Live: Art and Performance

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker’s career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, ‘How to Live’ and ‘Diary Drawings’ – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners.

A Study Room Guide by writer, filmmaker, artist, performer and activist Dolly Sen looking at madness and mental health

Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 31 Issue Number 4 November 2021

This book explores the practical, philosophical and aesthetic implications of performers working in pairs. It focuses on a ten-year period in the work of Karen Christopher, alongside wider reflections on the duet as a concept in artistic and social life. The book presents an investigation of the entanglement of form and practice seen through the lens of the smallest multiple unit of collaboration: the pair.

Ron Athey is one of the most important, prolific and influential performance artists of the past four decades. Queer Communion, an exploration of Athey’s career, refuses the linear narratives of art discourse and instead pays homage to the intensities of each mode of Athey’s performative practice and each community he engages.

Final Transmission is a book of intergenerational dialogue between artists, scholars and activists about what it means to transfer the skills, ideas and mysteries of performance through pandemic and crises.

The book is the final edition of NS, Brian Getnick and Tanya Rubbak’s 6 volume archive of performance art and community in Los Angeles.

‘The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which my ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into an intensive writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.’ Toine Horvers

Paper leaves and other constructions
a reading companion to Always Already
compiled and edited by Karen Christopher & Tara Fatehi Irani

Always Already is an 8-hour performance installation by Karen Christopher & Tara Fatehi Irani, which uses materials, text, sound and movement to explore the weaving together of plant, human and machine, including human/plant and human/machine hybrids.

Paper leaves and other constructions is a 32-page booklet, introducing the themes and content of the project, and responding to many of the questions that arose in the creative process. Drawing parallels between a path through life and one through the making of a particular work of performance, the booklet answers the question “how did you do that?”

The booklet includes contributions from Karen, Tara, Payman Kassaei (Professor of Mathematics, Kings College), Felipe Ribeiro (performance artist and researcher), Omikemi (poet), Eirini Kartsaki (performance writer and teacher), and an interview with Henry Dagg (sound sculptor and builder of experimental musical instruments).

Gómez-Peña Unplugged is an anthology of recent and rewritten classic writings from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a figure who stands alone as unique and ground-breaking in the history of performance art and as the artistic director of transdisciplinary performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society marks a transformation from its sister book, Exercises for Rebel Artists, into a pedagogical matrix suited for use as a performance handbook and conceptual tool for artists, activists, theorists, pedagogues, and trans-disciplinary border crossers of all stripes.

An anthology of critical essays that draw on a decade of the authors thinking, writing about and working within contemporary performance as critics, producers, dramaturgs, makers, archivists and more.