yorkshire, from Critical Writing Collective. Each issue offers a proposition loosely interpreted by it’s contributors.

COPY // understudy contains submissions of writing as or around critical practice and page/image based works with a critical / textual element. COPY // understudy examines the notions of standing in, examined, inquired or performed; the temporary, theoretical or illusory and will be presented at The Plaza Principle, an exhibition curated by Derek Horton and Chris Bloor at the vacant TK Maxx unit in Leeds Shopping Plaza.

COPY will be available throught the exhibition open 12–5pm every day, from Friday 22 October to Sunday 31 October 2010 and will also bedistributed at regional and national locations and online.

http://www.theplazaprinciple.org/

The Plaza Principle will provide an opportunity to see a large-scale exhibition of contemporary art in Leeds, presenting the work of over forty young and established international artists. Exploiting the scale and architectural qualities of the abandoned TK Maxx store, the exhibition will present a wide range of contemporary art, with an emphasis on sculpture, installation, video, performance, and audio works.

Critical Writing Collective Website Launched and Call for Submissions COPY - Understudy

2010-09-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

Visit Critical Writing Collective's new home at:

Critical Writing Collective

Including details of our open call for contributions:

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COPY // understudy

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The Plaza Principle, Leeds, 21-31 October 2010.

Deadline 11th October 2010

We invite contributions for the forthcoming edition, which will be presented at The Plaza Principle, an exhibition curated by Derek Horton and Chris Bloor at the vacant TK Maxx unit in Leeds Shopping Plaza.

The Plaza Principle will present work by a range of emerging and more established artists, and welcomes reflection on the site, a partially vacant 1980s plaza scheduled for demolition,and the economic context where by artists are being invited to occupy vacant shop units to disguise or compensate for economic decline in the nations town, city and district centres.

We welcome submissions of writing as or around critical practice or page/image based works with a critical / textual element for COPY // understudy – standing in, examined, inquired or performed; temporary, theoretical or illusory. Response to this theme and wider exhibition context may be loose more direct, limited to 2000 words / 4 A4 pages. Please send submissions by email to criticalwritingcollective@gmail.com by 11th October 2010.

COPY will be distributed at regional and national locations following the exhibition and available online. For more information contact criticalwritingcollective@gmail.com

RITE Review in White Hot Magazine

2010-09-17T02:31:00.000-07:00

Becky Hunter's article looks at RITE (Critical Communities) and June Leaf’s Record 1974/75 as recent publications of artists' own writings. You can read the article here: White Hot Magazine

RITE is still available to buy online for £8.

Hazard Reaction Texts now online

2010-07-27T08:43:00.000-07:00

You can now download, read and comment on all of the HAZARD: REACTION texts at: http://hazardmcr.org/

Below are my own two contributions:

To Be Hazard

To Land on the Moon

Critical Writing Collective - Call for Writers

2010-06-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

HAZARD MMX: REACTION

Hazard MMX: Reaction, will explore how text can react and respond to Hazard MMX, Manchester’s micro-festival of incidental intervention and sited performance, presented by hÅb and greenroom. The festival will take place this year on Saturday 17 July 12-5pm offering strange occurrences in unexpected places around Manchester city centre.

Critical Writing Collective would like to invite four writers to participate in Hazard MMX and create written responses to the festival to be published online.

As part of a small community of writers, you will respond to Hazard MMX in a written text, which could include any of the following; approaching the entire festival as a concept/programme of work, creating a critical response to one artists work, documenting the festival as a single audience member and your experience of it, interviewing artists and audience members, documenting audience response and reaction across the city or approaching the city with no programme or time table to see Hazard working at its best (exploring the unknowing of what is performance and what is ‘reality’ in the city).

Unfortunately we cannot offer any writers a fee for taking part in the project this year, but train fares to and from Manchester will be covered. Each participating writer will be supported in writing, publishing and editing their work if required. This is a great opportunity to be involved in the first writing project to run alongside Hazard and gain a unique insight into how the festival works within the vast city centre in the form of intervention and sited performance and installation.

We are looking for regional and northern writers in particular to participate. You will need to have a strong interest in site specific, live art and contemporary performance and be willing to write accessibly for both art and non-art audiences.
Writers must be able to commit to attend the full day in Manchester 17 July 12-5pm, and a meeting at 5.30pm (in a local café) for a de-brief and open discussion with the other writers involved.

If you are interested in taking part, please email your CV to Joanna Loveday: joannaloveday@hotmail.com by no later than Monday 5 July.

Information on the festival can be found at:

www.hazardmcr.org

http://www.greenroomarts.org/archive/events/hazard-2010/

RITE Launch and Art Writing Field Station

2010-04-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

Documentation from the RITE publication launch can now be found at:

http://writingencounters.squarespace.com/rite-launch-2010-03-26/

Here you can also find images of the ART WRITING FIELD STATION that took place at East Street Arts Patrick Studios, St.Mary’s Lane, Leeds, which I attended on Saturday 27 March 2010. More information on ART WRITING FIELD STATION below.

ART WRITING FIELD STATION is an ongoing event and publications series at which practitioners present material and evidence of the “field” of art writing. The aim is both to make a field recording of the field of art writing as constituted by a set of practices, and to offer an example of that field in poetic operation.

As well as individual presentations, each ART WRITING FIELD STATION produces a lexicon or live writing archive of its group discussions, which serves as a script and provocation for future events.

About the Project
ART WRITING FIELD STATION is curated by David Berridge/ VerySmallKitchen and was first presented at FIVE YEARS GALLERY, LONDON in February 2009, as part of their FIELD RECORDINGS season. The first set of FIELD STATION chapbooks (including texts by Tamarin Norwood, Matthew MacKissack, and Hyun Jin Cho) will be published on Mar 30th. For further information, event reports, images, and readings, see www.verysmallkitchen.com

The Sixth National Whippit Night

2010-03-22T11:33:00.000-07:00

The Sixth National Whippit Night
Saturday 20 Feb 2010
Space 109 Walmgate, York

ARTISTS: Bean, Emma Bennett, Victoria Gray, Mark Greenwood, Roddy Hunter, Charlotte Sykes, Nathan Walker, Katy Connor, Stephen Cornford

IT
It is happening! It is here! An evening of live, unapologetic actions, sounds, videos, words. The documentation taking place is immense. This is a scene unknown to the eye or to the mind in York, so cameras click continuously as if to prove its very existence - conversations erupt in every possible moment of silence. There are smart folk in overcoats, young girls in fish net tights, all ready, for a Saturday night provided by the Sixth National Whippit Night of Contemporary Art. But this is no ordinary event. This is the evening long awaited by many art lovers in the area. Gathered here because you just had to be here, to see it, to believe it is really happening on Walmgate, York, North Yorkshire. Maybe a lecturer told you it was compulsory, a friend invited you, or a daughter needed your support. There are many reasons to be here, but the best part of all, is that the community that care about this work, and those who have no idea what they are letting themselves in for, are here in numbers. BIG numbers. [HIGH 1465]

ME
And I seem to be floundering in its wake - how on earth can I take all this in during one night, all this work and activity in a space I have never been to in a city I know not for it? York has so long needed an evening of this sort that it now gushes in rolling video cameras and inappropriate applause, as the nine artists’ present work in Space 109. The night has magnetism; drawing in fellow artists, practitioners, students and even more delightfully - people from the streets. It is glistening and we are magpies flocking. Thieves in the night, we steal away ideas, as these artists make it happen; creating, repeating, throwing out, throwing up all that is new, live, ART - PERFORMANCE – VIDEO – SOUND. It is spilling out on to the street as the light of Katy Connor’s projection beams on to the pavement. It is compact, yet efficient, teetering at the edges of what it can be, full to the very brim - from 7pm until 11pm - three small rooms, one toilet, one kitchen. The audience migrate around the space, as three durational pieces take place; Connor, Hunter and Sykes and five timed works from; Bean, Bennett, Gray, Greenwood and Walker. Some short actions, some long intense sequences that we encounter time and time again.

WEB
Reading the manual post-event, I begin to filter through the additional layers of the work, written texts, putting it all into some new order. The work begins to exist beyond the live interaction, now on the page and on the screen. Images of the night appear gradually on my laptop and I discover new online communities, where they are debating the work I saw, pre-empted and archived, before I even got there. What was seen unravels. Whippit and all its spin off and starting points, points to; undoing, redoing, rewriting, criticality, honesty. And through Whippit’s sixth night, a reason is coming in to existence for contemporary artists to not only stay in Yorkshire, but in York. Artists here are not just talking about work and, they are making work happen.

MAP
This night in the city represents not only four local artists, but five national contributions as well, and this is the point at which Whippit can really be seen as more than a platform for new work. It places these artists, through the curation of their work in these events, on a national and international map, as Whippit grows in size as a network of artists, it hosts its next event in Berlin. This places the artists involved, as well as the city of York at the heart of something much bigger than this sole evening, it places them in a network and ongoing collaboration with endless possibilities. A close social and professional network such as Whippit generates work for those involved as they thrive on self promoting, self curating and create a supportive, yet critical and fastidious community, putting artists in touch with spaces, with each other, with educational institutes and even encouraging artists to take on the role of curator, project manager, marketer and agent.

Notes from the work I witnessed:

1) BEAN

OTHERS WORDS MAKE SENSE OF WHAT I AM ALREADY DOING

Reflexive and pre-emptive, these words go beyond the live event I witnessed. The bleeding and the running, the water and the glass. They are provocative and threatening to a writer. Particularly when read post-event. They encompass an acknowledgement to ‘everything else’, everything that has gone before, the vast winds of knowledge and work that have already existed and continue to exist. They write my words before I write them, they stall me and they spur me on, to write about the event, after the event, to write the words that were already written as I stood in the corner of the space at Whippit and watched. Yet Bean’s performance sits deeply in the present, the current flow of time and our own measly human efforts to interrupt it, stop it or change that flow: FIGHTING THROUGH CIRCUITS CIRCLES LINES BEYOND BUOYS. This sceptical statement packs an awful lot of punch, on the page and in the dark in the back room. It bites.
Bean circles the space towards the end of her performance. The materials she uses; butter, cut glass, knife, and blood are sharp and soft, blunt and broken, gushing and refined. The small sound system plays a monotonous list of 4 digit figures. HIGH 1582 LOW 1643 HIGH 1465 LOW 1478. I watch and collect my thoughts as she spins her circles and catches me inside them.

2) VICTORIA GRAY

JULY
all people are like grass all flesh is like grass all men are like grass
and various translations on the passage

AN ACTION FOR JULY IN FEBRUARY WITH GRASS

July in February
A face full of peace.

Victoria stands, with the stillness of a bird in hand. Several days after the event I can still see her clearly. Breathing. In. Out. Eyes closed and dressed simply. She made a tree for me. She dressed it, watered it and laid down at its feet. She stripped herself of her gold necklace and kept it close by in a glass bowl of water. Purity/Clarity. Clear white sheet. Grass, cut at its roots, is kept for months, dried like toast. A relic, it is straight and bundled, faded in colour. To now have its moment, to be spread out at our feet.
February in July
Folding time. Time bends elegantly now, like a dancer, back on to itself. Time against time. Flesh against flesh. Blinded by her own eyelids, groping, searching, striding, she paces into the long cut grass - collecting it at her feet. Walking into the past. It is dry, it is watered, it is soggy. This is summer too soon, hot July in wet February. The materials move when artist moves. They shift in form and meaning, they disappear and re-appear. They stand tall, they become shy.

3) CHARLOTTE SYKES

Drawing with her eyes closed, there is a clear determination and focus in SYKES as she works. Her arms stretch up and out, her reach is marked on the paper. I return to her durational performance time and time again. There is something incredibly soothing in the repetition of the line making with the graphite she holds in both hands to mark the paper. It is a marking of time, but also of release. Two lungs appear on the page in front of me and the rhythmic actions seem to follow a pattern of breathing. One hand begins to work quickly, drawing over itself again and again, whilst the left hand continues with broad sweeping motions. There is a sadness in it. It is quiet work, and when left alone it is as though Charlotte has been abandoned. Not attention-seeking, but dream making. Making and marking. Erasing from the paper later, the lines blur and congeal under rubber. Her arms become heavy under the work and she begins to move beyond the marking of time in to erasing it, ending it, covering up and blurring what once was. There is no declaration in this work. No statement shoving its way into our consciousness. Just a continuous stream of energies; both positive in mark-making, then deductive, reducing the moment of creation in to a small pile of rubber shavings and graphite. It is thankless but rewarding - for it is done.

1) BEAN - AND THE BUOY AT THE END OF THE LINE
2) VICTORIA GRAY - JULY
3) CHARLOTTE SYKES - DRAWING FOR A DURATION WITH EYES CLOSED – THEN ERASE DRAWING

Founded in 2007, Whippit is an international network of artists who host and participate in Whippit Nights, art event evenings for performance, video and sound art. More information on Whippit can be found at: facebook.com and www.whippit.org

RITE Launch and Publication

2010-03-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

Rite, write, rote, right and sometimes wrong....

Published in 2009, RITE is the result of a nine month collaboration with Critical Communities, a New Work Network and Open Dialogues project exploring the practice of critical writing on and as new work (interdisciplinary and live art).

Featuring the work of the Critical Community, RITE is a collection that brings together 19 original texts by UK based art writers that enact expanded acts of criticism, question the essay form, use language as material and attempt to work the different ways that writing can be on or about new work.

Order Online

LAUNCH

RITE will be launched at PSL Gallery Leeds on the evening of March 26 2010 6.30-8pm. The event will include propositions on the subject of art writing and live readings by RITE contributors. Contact lottie@newworknetwork.org.uk or sz@roomman.co.uk for more information and to reserve your place on the guest list.

The launch is presented by 'In a word', part of the York-based curatorial agency Writing Encounters. http://writingencounters.squarespace.com/ and supported by New Work Network and PSL.

The Customer is King

2010-01-11T00:48:00.000-08:00

FrenchMottershead are the London based partnership best known for exploring participatory and site specific art that engages with local communities and explores notions of identity and social rituals. The SHOPS project is the latest strand in a line of work which began in 2005 at ANTI Festival, Kuopio, Finland. The original Five Shops commission saw FrenchMottershead work with independent shops, who were in turn asked to invite their customers to participate in a group photograph that was then printed and gifted to the shop itself.

Site Gallery, Sheffield, commissioned FrenchMottershead to spend two years developing these ideas in Brazil, China, Romania, Slovenia, Turkey and Sheffield 2008-2009 and the final exhibition of the work from this ongoing project is currently on display in Sheffield; a collection of photographic prints, videos and texts, documenting the mirco-communities surrounding the global shops they worked with. The exhibition, displayed at Site Gallery Sheffield until 13 February narrates these individual experiences and joins them as the photographic snap shots, interviews and supporting texts of the artists time spent in these communities are presented side by side.

On seeing these disparate and diverse shops and their communities from all over the globe, the viewer is presented with a focused subject, from which the human behaviors that connect these shops comes into view. These behaviors are predominately ones borne out of trust, repetition and the familial. They display individual and community identities and the need for social interaction in everyday life. The human relationships that are rooted in the interactions of the shop are seen in this project as equally valued to the customers as the goods of utility the customers are buying; the food, DIY supplies, cigarettes, meat and veg.

The project in studying and involving the communities visited, raises wider artistic concerns than just social relationships and common traits in close knit communities however. SHOPS, treads a fine line between ethnographic study and artistic practice. SHOPS is a site specific piece of work but one where the audience is exposed to the documentation of the process, rather than the real time event itself. How the artists navigate through the ethical and moral codes needed in dealing with these communities is buried in the processes and seemingly insignificant decisions the artists made in how they interacted with the shopkeepers and customers. In their texts exploring the process we can see FrenchMottershead as artists differ in their approach to cultural anthropologist conducting a piece of field research, in that they have complete freedom in how much they wish to interact, if at all, and how they build and then leave the relationship. They are in fact, despite their artistic funding, completely free from beauracrocy and codes of practice. They are two individuals making up their own rules of interaction. Which of these two approaches results in the most positive experience for the participants or reveals the most interesting outcomes is however unknown here, as the artists draw no comparisons. But it is nevertheless an important point to consider as the artists, in this case FrenchMottershead, not only rely on input from the community in order to create the art, but the art becomes wholly reliant upon that input.

Finding shops and communities who were interested in the project and willing to engage with the process was the first challenge for FrenchMottershead. During a talk at the exhibition opening the artists comment that by using local professionals from the town in which they found themselves helped to broker relationships in a short time frame as having only four to five weeks to build a trusting relationship with the shopkeepers and their customers is of course no easy task. The local producers, interpreters and photographers FrenchMottershead brought on board all helped to persuade locals to participate and grant consent for the photography to take place. But it also brought a third party to an already complicated set up, making it difficult to define artist, subject and artwork, as FrenchMottershead, locals and even local artists all played a part in the making of the work.

Enver Korkamz, the butcher in Tepebashi Istanbul was an ideal subject for the project. Many different groups of the local community interacted with Enver and his shop and his willingness to take part and complete trust in the artists, was reflected when those who trusted Enver also began to trust the project and became involved. A collection of photographs were printed for Enver and hung on his Butchers shop tiled wall on the last day of FrenchMottershead’s stay in Istanbul. In Sheffield hangs an exact replica of the pictures currently found on Enver’s shop wall, specially taken for him of the individuals and groups he interacts with every day.

This collection in particular demonstrates the organic process the artists were working towards in each case study and also the clarity of how documenting a SHOP and its customers is an alternative artistic study and documentation of a community. The prints show the children who Enver was asked to watch, the friends who left their keys and valuables with him, the women who borrowed his stools to sit outside. In this case, it is clear to see how a local shop can become much more than a business. Enver’s shop crosses many boundaries as it becomes a place of not only trade for meat, but Enver himself morphs into many possible alternative roles including social worker, youth worker and neighborhood watchman as well as butcher. Yet outside any of these formalised roles, Enver and his shop are here seen as a real life example of how all these roles and community duties can and still do exist in society of their own accord.

The most fascinating part noted in the documentation of Enver’s butcher shop, was not the final prints on the wall, but the quote that to gain the communities trust, FrenchMottershead with their local photographer had taken many photographs that the community asked for in the weeks prior to the final shoot. In the style of a true ethnographic study the artists could not merely observe the community, but had to find a role within the group themselves and did so in becoming the village photographer. These were photographs the community wanted taking; photographs of the elderly members of the community, mothers, grandads, friends, who had never had their photograph taken before, photogrphs unseen here. Taken as a gesture of good will, a building block of the relationship between artist and participant, these photographs exist outside of the gallery work and possibly outside of the artwork - a gift for the community alone. These were the offerings gifted before the artists took a snapshot of their SHOP and community, and the care FrenchMottershead took in building these genuine relationships is the crux of the project that really makes this a sound artistic endeavor opposed to an exploitative voyeuristic one.

Unfortunately these images, negotiated and commissioned by the people of the community, are not on display here in the exhibition, which perhaps makes them even more fascinating than the prints that do hang in Sheffield. Reading about them is excitig in that the text unravels even more of what it means to be a tight-knit community than the artists prints do. The final prints I feel fail to demonstrate the most interesting aspect of this artistic endeavor, that of the negotiation and compromises at the heart of any relationship, and the actual interaction between a western artist and international shop, its community and the individual personalities that make it.

In hearing the artists speak, delving into the online blog and leafing through the catalogue that was made as an extension of the project, there lies some fascinating content, international comparisons and musings on human interaction as it took place in real time across the globe. But this is an artwork that is not necessarily visual or easily consumed. The final photographs that were printed indeed were also curated by the communities themselves, as the artists only printed the shot everyone was happy with, no one with their bad side showing or pulling a face they weren’t happy with. Some of the pictures such as the Sheffield hat shop ‘J B Hats ’n’ Things’ print do let the personalities shine through in their skilled portraiture. But SHOPS is a project with many layers, and as the real art at the centre of this piece lies in the negotiating, chatting, repeated visits and placating of these people, so the exhbition relies on the curation of the visitor, in making sense of all this evidence and material for oneself. The artwork can be seen in the act itself, the live event and the many disucssions and photographs taken and exchanged before any official photographs were taken. As in the nature of the ephemeral act, to be the audience is now to be the voyeur of documentation, unwrapping the layers of what once was and trying to capture something of that which can never be recreated in real time.

Joanna Loveday

The FrenchMottershead SHOPS Project is on from 21 November – 13 February 2010 at
Site Gallery, Sheffield, S1 2BS http://www.sitegallery.org/whats_on/

POETRY INDOORS

2009-11-30T12:11:00.000-08:00

Rachel Lois Clapham and Joanna Loveday have developed a collaborative text in response to Marina Abramovic Presents... at Manchester International Festival. See the text here, designed by Charlotte A Morgan.

Poetry Indoors

Launch of RITE

2009-11-27T03:10:00.000-08:00

RITE is now available to purchase at lulu: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/rite/7956764 for just £5.

RITE will be officially launched at this years New Work Network AGM and Christmas Social event, on 12th December at Toynbee Hall, London and launched in Yorkshire in January - date to be confirmed.

RITE is the publication culmination of the Critical Communities critical writing project which ran from February 2009 in collaboration with Open Dialogues:.

RITE

2009-09-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

Rite, write, rote, right and sometimes wrong....

Forthcoming in October 2009, RITE is the result of a nine month collaboration with Critical Communities, a New Work Network and Open Dialogues project exploring the practice of critical writing on and as new work (interdisciplinary and live art).

Featuring the work of the Critical Community, RITE is a collection that brings together 18 original texts by UK based art writers that enact expanded acts of criticism, question the essay form, use language as material and attempt to work the different ways that writing can be on or about new work.

Contributors include Emma Bennett, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg, Emma Cocker, Hannah Crosson, Amelia Crouch, Chloe Dechery, Tim Jeeves, Emma Leach, Johanna Linsley, Joanna Loveday, Charlotte Morgan, Mary Paterson, Jim Prevett, Nathan Walker and Wood McGrath.

RITE is commissioned by New Work Network, designed by Wood McGrath, edited Open Dialogues and produced by the members of Critical Communities with external editorial advice from Maria Fusco. It includes a foreword by New Work Network and introduction by Open Dialogues. All material is copyright the authors and Critical Communities 2009.

http://open-dialogues.blogspot.com/2009/08/rite.html

Critical Communities

2009-06-30T04:11:00.000-07:00

Critical Communities Publication coming soon....http://open-dialogues.blogspot.com/2009/02/critical-community_23.html

Morphic Resonance - Project Space Leeds

2009-06-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

25 March – 27 June 2009

Project Space Leeds

On entering the new exhibition at Project Space Leeds, I find little in the way of a formal finished exhibition showing, other than the catalogue of details which tells me:

“This catalogue introduces the second phase of the project [Morphic Resonance], a more formal curation of the work produced in response to the project to far.”

On reading this, I am heavily disappointed that I missed the first 'informal' phase, as the project space still oozes a sense of artists studios and artistic liberation, and I wonder at the exciting havoc that was here before, as much of the work appears still under construction in the space at this stage.

Acting out Project Space Leeds’s artistic objectives, this 12 week experimental project with artists from across the North of England is incredibly fitting for PSL - independent, artist-led and a contemporary art space -project. To see a project alive and well in a ‘project space’ is somehow unusual. It seems you are more likely to find a formal exhibition, with all the trimmings and finishing’s of a highly curated programme in the majority of artistic 'project spaces' I have visited recently. But this is definitely a project, sill in full swing and it quite takes me aback. There is a mixture of finished installation exhibits, ongoing spontaneous artist-led activity and object based works, still in the throws of creation.

David Stean and Hardeep Pandhal’s ‘props and costumes’ are not currently 'in action' on my visit, but as I take a closer look at the colourful melted substance, dripping from pictures balanced precariously on nails, I am drawn in to the point where I almost action them myself - stepping on split and broken pieces of the melted material underfoot. Moving around another temporary wall in the space (realising PSL’s utter flexibility in layout, no permanent, clean white walls in sight), I see a sign:

PRIVATE- NO ENTRY.

I look hopelessly at my map for a clue, and begin to realise it is up to me to decide if this in itself is part of the exhibition. I peek inside the door to see a shambolic stack of furniture, almost a chaotic store room and I decide to go no further, still clueless as to whether this is actually ‘private’ or part of the exhibition. Using the space so openly for projects and to show artists at work, gives me a close proximity to the work and those involved that is both exciting and nerve-wracking. The onus is on me to decide whether I take what I experience to be ‘Morphic Resonance’, the structure of the PSL space at large, neither, or both as the norms of gallery viewing are abolished. Everything becomes questionable, even the books and leaflets left out for visitors to browse suddenly become curious and I interact with them differently. The formality of the gallery space is broken down by the happenings around me and the ones I create as I move from one area of the exhibition to the other.

The project I am particularly drawn to within Morphic Resonance is No Fixed Abode, Dan Simpkins and Penny Whitehead’s. There is a raft currently under construction with someone deeply concentrating; hammering bits of wood on to a massive construction of scrap wood and large metal drums. Next to this workshop site is the ‘We, the other: marketing suite’ a large table, with texts laid out for me to read. The more formal texts on display offer detailed accounts, reports and newspaper columns on the Green Bank development project, originally planned for Leeds this year. This is a multi million pound building development from George Wimpey and as a resident of Leeds is a project I knew nothing about until now. At first glance it appears to be just another building development, which has currently been shelved due to the current economic down turn. But as I look at maps and photographs taken of the site and the marketing suite, I begin to recognise it, from just moments ago. The development was planned for a strip of land sandwiched between the railway lines and the Leeds-Liverpool canal, almost directly opposite PSL. The harsh white building currently occupying the space, is the £1 million marketing suite, now de-funct. My jaw hits the ground.

£1 million pounds. £1,000,000. One Million Pounds.

I carry on reading, desperate to seek some logical explanation of how this kind of money can be spent and sat vacant - current climate. I read about the raft as the hammering continues beside me. It is then that I re-discover the raft as a symbol of survival, rescue and begin to understand it as both spontaneous (using materials at hand) and life-saving in purpose. I also begin to grasp its use in the marketing suite, as it can be used as both a metaphor for ‘the often precarious position of artist-led initiatives’ as well as the developers and businesses such as Green Bank, ‘struggling to stay afloat in current economic crises.’

I stumble out of the gallery, not really wanting to leave, but urged to take a look, to get to grips with this project that is not yet finished, both within the Galley space and on the site outside of it. I look out across the water, still aghast by how strange this suspicious ‘Green’ development sounds and locate the marketing suite. The sheer oddity of it glaring back at me, such an expensive sales device sat empty, excessive and pointless is a stark contrast to the artists busy indoors behind me. Their project is similarly unfinished, but they are working away, dreaming of rafts and turning their own corner of the urban city into a real life alternative.

No Fixed Abode, Simpkins and Whitehead in a moment of inspiring and ongoing activism, collaboration and spontaneity, in this project highlight just how extraordinary and ground-breaking artistically this exhibition is. Mirroring some of the complex dynamics that brought PSL in to life in the first place (as a collaboration with property developer KW Linfoot PLC) their project fully embraces the opportunities offered in artist-led projects and addresses the precarious nature of both business developments and artistic initiatives. Reflecting on their immediate surroundings has led them to examine not only the frivolous, precarious and fleeting possibilities of Green Bank and the implications of Leeds’ continuous regeneration and re-development, but also the stability of both artistic practice and the economy at large.

In opening its doors for the public to wander around such a fluid and conceptual project-driven exhibition, PSL embarks on a risky business. Morphic Resonance explores precarious territory in displaying works in progress, micro-exhibitions and spontaneous actions - but as evident in Green Bank, sometimes investing in highly organised and 'sure bet' projects, rewards no-one. I come away realising just as watching artists-work in progress is fascinating, so too is witnessing any massive tower block of apartments ascend, with swinging cranes and drills the size of houses. Sometimes, sites are more interesting than the finished product.

Abstract for Critical Communities

2009-05-16T12:19:00.000-07:00

Abstract of the text I will be writing for Critical Communties:

Tracing two performances of Nathan Walker, this text explores the depths and limitations of collaborating with a friend across practice and in a critical context. The text includes individual responses and ongoing dialogues in regards to two pieces of performance and examines the main threads which make up this body of work, as a platform for exploring the relationship of writer/performer/spectator and friend. These areas of discussion similarly touch upon topics discussed in the wider critical communities project including; care, hard work and the cross overs and distcinctions of the roles of writer and artist. Working in collaboration the text hopes to open up new dialogues and areas of possibility for both writer and artist.

Critical Communities

2009-02-25T02:14:00.000-08:00

I will taking part in Critical Communities, a new collaborative critical writing project from Open Dialogues and New Work Network. Critical Communities has been developed by Open Dialogues and New Work Network (NWN) and is supported by East Street Arts, The London Consortium and Space. For more information on this project visit: http://open-dialogues.blogspot.com

The Yorkshire Critical Community includes Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Amelia Crouch, Joanna Loveday, Charlotte Morgan and Nathan Walker. With special guest provocateurs Sohail Khan, Alfredo Cramerotti and Derek Horton. Together the participants represent a community of new work/writing practitioners who will meet regularly in London and Yorkshire to discuss notions of 'the critical' in relation to critical writing both on and as new work. We will be critiquing our own art/writing and that of others, examining alternate critical modes both on and off the page and collaboratively developing a publication. The community will also act as a sustained network for experimental writing/new work practitioners in the London and Yorkshire areas. The Critical Community and its members will profiled on the New Work Network website http://www.newworknetwork.org.uk/index.php

Hatch at Bradford Playhouse

2009-01-24T08:27:00.000-08:00

'Hatch' is Bradford's new experimental arts showcase at Bradford Playhouse. A new collaboration between Fabric and Bradford Playhouse Hatch, will be an ongoing series of showcase events, featuring work from filmmakers, DJs, musicians, comedians, performers, poets, dancers and artists working in installation or time-based artforms. Providing an opportunity for regional artists to workshop new work and showcase completed pieces, Hatch promises that "Each event will be exciting and unique - as it's all up to what work is submitted".

My first experience of Hatch on Thursday 22nd January was combined with my first visit to the Bradford Playhouse (formerly The Priestley). The Playhouse sits neatly in the Little Germany, cultural district of Bradford city centre. This old theatre with small 290 seat auditorium, newly refurbished downstairs bar area and attached 'Studio' (which I later discovered to be a stark room in the drafty upper wing of the building) has recently re-opened its doors to a hive of cross-disciplinary artists and arts activity. An old venue with a fresh new outlook, is a perfect demonstration of how an old building doesn't necessarily mean old work and old audiences. The Bradford Playhouse is now pitched as a new independent arts venue; willing, enthusiastic and capable of hosting a range of arts events, exhibitions and performances. In its open invitation to all genres, it is an excellent demonstration of the level of interest, artistic activity, enthusiasm and the determined 'can-do' attitude of those both programming and taking part in the Hatch collaboration.

Arriving late after walking in completetly the wrong direction around Bradford, I was welcomed in the foyer by the durational performative piece listed on the prgormame as 'Live art boxing by Nicolas Kilby'. Having already boxed for half an hour or so, he was gleaming with sweat and already looking out of breath. As he returned to his boxing stance after a break, his face showed signs of worry, that I could only take as concern for just how long two hours of back to back shadow boxing actually lasts in the moment of performing the action, and whether he had understimated just how much he could take. But he looked fit, and he seemed comfortable in his shorts and boxing gloves, laying in to nothing but the cold drafty air around him, flowing in with me through the entrance. His focus on the task in hand was fierce and his reptitive blows full of power. Aggression expressed itself in both the swing of his arms and the tightness of his narrowing eyes. Eager to move on to see more of the programme of events, I left after a short while and unfortunately missed the ending of this durational act, which no doubt left his body in a completely exhausted state. But the simplicity of subject, the dedication and gutsy reality of his chosen action had sparked my interest in Nicolas' artistic practice and I was left keen to find out more.

The performative lecture by Simon Warner, photographer, was a self stated 'work in progress' but gave an informative insight into his research into the artistic paintings which eventually led to the development of photography. This lecture focused on the Panorama paintings of the late 19th Century, the buildings in which they were painted and the story of Warners visit to see the only known Panorama painting in the UK at present - The Panorama of Rome in the V&A Museum. The lecture in its completition no doubt will be fascinating and incredibly educational, the main disappointment at this evenings taster was the missing imperative piece of information on how exactly the Panorma painting directly influenced the birth of photography. The lecture finished with an emotive ending, as in Warners description the Panorama of Rome was inspirational and excavated, not only as a historical subject matter but created for Warner an example of " Everything I could ask of a work of art".

On the verge of heading for the next train home I decided to stay for the 'Work in progress dance' by Slanjayvah Danza and was so pleased I took my chances on this last performance. Theatrical spot-lighting lit two dancers, one male, one female, on the small stage in the main auditorium. The varied musical score complimented the mix-tape of dancing styles blended in Danza's choreography in a brief yet vibrant contemporary dance piece. Beginning with the Argentine Tango, and donning only thin vests and hotpant shorts, red blindfolds and bare feet, the couple moved towards one another and after finding their partner in almost complete darkness, jointly took on a challenging set of dance sequences, lifts and near acrobatic movements. Whilst the spotlights revealed their figures but not the detail of the face, this dance work scrumptiously uncovered just enough piece by piece, tantalizing the audience and driving the routine forward, not through narrative, but sheer gusto and passion as each movement led them in to the next. The momentum and intensity of the movement progressively built into climax after climax. Also listed as 'a work in progress', I struggled to find any aspects in need of improvement. The dancers were highly professional, and choreography of this intensity and quality was a joy to watch, especially when the event was Free!

Joanna Loveday

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing on performance and live art.
If you would like to reproduce this article please contact joannaloveday@hotmail

More information on Hatch at: www.myspace.com/hatchatbradfordplayhouse

To join the Hatch group on facebook go to: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44296871799

New Writing Collective Yorkshire Next Meeting

2008-12-23T03:12:00.000-08:00

New Writing Collective Yorkshire Leeds Meeting: Wednesday 14th January, Victoria Hotel, Leeds 7.30pm

After several successful meetings across the region, we would like to invite anyone who is interested in the collective to a second open call out meeting in Leeds where we will be discussing the potentials of the regional writing collective. This meeting will be informal and open to everyone in Yorkshire who is interested in the possibilities of a regionally focused critical writing collective and would like to find out more or get involved. Whether your interests are the same as ours, or you just haven’t been able to make any of our previous meetings, then we would love to see you there!

After 4 meetings we have developed a clear set of aims and potential activities, and this meeting will enable us to hear any more thoughts from any writers and venues we have so far not had chance to talk to, after which we will begin work on some of the actions and objectives outlined. This is a chance for both local writers, arts venues, curators and institutions to have some input and contribute to the growth of the new collective and if you are interested and can or cannot attend, we would love to hear from you.

We are interested in critical writing that may include or combine; review, academic text, performative text, documentary or cultural commentary, and which discusses contemporary art, performance, film, new media, site-specific and public realm projects, architecture, installation, live art and community based projects.

The Aims of the Collective:

Provide a database of regional writers and critical writing for local arts venues and performance spaces.
Create a platform for new and emerging regional writers to produce critical, informed, accessible new work.
Link the region's arts activities in an informed yet accessible online/printed publication.
Contribute as a regional collective to the national and international critical dialogue and debate in the arts.
Spark debate around visual art, performance and wider cultural issues, through texts that interrogate as well as support new and experimental arts practice within Yorkshire.

Potential output and activities of the collective:

Online forum for texts, comments and debate
Printed Publication
Online resource centre, including regional writer biogs, publication listings, relevant venues etc
Regular writer meetings (on a local level) for support and networking
Regional and national publishing opportunities
Work with HE/FE/Universities and in collaboration with regional arts organisations: connecting festivals/companies with writers.

This will be an informal meeting over drinks, starting at 7.30pm in the Victoria pub, just off Millennium Square in Leeds. This is the final open call out meeting, so if you are interested in any of the above aims or activities, would like to come along to find out more and share your views, then we hope to see you there. For more information on how to find the Victoria Hotel see: http://trustedplaces.com/review/uk/leeds/bar-pub/1z6286g/the-victoria-hotel

If you would like to add a topic to the agenda for discussion or talk to us beforehand, please do email.

Joanna Loveday and Charlotte Morgan
New Writing Collective Yorkshire

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Leeds, Yorkshire, specialising in writing on performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com

Charlotte A Morgan is an artist and writer based in Sheffield focusing on site specificity, collaboration and the built environment. Contact: charlotte.anne.morgan@googlemail.com

New Writing Collective Next Meeting and News

2008-11-24T03:49:00.000-08:00

New Writing Collective Yorkshire Hull Meeting: Monday 1st December, Pave Bar, Hull 8pm

Yorkshire based writers for contemporary art and performance, Charlotte Morgan and Joanna Loveday, would like to invite fellow regional critical writers to join them at the third meeting of a 'new writing collective'. These meetings are taking place across the region and are an open call to anyone interested in the possibilities of a regionally focused critical writing collective. If you are a writer of (or are interested in writing) reviews, essays or cultural commentary on contemporary art, performance, film, new media, installations, live art and community based projects then we want to hear from you! We also welcome local artists, curators, venues and institutions to offer their thoughts on how or if the collective could work for them.

Aims of the Collective:

Provide a database of regional writers and critical writing for local arts venues and performance spaces.
Create a platform for new and emerging regional writers to produce critical, informed, accessible new work.
Link the region's arts activities in an informed yet accessible online/printed publication.
Contribute as a regional collective to the national and international critical dialogue and debate in the arts.
Spark debate around visual art, performance and wider cultural issues, through texts that interrogate as well as support new and experimental arts practice within Yorkshire.

Output and activities of the collective:

Online forum for texts, comments and debate
Printed Publication
Online resource centre, including regional writer biogs, publication listings, relevant venues etc
Regular writer meetings (on a local level) for support and networkingRegional and national publishing opportunities
Work with HE/FE/Universities and in collaboration with regional arts organisations: connecting festivals/companies with writers.

These aims have been refined in line with the issues and ideas that were raised in the three first meetings of the collective and we hope to gain further contributions and continue building a clear agenda over the forthcoming meeting in Hull.

Outline of the Hull meeting:
Introductions - getting to know fellow writers, sharing brief biogs
Yorkshire Focus - looking at the region, covering the geographical areas and homelands of the writers present.
Sharing knowledge of current curators, venues and artistic programmes and whether they are reviewed or written about at present.
Publications -discussion of all known regional (and if appropriate national) publications, including zines, journals, newspapers, websites and newsletters.

This will be an informal meeting over drinks, starting at 8pm in the bar at Pave Bar, and is a great opportunity to meet new people with a shared interest, talk, and hopefully build something new together. For more information on how to find Pave Bar see their website:http://www.pavebar.co.uk/

If you would like to add a topic to the agenda for discussion or talk to us beforehand, please do email. We welcome all writers, curators, artists, editors and programmers to this meeting, if you have an interest in new writing, we hope to see you there!

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Leeds, Yorkshire, specialising in writing on performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com

Charlotte A Morgan is an artist and writer based in Sheffield focusing on site specificity, collaboration and the built environment. Contact: charlotte.anne.morgan@googlemail.com

Sounds of Another World

2008-10-24T05:10:00.000-07:00

Stephen Cornford, Vleugel
MA Show, Dartington College of Arts, Totnes
Friday 26 September 2008 7.15pm, Studio 3

The instrument takes centre stage in Stephen Cornford’s performance of Vleugel.
Vleugel is the Dutch noun for, amongst other things, the grand piano. As a musical instrument, the piano is a device for playing or producing music. Yet the music that gives the instrument its function and its status as an object is reliant upon its relationship with humankind.

Instruments are made by humans, for humans to play, and their relationship to us is so closely interconnected that we struggle to define what an instrument is without us. What would an instrument be without music? With no one to make them, no one to admire them and no one to play them, surely instruments are hollow of sound in our absence? But here, right here, in this quiet studio at the Dartington MA Show we hear their voice. The noise they make without us, occurring beyond our control, existing beyond our intervention.

Vleugel consists of Cornford stood at a central sound desk, surrounded by two kettle drums and a piano with its delicate interior on display. From the sound desk leads a trail of cables and circuits which are in turn linked to microphones and four large amplifiers set in each corner of the studio. There is a mechanical vibrating device attached to a selection of the bass piano strings, which Cornford seems to manipulate. A scattering of tiny shells on the kettle drums skin can be seen only on approaching the drums after the performance, and from the perspective of the human eye, this is all that is visibly making the large impressive sound. The bass strings of the piano are amplified so loud they create entirely new resonances on the drums surface as the shells bounce and these noises are in turn picked up by the microphones and amplified back out in to the room. These three instruments create sounds that are repeating and building in momentum. Despite seeing all the elements on display; just how the musicality of the composition is created, whether by the technology, amplification or the small manipulative gestures Cornford makes on the sound desk, is still unknown.

Plugged in to the instruments interiors Cornford somehow taps into an alternative world in Vleugel, one where microphones inside grand pianos make the most engrossing and impassioned tones. Where kettle drums vibrate, as if they were responding to the strings of the piano. Vleugel is a sound-scape without humans, where objects have a life and a voice of their own and where they appear to be communicating on sound waves, vibrating and reverberating to each other. It is hard to get over the scale and power these instruments make, when amplified and ‘played’ by the artist. No hand touches any key of the piano, nor brush on the tight skin of either the two drums, but this composition is as profound, evocative and technical as any classic concerto.

Cornford plays the sound desk like a pianist. His black shirt and concentrated eye all affirming our notion of him as a musician, a composer and magician. We become accustomed to the noise he coax’s out of the striking black piano, through these new systems and devices. Yet the prominence of the instrument in this performance diminishes the significance of any person present or in operation of these objects. The concentrated efforts and clear technical experimentation that has been undertaken in order to hear these new and extraordinary sounds as they reverberate and on some level communicate, reverses our accepted dynamic of power in the relationship between object and creator. Here is seems that Cornford needs the instrument to be creative for this performance to occur, just as much as the instruments need Cornford.

Elevated high above Cornford and the instruments on a viewing balcony I can feel the vibrations under foot and as they run up my leg, I wonder is it possible I become part of the composition; my own body moving making its own noise, always present, just now amplified like these mysterious noises I hear. I feel, through every receptacle in my body: ears, eyes and skin - that these instruments are somehow singing without a musician physically forcing them into any set musical score. These subtleties in sounds and how they interact; how one vibration can cause another, is a new level of musicality produced in these familiar instruments that I was oblivious of until now. These are simple things; vibrations occur, they signal noises we cannot hear or comprehend exist, yet it takes a mile of cabling for us just to hear them in Vleugel. And even in looking and listening now, letting the eye follow the arrangement of objects, microphones and wire, I still don’t know where this sound truly is.

This performance is profoundly personal, an improvised composition, yet one Cornford has performed many times. Around 20 minutes in to the performance I feel the fun in ‘playing’ has left, I begin to urge the pressing of the ebony white key, smooth in texture and tempting to the human hand. I desire the delicate ping of a note. Reaching the limits of experimentation with the equipment and its rigging - it is possible that the scale of this composition has a tighter musical scale than that of the grand piano itself. So, is this new soundscape, this other world, somewhere I could and would wish to inhabit on a regular basis? Is it somewhere deeper and more ‘special’ than my own world of noise? Does it represent something we wish we knew, perhaps something so far unheard about our own existence? Vleugel certainly raises these questions by performing, moreover amplifying the ontology and object of sound.

Importantly in Vleugel the audience is given space to think in an all engrossing sound world. They become settled and have soon worked out what they can in regards to how noise is been produced and projected, and therefore drift off into new passages of thought. My mind turns to these questions: If this organ of sound only has so many notes, then how can we move beyond it? How can we herald it as our new world? Cornford is testing those limits in Vleugel, playing on those boundaries and in doing so brings a new world to life that I am thrilled to have experienced. Here is a performance highly thought provoking, both simple in its notions of play and experimentation and highly complex in its recognition, artistically and technologically, that there are is always new territory to explore and new worlds to discover, even within the confines of known musicality, sound and the instrument.

Joanna Loveday

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing on performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com

For more information on Steve Cornford visit: www.scrawn.co.uk

New Writing Collective Yorkshire

2008-10-15T02:55:00.000-07:00

York Meeting: Tuesday 21st October, City Screen Bar, York 8pm

Yorkshire based regional writers for contemporary art and performance; Charlotte Morgan and Joanna Loveday, would like to invite fellow regional critical writers to join them at the third meeting of a 'new writing collective'. These meetings are taking place across the region and are an open call to anyone interested in the possibilities of a new writing collective. If you are a writer of art/theatre columns, reviews, essays or cultural commentator on performance, film, new media, installations, Live Art and contemporary exhibitions then we want to hear from you!
Aims of the Collective:

To support writing/writers who work with: critical, informed, accessible new writing
Provide a database of regional writers and critical writing for local arts venues and performance spaces.
Create a platform for new and emerging regional writers
Link the regions arts activities in an informed yet accessible publication.
Contributing as a regional collective to the national and international critical dialogue and debate in the arts.
Spark regional debate around visual art, performance and wider cultural issues, through texts that interrogate as well as support new and experimental arts practice.

Output and activities of the collective:

Online forum/Interactive online platform
Printed Publication
Online resource centre, including; regional writer biogs, publication listings etc
Regular writer meetings (on a local level) for support and networking
Regional and national publishing opportunities
Work with HE/FE/Universities and in collaboration with regional arts organisations: connecting festivals/companies with writers.

These aims have been refined in line with the issues and ideas that were raised in the two first meetings of the collective and we hope to gain further contributions and continue building a clear agenda over the forthcoming regional meetings.

Aims of the York meeting:

Introductions - getting to know fellow writers, sharing brief biogs
Yorkshire Focus - looking at the region, covering the geographical areas and homelands of the writers present. Sharing knowledge of current curators, venues and artistic programmes and whether they are reviewed or written about at present.
Publications -discussion of all known regional (and if appropriate national) publications, including zines, journals, newspapers, websites and newsletters.

This will be an informal meeting over drinks, starting at 8pm in the bar at The City Screen, and is a great opportunity to meet new people with a shared interest, talk, and hopefully build something new together. For more information on how to find The City Screen see their website: http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema_info.aspx?venueId=york

For more information about the New Writing Collective Yorkshire, please email Joanna at: joannaloveday@hotmail.com. If you would like to add a topic to the agenda for discussion or talk to us beforehand, please do email.

We welcome all writers, curators, artists, editors and programmers to this first meeting, if you have an interest in new writing, we hope to see you there!

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Leeds, Yorkshire, specialising in writing on performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com

Charlotte A Morgan is an artist and writer based in Sheffield focusing on site specificity, collaboration and the built environment. Contact: charlotte.anne.morgan@googlemail.com

Writing Encounters

2008-09-08T04:45:00.000-07:00

I will be taking part in the international symposium 'Writing Encounters':

11, 12 and 13 September 2008
York St John University, York, UK

Curating the encounter between writing and performance – a three-day event bringing together artists and writers with critics and producers to debate, present, perform and collaborate.

Writing Encounters is an international symposium featuring interdisciplinary artists and scholars working in the expanded field of writing.

I will be present both as a freelance writer, member of New Work Network, New Work Yorkshire and representative for 'Script Yorkshire'.

For full details on the stymposium visit: www.yorksj.ac.uk and www.thespacebetweenwords.org

'Step off the stage'

2008-08-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

The Live Art Almanac is a collection of ‘found’ writing about Live Art, published between April 2006 and April 2008. It brings together 30 texts by different authors; artists, producers, writers, curators and commentators, reflecting the issues surrounding Live Art.

Collected by Live Art UK through recommendations, many of the texts included have evolved in conjunction with, or have some relationship to Live Art UK and the various initiatives they have instigated over the past two years. One of those initiatives, Writing From Live Art, has been extremely successful and many of the writers who took part in it feature in the Almanac, including Theron Schmidt, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Paterson and Tim Atack. These emerging writers are placed alongside those who have long been commentating in the field of Live Art and Performance, such as Lyn Gardner (Guardian Newspaper) and artists Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment) and Guillermo Gόmez-Peña (La Pocha Nostra). Here, as in previous Live Art Development Agency publications, the agency provides an unmatched contemporary resource and collection of texts that portray a rich and complex area of practice.

Together, the texts collated in the Almanac cover a myriad of ideas and areas, some firmly grounded in their sense of the performative and what ‘Live Art’ as a strategy includes, others cross and expand the borders of what it means to be ‘Live’ or even what it means to be ‘Art’. But happily the Almanac has much more to offer than a definition of Live Art. The wider issues at stake in live work are brought to the table for the reader. The aspirations of the artists creating, the producers shaping and the audience or writer reflecting are all somehow squeezed into this petite Almanac, taking the reader on a journey from the darkest moments of an artists’ self doubt to the most life changing fragments of inspirational performance.

In the first text, originally presented as the opening polemic for the SPILL symposium in 2007, Tim Etchells provokes and encourages his readership to ‘step off the stage’, both physically and metaphorically. In its assertions regarding how live art - seen by Etchells as a certain type of theatre involving inspirational artists - implicates the audience to take action, Etchells’ text is almost conclusive. Its instructions are “You. Are. Not. Here. To. Record. The. Coming. Quake. You. Are. Here. To. Make. It. Happen… Step. Off. The. Stage.” With this, the reader is implicated from the offset of the Almanac and our inclusion in its call to arms inspires action and response.

The Almanac includes the theoretical, philosophical and questionable of UK Live Art, warts and all. Big issues are tackled. Arts’ relationship with politics and political leadership is put under the microscope in both Madeleine Buntings text, ‘Artists are now taking the lead politicians have failed to give’ and Stephen Duncombe’s ‘Politics in an Age of Fantasy’. 21st century cultural and Government inclusionist policy terminology such as ‘cultural diversity’ - and the repercussions of these blanket cultural terms - are tackled in Rajni Shah’s ‘Bite-sized Chunks from my Life’. Live Arts’ historical relationship with ‘new media’ and new technologies is also addressed in the ‘Live Art UK: Keynote Presentation’ by John Wyver. All these are insightful texts in our current cultural climate, and timely presentations in our ever new ‘digital era’ with its changing audiences and shifting concerns.

Artist Leslie Hill praises the writing of Guillermo Gόmez-Peña in her review of Ethno Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy, in its ability to not only share well practiced thoughts, techniques and theories but offer inspiration to beleaguered performance artists world wide; “His essay ‘In Defence of Performance’ (2003) should be on the syllabus of every performance studies course and should definitely replace Gideon Bibles in the drawers of every hotel room used by performance artists on tour.” Private moments of grief and hope are shared in obituaries by Brian Catling and Nick Kimberley. The texts somehow distil what an artist truly leaves when they are gone. The birth of projects from nothing more than a flicker in the artists’ imagination is also lived out in Will Pollards’ accounts of the Exchange Places festival in ‘Exchange Places: The Memory of Desire and the Desire of Memory’. Exacting and recounting in almost molecular detail some of the acts, Pollard demonstrates the intense and hefty discourses a performance can create in its moment of existence.

The complex relationship with artist and audience, and the contract that binds it, is revealed in the letter ‘Dear Artist…Love Audience’ from Arnolfini Producer Helen Cole. The experiences of those audiences are relayed in individual reviews by Atack, Clapham and Schmidt. These reviews are all capsules of live work that existed in a specific place and time - from the National Review of Live Art, Toynbee Hall and Toynbee Studios respectively - moments that as readers we can plug back into via their writing. But as much as these texts give, they also take away. They install new doubts and raise questions that can be addressed in future artwork, reading and writing.

The voices in the Almanac are diverse in tone and style but most are written by those who are actively involved in Live Art. Inevitably, the only voice missing is that of the public who know nothing of Live Art, but who may encounter it all the same. This gap could critically confine The Almanac, limit it to self-analysis and make the issues it raises self perpetuated. As such, The Almanacs’ success in highlighting the reach and impact of Live Art outside what can be seen as a Live Art community remains a tantalising question. However, in capturing a small section of this activity between 2006 and 2008, and supporting it’s artists, readers and commentators, The Live Art Almanac shines and is not only a worthy catalogue of the current condition of Live Art, but is a platform from which new ideas and cultural conversations can spring from.

Contributors to The Live Art Almanac are:
Tim Atack, Madeleine Bunting, Barbara Campbell, Simon Casson, Brian Catling, Rachel Lois Clapham, Helen Cole, Stephen Duncombe, Tim Etchells, Ed Casear, David Gale, Lyn Gardner, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Daniel Gosling, Leslie Hill, John Jordan, Nick Kimberley, Adam E Mendelsohn, Alex Needham, Sally O’Reilly, Mary Paterson, Will Pollard, Chris Riding, Nick Ridout, Ian Saville, Theron Schmidt, Rebecca Schneider, Rajni Shah, Kate Tyndall, Mark Wilshire and John Wyver.

The Live Art Almanac
Published June 2008
Edited by Daniel Brine
ISBN 978 0 954604066
£5.00
Available to buy from Unbound, http://www.thisisunbound.co.uk/

Joanna Loveday
Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing on performance and live art. http://www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com/.

Original article
Step off the stage

If you want to reproduce this article please contact editor@culturewars.org.uk and joannaloveday@hotmail.com

Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci

2008-06-24T01:51:00.000-07:00

Site Gallery, Sheffield

3-May-14 June 2008

Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci premier at the Site Gallery Sheffield with a joint exhibition of video works and live actions. Cool spends a durational time in the exhibition space, performing daily an ongoing series of actions. Cool is both mediated on-screen and performs live in the space-time of the work. The relationship between Cool’s on screen actions and those performed live are intrinsically intertwined, yet nevertheless, exist as separate works in their own right.

The actions Cool draws upon are ones she has regularly performed in her live work since her first public performance with Balducci in 2000. She works with sheets of crisp white paper, a table, chair, string, wire and tape. Both live and in the video she performs simple gestures and encounters with these materials. Enveloping her arm in a sheet of paper. Holding a length of tape with sheer intensity and steadiness, away from where it wishes to fall. The elementariness of matter is the theory at work in all of these actions. The live action follows the same structure as the projected performance, with Cool repeatedly moving from one ‘action’ to another. It is hard not to imagine her live performance and that on the screen are interlinked, as they have endless similarities. Yet here the audience does a double-take, as the live work is not filmed and the filmed work action is not projected as part of the live performance. The projection screen shows a collection of previous work; including Untitled (2007) and Untitled (2004) and these formerly performed actions are never performed live. Through this staging, Cool and Balducci become masters of misconception, heightening our awareness of real-time and the reconstruction, or rather pre-construction, of actions as we see them on the familiar surface of a screen.

Moving into the room where Cool performs, her liveness in the space creates a dramatic shift in atmosphere. Sphere, paper boxes and oblong objects are hung from invisible wire in the gallery where Cool resides. She places her hand no more than a centimetre from a delicately suspended object, pausing, yet moving constantly. Her movements appear choreographed in their precision and certainty, yet still show signs of a methodology of improvisation. The visitor punctuates these ongoing actions by breaking into Cools solitary space. Immaculate, her centre of attention on the object is clear. There is no acknowledgement of the audience and the witness feels uneasy and unsure of how to approach both the artist and the objects. Cool moves from one article to the next, maintaining a slow and exceptionally gentle pace. The work unravels in the visitors sudden realisation, that Cool is the constant in this performative equation and the witness is the misfit.

Ferociously trying to read meaning, quicken pace, spot some error or misjudgement, the spectator fidgets. Cool’s tempo never alters, a mistake never surfaces and a basic human interaction with matter is all that is left, but all there was to begin with.Sculptural, this work sites the moving and shaping of matter not only as its stimulus and concept, but as the very performance at stake. The process is the sculpting and the sculpture itself. The ‘matter’ of paper, tape or wire and how it responds to her movements, or fails to respond, has equal accountability in the act as Cool does, as it is the relationship between person and matter that is under investigation here. The notion of an ongoing existence, beyond and above our own personal experience, is nurtured in the knowledge that Cool’s actions continue at the regular times, regardless of any audience or witness being present. Visitors are forced into acknowledging presence and physicality – of their body, the body of Cool and that of the video - in a way that is only possible here as the artists’ grapple with the exquisite live-ness of live performance. The here, now, time-space Cool and Balducci have emphasised, like the plain blank paper Cool moves amongst, has no narrative or pre-written text inscribed onto it to give it definition, purpose or meaning, it just is and it is for us to decipher, for us to write.

Joanna Loveday

Only reproduce this text with Permission from the author.

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing on performance and live art. http://www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com/. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com

New Life Berlin Interview

2008-06-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

INTERVIEW WITH SIXTEN KAI NEILSEN, ARTISTIC CO-DIRECTOR OF WOOLOO PRODUCTIONS
Wednesday 4th June, 4pm, New Life Berlin Shop, Choriner Str 85.

Founded in 2002, the mission of Wooloo.org is to ‘serve as a free and independent space for the presentation, production and discussion of contemporary art in a globalized world.’ Today, more than 8,000 artists from over 100 different countries are using the Wooloo.org website to show their work and ‘New Life Berlin’ festival 1st -15th June 2008, is the first festival programmed by Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard the co-artistic directors of Wooloo Productions. The ‘Call All Artists’ slogan is still splashed on billboards across the city, way in to the festival – because although the call for projects is now been closed, the call for participants is ongoing. Participation is a key aspect in all the programmed projects, asking questions about artistic social responsibility, how online and transnational communities operate and how social intervention and participation work in an artistic context.

Joanna Loveday: How did the idea and the concept of New Life Berlin come about?

Sixten Kai Neilsen: I think it’s a combination of two things. One, that we wanted to experiment with the community that we have been running since 2002 - the Wooloo.org community - and really try to find out what binds the community, what governs it, how strong it is and what it is about. With all these online experiences and online people existing, we wanted to bring everyone together. The second part is the interest we have after living and working in Berlin for two and half years; we wanted to explore the city and investigate the city before our time here is up. We really wanted to engage with the city. I think the festival came about because those two things came together. Our general interest is often movement and immigration; this is a big part of our work. We have dealt before with these areas in our work such as in 2005 we developed the first communication platform for asylum seekers, ‘AsylumHOME’. Here we really wanted to focus on a different kind of immigration – this flux of artists and ‘privileged immigrants’ lets say and how they are fortifying and creating new networks and what that can say about today.

JL: Why is it important to focus on ‘participatory projects’ in 2008 in Berlin?

SKN: We don’t really define our roles as curators, directors or artists; we are not really interested in these definitions, what we are really interested in is people and humans. If lets say a painter works with paint and canvas and an installation artist works with sculptural objects, then we work with frameworks and humans. Been interested in this kind of work automatically creates a participatory element – it is creating frameworks for human participation and in this way we try to create situations that can result in alternative modes of existing. They tell something different about our lives today, about society.

JL: Do you think it would be possible to curate this festival in another city?

SKN: I think today there is quite a unique thing going on in Berlin. It’s not a new thing that artists are relocating here - this has been happening for ten or fifteen years. But the amount of artists that are here now is quite incredible. There are so many of these ‘new Berliners’. They are fortifying new networks, they are talking to each other. In a way this festival is also saying something about a different kind of citizenship, a different kind of national identity, because there are so many people here from so many different countries talking to each other. In this way we are talking about a ‘transnational community’ - this is an investigation of this transnational community in Berlin. I don’t think there are really a lot of other places on earth right now that has this significant degree of foreign artists’ networks. New York, Paris and London also have networks – but they are established and I think for this kind of work there are not really any other places that are quite like this. You could do the festival elsewhere, but maybe with a different angle.

JL: How does your own artistic practice interlink with or differ from the aims and objectives of Wooloo productions?

SKN: We have to go back to national identity and the nation state versus this global network of artists. We have been quite interested in the nation state and the [dissolution] of the nation state and we have done a lot of investigation in this area. New Life Berlin is totally in line with what we have been researching before and experimenting with in our previous practice. It fits well into our overall interests and approach.

JL: Like your previous projects, the festival has a level of risk and can be seen as ‘controversial’ to some. Is that important to you as an artist/curator?

SKN: There are a lot of projects in this festival. And when you are dealing with 20 or so projects – all of which are experiments that are going on during the two weeks - that creates risky experimental work. But this is a situation that happens under a global body that exercises them. There is risk built in that they could fail, or there could be no participation or extreme differences of opinion within projects. But it is the nature of what we are doing and so we can’t really say anything yet of the result, the individual projects have to now show themselves for their individual angles and together hopefully form the kind of social sculpture we were envisaging when we put them together. We have done a lot of work trying to interlink them and put these projects together. One of the big aims of the festival was to create an intimate interlinked artist structure. For example, the artists are living in the same buildings, they interlink with each other, they have the same workspace and workshop space and so forth. In this way the artists and projects are really coming in to contact with each other. Also the Open Dialogues project means that we are incorporating the writers inside the projects, which also creates a tension and ‘danger’. We want to blur the boundaries of these normal ‘groups’ of professionals and individuals who traditionally make up a festival and biennial. We are really trying to work on an intimate level as well within this wider framework.

JL: In the programme introduction Wooloo states: “In contrast to traditional art festivals and biennials, our aim is not to represent a set of cultural conclusions, but to create a model for a fluid cultural landscape.” How do you think this fluid cultural landscape will continue or manifest itself after the festival?

SKN: We want to continue creating frameworks after this and continue our work in this area. I am very interested in the idea of ‘nursing’ and helping out with individual executions and projects. It is hard for me to look beyond the festival right now as I don’t know the outcome of the festival. But hopefully the festival will say something both on a sociological level but also about how a certain group of people are living today. Hopefully we can learn things about new immigration and tell the different stories about immigration. The kind of immigration talked about in the country I come from, Denmark, is very one sided. We are always trying to tell different stories. How it will continue after the festival? I really don’t know.

JL: Do you have any aspirations for the festival to have an impact on how we see art and how festivals can take place? Do you have a wider aspiration to change how people think about the art world and festivals?

SKN: This is not an anti-festival or anti-biennial, but we are trying to take a different track here. Using this new style of curation through a fixed framework, taking its outset from an online community, we don’t have all the usual ‘stars’ that most biennials have. So in this way we set up a lot of rules or dogma that doesn’t exist in other biennials from our starting point. I am a little bit afraid of taking a standing point against others, I am more focused on our own practice and developing that to the best we can.

JL: Regarding the funding of New Life Berlin, did you have to secure alternative funding as well as using the ongoing Wooloo Project Fund?

SKN: We had to find public funding as well sponsorship funding from companies. We are not afraid of touching business at all. We have a cross-disciplinary attitude to partnerships. We have a very critical attitude to certain companies, for example those in the tobacco, weapons and alcohol industry. But then again, what is clean money? For us it is very interesting how you go about incorporating a corporate interest in a festival like this. It’s definitely an area that we interested in exploring and experimenting with. In this case we have Deutsche Bahn and the Danish equivalent, Stadtbahn who produced half the money we generated. They just opened a connection from Copenhagen to Berlin, so it was quite fitting, as it was concerning a transportation of people over this border. I think this festival is a very good example of a good partnership with a corporate partner.

JL: Was there any funding from arts funding bodies?

SKN: Yes, half came from private companies and the other half came from public funding. And then, the next half came from our own pockets. In comparison to other cities, how straightforward was it to secure the funding in Berlin? The situation is a bit different here as we have been running the space in Berlin for two and a half years and this is a conclusion to our time here. We are now using up a lot of the contacts and networks that have been created. Normally we look at taking over a space for a few months and then we go there. It has been fascinating to generate the community here first and then do the festival.

JL: If this is a conclusion to your time here in Berlin, then what’s next for you and Wooloo?

SKN: We have three or four projects already lined up that we have been invited to. One of those is quite intimate, it will only be me and Martin, although we will be using some of the online community, it will definitely be a more intimate body of work. We like to go from big productions and organisations to smaller projects and smaller intimate situations, with ourselves as performers. And then we will go back and perhaps become even bigger in the producer role. So we will now shift mode for the next four months, or even[for the] rest of the year. We will also be working on a whole new version of the website and a similar festival in Copenhagen in 2009, called 'New Life Copenhagen 2099'. So we want to go to the future. It will correspond with the UN Copenhagen conference for climate change in late 2009. We want to become an alternative dynamic to the more formal political meetings that will be taking place.

Joanna Loveday

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing for performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com

Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com

New Life Berlin

2008-06-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

Flash Job Campaign
Public Workshop, 1st June 2008, 5-7pm, Karl-Marx Str 168, Berlin.

Flash Job Campaign is the third chapter of a project collaboration started by Art Source Lab and Teenkom which began in Berlin in 2002, born out of joint focus on interdisciplinary activities. At the opening public workshop, it is clear Flash Job Campaign not only dips its toe in to the three central concerns of the New Life Berlin festival, but jumps right in at the deep end. The festival’s three main themes are that of ‘Transnational Communities’, ‘Artistic Social Responsibility’ and ‘Participation and Intervention’. So as you can imagine – the project find itself in some very deep and murky water from the off.

The participatory project ‘Flash Job Campaign’ involves eleven ‘catalysts’ who go out solo in to different sections of Neukölln, Berlin and seek employers who have a one time ‘flash-job’ for a teenager. The two key challenges involve firstly, working in this particular area of Berlin which is known as a ‘no-go’ area, heavily populated by a mixture of immigrants and also high in crime. Secondly the catalysts must bravely approach the teenagers alone, with the added difficulty of a language barrier, as most catalysts speak little or no German. The flash-job lasts a maximum of three hours for a small negotiated wage and must be achievable with little or no training – requiring trust from both parties. The aim is that the teenager gains independence and an insight in to the reality of work and the employer has his work completed immediately with no further compulsory commitment.

The project appears to provide a win-win situation for employer/employee, building new relationships in the area in a ‘flash’. Yet the sustainability of a safe and healthy community based on these one time interventions is a highly dubious prospect. Artist Per Traasdahl, founder of Art Source Lab, sees an ‘inefficiency’ in public school systems in how they introduce teenagers to the reality of work, opting for the ‘artificial’ work placement method. Flash Job Campaign certainly is the opposite ‘hands-on’ approach, thrusting its catalysts in to a weak community and working at a grass routes level to tackle social issues head on. But to what extent is this social intervention and unravelling of popular belief the role of the artist? Whether the ‘flash job’ is just a ‘flash in the pan’ is still to be seen. The project began officially Monday 2nd June 2008, with eleven catalysts and one mission.

Joanna Loveday

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing for performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com

To see the New Life Berlin Open Dialogues Blogspot visit: www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/

Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com

New Life Berlin

2008-06-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Marisa Olson, Assisted Living
Karl –Liebknecht-Str, Berlin, 6pm, 3rd June 2008
New Life Berlin Festival, Wooloo Productions

The audience are invited to travel 30 years into the near future. On arrival, they become the live studio audience for a daily taping of Marisa Olson’s futuristic parody of Martha Stewarts American TV hit show. Promised an insight in to the lives and practicalities of ‘coping with the health and environmental challenges of living a life prolonged by technology’ – the audience anticipate their own programmed participation as well as that of the crew. Welcomed into the derelict Berlin shop front by crew in neon t-shirts, we are script read an invitation to take our positions in the ‘future’, by ‘whooping’ through paper chain curtains before the camera roles. I take a front row seat expecting some hefty ‘action’. Little comes. The day time TV formula is rolled out, with humorous futuristic anecdotes in a slick American accent by Marisa, and then cut; my experience in this ‘time machine’ is over.
After a frantic and eye opening ‘googling’ of Martha Stewart, I finally look in to the crystal ball of modern online ‘reality’ and find the bizarre arts, crafts and recipe tropes of US day time TV, and all the parody comes flooding at me like a perfumed paper bouquet with ‘Martha Stewart’ cookie sprinklings on top. For a US audience maybe the gags would have gone down easier I wonder, only having managed a wry smile in the actual performance.

Billed as a look in to the near future, the audience’s imagination more so than the artist’s creativity is most heavily called upon here in this shell like shop front with chairs, two staging lights and a paper cut out backdrop of a TV set. The framework of taping this ‘TV Phenomenon’ in front of a varying live studio audience daily throughout the festival, has the potential to raise diverse and fascinating topics. A collective documentation and presentation of just what our fears, hopes and concerns are for the future perhaps. Contextualised in the New Life Berlin festival, ‘Assisted Living’ strongly fulfils the festival theme of New Modes of Moving and Existing, yet the second show of 14 tapings seemed more reflective of our own personal lack of capacity to keep up with the world in the present day, never mind the future. Seventies outfits and modern recipes we can no longer make highlighted our inefficiencies as humans in even realistically forecasting our near future and paper chains with plastic food left me more with a war time ‘make do and mend’ ethos, than one of a futuristic 2038.

Joanna Loveday

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing for performance and live art. http://www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com/. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com

To see the New Life Berlin Open Dialogues Blogspot visit: www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/

Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com

Time and Tidal Flow - Jo Ashbridge 'Full Time Indecisive'

2008-05-14T09:42:00.000-07:00

Saturday 26th April, 2pm (15 minute performance) 3pm (15 minute performance)

As the audience walked in to the performance space, Jo was already in her opening pose - stood on a chair on the small stage, cradling a dozen eggs in her skirt. One by one she picked them out and dropped them from the height of her chair, letting them smash into a hanging basket on the floor. Smooth easy listening accompanied, as Jo played out a sequence of gesture-based movement (dance) vignettes, her serene facial expression fixed in a half smile throughout.

In Full Time Indecisive, Jo could neither be pigeon-holed as a dancer, an actress or even a story teller, as she flitted through all of these personas with ease. Working with her props of eggs, two chairs and armfuls of baskets, she moved about the space - twirling, posing, idling and acting out minute narratives and moments of seemingly spontaneous movement. The movement was at times lusciously romantic, stylized and rehearsed yet simultaneously rushed, slapstick and statuesque. Jo began what seemed to be a complete choreographed phrase of work, to stop abruptly after just a few moments. She dropped her props, moved to a new position on stage and started a completely different act in a new style. For example from nervously throwing and catching eggs, higher and higher, on breaking one her focus immediately switched to balancing a chair on its side using only her foot. This abrupt ending and change in direction re-occurred throughout the performance, demonstrating Jo’s ‘indecision’ in just quite what and how to perform.

The soundtrack was played alternatively on a mobile phone in one of the egg baskets, an ‘i-dock’ and a turntable. It included two key tracks: I Only Have Eyes for You written by Al Dublin & Harry Warren, sung by Art Garfunkel and Ella Fitzgerald, and Waters of March written by Antonio Carlos Jobim and sung by Art Garfunkel. The music evoked both a sense of nostalgia and humour that complemented Jo’s movements, as it cheerily clunked along in the background regardless of how little or small her gestures were. The over-dramatic soundtrack, slightly out of key with the events happening on stage, gave a surreal overtone to the whole performance, almost evoking a trance like state in the audience.

The surreal mood and musical theatre style glimmered through the gaps in the fragments and was at the very core of what made Full Time Indecisive work. Bouncing her ideas around, with a nod to cabaret and the west end magical ingredients of what it is to be true 'performer', Jo had a grin about her that gave the whole show a bit of the old 'razzmatazz' . Pulling away the layers of narrative, the set-design, lighting, theme and even focus of a performance, it is amazing what a cheeky smile and some raw honesty can achieve.

The songs were repeated throughout and eventually merged and overlapped at the climax. Jo circled the audience once and finished the piece with this pinnacle moment of ‘indecision’ - over which song to chose and just how to exit. All of this indecision added up to a predictably fragmented performance, yet with clear starts and endings to each vignette. Trying to connect each of the segments truly would be a ridiculous task, and probably pointless, as Jo points out in the programme, the performance shows the theme of indecision in a ‘loose and conceptual way’. What was particularly interesting in Jo’s acting out of her own indecision in this way, was that through the numerous artistic ideas she shared with her audience, the pressure she put on herself to give a clear, entertaining and succinct performance, was itself on display. Her reluctance to disregard any one idea, yet simultaneously her dissatisfaction in presenting any singular idea became a frustration yet a fascination for both performer and audience.

In a cultural climate where droves of regular theatre attendees hand over their ready cash to see well polished shows, Hull Time Based Arts created a niche opportunity in programming a festival where ‘change’ was actually the core theme under examination. Jo made the most of this opportunity, bravely performing nothing but her own indecision. Despite the lack of narrative or interconnecting elements that could be read as whole, with a clear artistic statement, her performance remained playful and unapologetic in its simple staging and 'indecisive' content. The use of music and the innocence of the indecisive acts lent themselves to comedy as opposed to torturous or mundane acts of frustrating pointlessness. These acts came from somewhere genuine and this authenticity carried the piece, keeping it light and simple. In this sense, Jo can be proud of the statement that Full Time Indecisive makes – which is that our own individual complexities and everyday interactions in life work and play, are at the very core of what fascinates and captivates us. She tackled her own indecision through performing not one, but many of her own artistic thoughts, and through this sincerity, gave the audience live moments of comedy, boredom, beauty and bizarre brilliance.

When approached with an open mind, Full Time Indecisive provided a heavenly spot of relief from our heavily saturated, mediatized and hectic urban lifestyles. It was playful and honest, letting us step outside ourselves for a moment to take a look at our own inflamed ambitions and dissatisfactions in life, desires to be ‘perfect’ and accept out shortcomings. The performance dealt with an aspect of our very human condition and taught us once more how to laugh at ourselves. The work was raw in its very ‘indecisiveness’ with no element over rehearsed or re-worked to the point of no return. The performance was well suited to the Hull Time Based Arts Time & Tidal Flow festival that had change, experimentation and development at its core. The performance was the epitome of the philosophy ‘learning through play’ and its experimentation and unwillingness to be ‘fixed’ made for a changeable and transient fifteen minutes, that was a delight in and amongst the three day festival.

This performance took place as part of Time & Tidal Flow a free festival of new work and Live Art from Hull Time Based Arts and New Work Yorkshire.

Joanna Loveday

Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, specialising in writing for performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com

© Joanna Loveday 2008 – seek permission before reproducing this text.

Open Dialogues:New Life Berlin

2008-05-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

Joanna will be attending the New Life Berlin Festival, participating in the Open Dialogues programme of writing. Attending events from the festival programme of New Life Berlin and the 5th Berlin Bienniale on the dates of 31st May - 5th June. Writing (both critical and other), blog posts and links to the New Life Berlin writing collective to follow shortly...

In collaboration with the participating writers, OPEN DIALOGUES: NEW LIFE BERLIN will investigate the implications and role of critical writing as discourse and practice. We will explore critical writing in relation to communities of contemporary art, and develop organic responses to the Festival as it unfolds.

http://www.wooloo.org/opendialogues/

Open Dialogues is a UK-based critical writing initiative that supports, fosters and promotes international networks for critical debate around contemporary art.

NEW LIFE BERLIN is a contemporary art festival dedicated to new modes of moving and existing. NEW LIFE BERLIN is curated from the participatory art community WOOLOO.ORG, and will take place in Berlin between 1st and 15th June 2008. In addition to the published program, the curators invite members of the online community to participate throughout the festival itself.

Notes on Strong Hours Placed

2008-04-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

Some notes on the perforamance 'Strong Hours Placed' Elanor Stannage and Nathan Walker
27 October 2007, LUX festival York.

Repitition. Silence. Muffled worlds.

What makes the hours strong?

Waiting to die? Learning how to die? Oppressive matter is physicalised. Repeated. It is heavy. It is hard to say whether weight truly means something is 'strong'.

The bags of sand are so heavy we can see his muscles quench, stretch and strain under the weight. But he is alive. He can beat the sack of sand to the point of exhaustion. Falling in to a pace determined by the load.
To sprinkle sand so purposefully, as if it were a shamanic ritual, practised and performed for centuries.

Her strength is less obvious. Her rituals are more fragile. The sand runs between her fingers. Her own legs fail to support her. Yet her words resonate - and the flowers are clearly something precious to her.

Whereas to him they are a tool, to her they are life.

The performance through its duration, coerces the audience to live through a transition of states; fear, boredom, deep serenity, frustration, suprise, tracking. It is too easy to fall in to the trap of applying narrative to what we see. The minute we begin adding narrative to 'strong hours placed' however some other 'moment' breaks it - or begins to back track. You have to give in. You have to be in the moment, the minute, the hour.

These artists make their audience work. Don't expect to pop in for five minutes, see something to smile about and pop out again. You have to be in it for the long haul. Moments of complete peace, or complete acceptance happen only in an instance - born out of a journey.

My thoughts mainly turn to death. It is spoken of directly, but the room seems steeped in the ideas of death. Both positive and negative.

For more information on Strong Hours Placed see: http://www.stronghoursplaced.co.uk/

News: Time & Tidal Flow E- Forum and Live Connections 25/26/27 April

2008-04-11T08:58:00.000-07:00

Hull Time Based Arts in collaboration with New Work Yorkshire present:
Time & Tidal Flow Festival of Live Art,25-27 April 08, Hull.

I am currently participating in the Live Connections mentoring scheme in the capacity of writer/curator/producer for Live Art and performance. My mentors are Sarah Spanton, New Work Yorkshire Development Direcor and Rachel Lois Clapham, Writing From Live Art 2006-2008 and Director of Open Dialogues.

I am also managing the online discussion forum for this event. Click Here to go to the HTBA Forum Blog.

For more details on the Live Connections scheme and the Time and Tidal Flow programme see http://www.hulltimebasedart.co.uk/ & New Work Yorkshire www.newworknetwork.org.uk/newworkyorkshire

Stacy Makishi - Bull: The True story

2008-04-11T03:51:00.000-07:00

Bull: The True Story
Wednesday 6 February, Leeds Met University Studio Theatre

Stacey Makishi is giddy with herself. Brimming. Bubbling over in fact with stories and tit-tattle tales. Sexual, shocking, and most of all a mystery.

Stacy enters the space bound by flesh coloured tights at her wrists and ankles and gagged by a pair at her mouth. She pushes a small white suitcase, full of articles and props, put to use one by one in the narration of her stories. Some she claims are part of her own story, others are anecdotes - stories from and surrounding the film -Fargo (by the legendary Coen Brothers) -that acted as the sole catalyst for this performance.

Stacy is compelling to watch. The audiences' gaze lies easily on her, lit by a handful of pools of light. Her narrative slips and slides and flips at quick speed. One moment she commands raptuous laughter, the next we find ourselves with Stacy in a very dark closet with shouts of "oooohhh, ahhhhhhh.... Got it? Goooooood". This sinister underbelly of the performace unnerves - punctuating the performance throughout.

The films location resonants strongly with Hawaii-born Stacy as "somewhere far away from home". And the proposition of kid-knapping, together become two themes that not only capture Stacy's imagination, but somehow cross over in to her own psyche and imaginery/real life.

She appears simultaneously before the audience as both kidnapped and kidnapper, criminal and victim. Innocent yet unabashedly sinful.

This in itself is quite a feat. The contradicting and constantly self-interupting collection of Stacy's thoughts are at times gripping. Her lack of lienear narrative could become frustrating, but her witty one-liners - weaving in stage directions and well composed sound cues - lifts the audience from thinking too consciously about the whole affair.

For me the biggest frustration at the end of Bull: The True Story, is not only not knowing the 'whole truth' - but not knowing whether anything she relayed to the audience was true at all.

The performance was intruiging and at times delightful. Stacey's fascinations however are just that - and a little out of my reach after catching her only this once. There is a depth and an intellect to the themes she teases out and striking visual moments that become immediately imbedded in my memory of it. These sporadic moments occur when Makishi truly pushes her performance to new levels, finding curious and fascinating things to do with only a pair of tights.

Bull: The True Story leaves it's audience with a lot of leg-work and research to do post performance and I worry most of us (as this was Stacy's obsession and not our own) will somehow never get to it in order to resolve the mysteries and seperate the truth from the lies. But if 'what defines us is what's missing' - then this missing information should only add to who we are...

Joanna Loveday, writing on Bull: The True Story

Claire Blundell Jones "Kissing" Review

2008-04-06T03:48:00.000-07:00

Claire Blundell Jones "Kissing" –
Raw Incidental Performance for Perambulator November 07, Leeds Met University

The moment 'kissing' began, an electricity and intensity filled the space. People stopped, frozen still in their tracks. Finding a place, scattering, hurrying past.

The six couples huddled in a random collective on the long locker-filled corridor, where they began to kiss. They were cheeky and every bit genuine, stood kissing, almost without breath. The passion of the kissing was the first thing to hit me. Then I noticed their hands. The arms wrapped around, fingers interlocked, eyes gazing deep in to each others. Bags, coats, clutter. Hair falling in eyes and a sweet suckling noise. Six couples kissing. A new experience for probably everyone present in the space. Were they performers, were they couples? Our first knee-jerk reaction in any performance situation is to identify who is artist/performer/actor and who is spectator/audience/witness. Yet these boundaries were blurred from the offset of the performance, in what was the first of 3 incidental happenings in Kissing by Claire Blundell Jones.

Members of the public and attendee's of Perambulator hesitated. Plucking up the courage, a few dared to walk past. A few stood almost rooted to the spot at each end of the 'Long Corridor'. Some passed again and again, each time getting a closer look at the intimate pairs and their kissing lips.

Squeezing past, unable to avoid just how close this brought me to these mouth-interlocked couples, reminded me of the very early Abramovic and Ulay performance Imponderabilia, performed in 1977¹. 'Kissing' similarly is a performance focused heavily on the reaction of those who encounter the couples. Experimenting in to human conduct and reactions helps us to question that which is socially ‘acceptable’ and that which is not. To duplicate the act of kissing helps the audiences scrutinize this human activity to the point where we question - why do we kiss at all? A sign of love, affection, or a pleasure which can take our encounter into that of a sexual nature?

The other two incidental happenings of kissing, happened in a lift and outside a bar area. With six couples squeezed inside a relatively small lift, there was little room for audience to ride alongside with them, but this didn't seem to phase too many of the eager spectators! The noise inside and the extreme close proximity was quite sensational when you did brave the squeeze and shuffle in alongside them. Audience huddled outside, on various floors, catching glimpses as the doors opened and closed taking the performance up and down the lift shaft. The giggling and sometimes garish comments made inside the lift did little to distract the couples. By the third happening however it seemed as if too little time had passed and the couples became accepted, almost as part of the fabric of the platform ‘Perambulator’. Audience somehow caught wind that only one of the couples were not actually a ‘couple’ and tried to unabashedly examine the performance with some superior knowledge in trying to guess who were the ‘actors’.

Unfortunately this did take something away from the final performance of ‘kissing’, which for me seemed a piece intent on mixing up the audiences experience and surprising them, rather than letting them slip in to the roll as commentator. The piece pushed to examine and cross the boundaries of what is normal life and what is art, what is acceptable in both art and audience behaviour. Why are we 'allowed' to stop and stare at these couples in an arts context, when day to day we would never stare so blatantly at anyone in this intimate act, is a fascinating social question and comment the performance/act of 'kissing' makes quite beautifully and quietly.

Claire Blundell Jones' raw incidental performance definitely captured both myself and the others in the space. The sincerity of the idea and how it was brought to fruition meant that the kissing lost nothing of its beauty, yet was shocking, fascinating and captivating.

¹Marina Abramovic and Ulay, The Galleria Communale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy

Hannah Bolland - "Waiting, Wandering, Wondering" Review

2008-04-06T03:22:00.000-07:00

Hannah Bolland – “Waiting, Wandering, Wondering”
Raw Performance for Perambulator November 07, Leeds Met University

Hannah Bolland in “Waiting, Wandering, Wondering”, floats, shuffles, hesitates, plays and seems lost in an infinite bubble. Her character is so well isolated, she appears encapsulated - bubble wrapped. She and her world are fragile. Just one pin prick could shatter the entire imaginary world she has created, leaving it broken in pieces on the floor like one of the abandoned toys she cradles. It is as though everything of the adult world, big, noisy and scary, is paused in time. There is little space for adults in this world, and none for those who have lost touch with their own imagination. Barbie’s existence appears on first inspection to revolve around a collection of toys and her box (or suitcase¹) of fun. The character 'Barbie' however, to me, was not a Barbie at all. A far cry from the glam size-supermodel in pink, with a permanently fixed painted smile and bleached hair. This character was a child. Perhaps a child who once uttered, "When I grow up I want to be...Barbie". But of course, like most little girls, she had grown into a real woman; astonishingly leaving her somewhat at the other end of the spectrum to everything Barbie is and represents.

This performance was one in a progressive series by the artist and it did seem that Hannah had already moved on from these musings in to 'child play' and that there was much more to be explored. Stood watching Hannah move, sit and dawdle, I wanted her to push the boundaries further. My thoughts drifted into the ideas of the children we once were and the adults we become. How is the child we once were still present in our everyday life? These questions had somehow been posed by the performer, yet the realities and difficulties in answering them needed pushing and drawing out further. For me there seemed a great void in the performance of the world of 'adulthood'. The woman. Who is she? This lady, playing with these toys, living the world of child and innocence. What is beneath? The thought of sex and how such a topic would play in the world Hannah had created was one I had a strong desire to see played out. I was desperate for an image of sexual nature to interrupt and juxtapose my seemingly innocent watching of a seemingly innocent little girl. For a hint of the woman playing out this role to shock me, give me an unmistakable sign that she was in fact, a woman. The desire to smash the two worlds of 'adult' and 'child' together in a dramatic car crash of a collision was a strong one I anchored for. Overall, there was much to be said for the understated, drifting of a child like character in the space. In order to create a truly lasting and unforgettable impression on the mind however, I think the audience could have taken a much bigger punch of performativity, shock and confusion. Our job as spectator is often to piece together the puzzle of clues the artist offers us. And I look forward to a few more juicy and shocking pieces to the jigsaw that was "Waiting, Wandering, Wondering" as it progresses as a piece of work from this 'Raw' performance at the Leeds Met University.

¹The suitcase and the clock ticking faintly in the background are the only signs of the 'adult' world in this performance. Yet somehow both seem out of place and in particular the clock. A girl with a suitcase full of dressing up clothes and old toys is an image our minds have no problem in accepting. Yet time is something children are so unaware of. There seems to be an alteria motive to the clocks presence. It imposes itself on the space.