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Deception, Performance Magic, Hoaxes, Pranks and Tricks (2019)

A Study Room Guide by Tom Cassani

This Study Room Guide draws together resources that inform the sometimes disparate and eclectic field of deception and performance. Tom Cassani collated these resources in response to his research and reflections on the themes of Deception, Performance Magic, Hoaxes, Pranks and Tricks. The Guide also contains an accompanying essay which aims to expand the discourse around deception and magic in performance with reference to a curated selection of significant works and artists presenting work that explores these themes.

Read Tom Cassani's Study Room Guide

Banner image credit:

Image by Manuel Vason and Tom Cassani.

Part of Study Room Guides

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A Small MAP PIECE of Performance Art in China (2008)

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A Swiss Study Room Guide (2021)

A Study Room Guide on Swiss Live Art authored by Andrea Saemann and Madeleine Amsler

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Are we there yet? (2015)

This Guide features a conversation between Lois Weaver and Lois Keidan about this project and their own personal histories of feminism and performance.

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Bodily Functions In Performance (2013)

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Brutal Silences (2011)

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Disability and New Artistic Models (2010)

The Guide reflects the ways in which the practices of live artists have engaged with, represented, and problematised issues of disability.

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Dreams for an Institution (2013)

This Guide looks at artists’ projects that engage with institutions, and considers how performance practice has engaged and challenged institutions.

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EcoFutures (2020)

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Food & Performance (2016)

The Guide has a specific focus on food, eating, and dining as they have been explored in artist performance and Live Art.

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Glimpses of Before (2016)

This Guide includes information about artists who were making performance in the 1970s. It features texts by Helena Goldwater and Dominic Johnson.

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Hear me Roar! (2016)

In March 2016 the Hear Me Roar! Festival invited LADA to curate a small selection of items for a Pop-up Study Room during the Festival.

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In search of documentology. Walking (half) the study room (2008)

Extensive and comprehensive guide on documentation, live performance and its traces and ghosts,inspired by the documents of the Study Room itself.

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In the Footnotes of Library Angels: A Bi(bli)ography of Insurrectionary Imagination (2006)

This Guide addresses performance and activism, and the strategies that artists have engaged with to address radical cultural, social and political agendas.

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Know-how (2017)

Lois Weaver’s Study Room Guide, Know-how, explores the possibilities of Live Art practices and methodologies in working with older people.

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LADA Anthologies (2014)

Themed collections of performance documentation and works for camera that LADA has been invited to curate for public programmes.

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Let’s Get Classy (2018)

This Guide was written by the artist Kelly Green as part of a LADA research residency exploring Live Art practices and methodologies when working with those who are excluded through economic and social barriers, and particularly reasons of class.

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Live Art and Animals (2020)

This Study Room Guide on Live Art and animals is based on the artists’ films, books and contextualising materials LADA developed for Animals of Manchester (including HUMANZ) and documentation of that project.

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Live Art and Kids (2017)

A Study Room Guide by the artist and researcher Sibylle Peters looking at key issues and works in relation to Live Art by, for, and with, children.

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Live Art and Motherhood (2016)

This Guide features fourteen individual artists and two artist collectives working in the mediums of Live Art around the topic of the maternal.

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Making it Your Own? – Social Engagement and Participation (2009)

This Guide directs you to key artworks and texts in the Study Room (and beyond) in which the artist’s intention is to engage the audience in the work.

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Making Routes (2012)

This Guide is interested in roots as well as routes; acknowledging the geographical, cultural and political context from which ideas and practices develop.

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Managing the Radical (2020)

Managing the Radical is a project considering the idea of what it means to manage the radical (or radicalise the management) and aims to rethink, reposition, and reimagine how art that operates and thinks ‘differently’ is created, produced, peopled, framed, funded, represented and contextualised.

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On Falling (2013)

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On Neurodiversity  (2019)

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One to One Performance (2009)

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Performance, Politics, Ethics & Human Rights (2006)

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Performing Borders (2016)

This Guide explores the notion of border in relation to Live Art and the works of experimental artists addressing issues around physical borders.

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Remoteness (2015)

In this Guide Tracey considers wider issues of remoteness and art through a range of artists’ practice with “the odd deviation into literature and theory”.

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Sissy (2018)

This Guide was written by the artist Nando Messias, outlining theoretical and practical research into effeminacy, queer visibility and social violence.

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Take the money and run? (2012)

In this Guide, arts, social justice and environmental group Platform has selected key texts that can be useful in helping to position oneself ethically.

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Tantalising Glimpses (2020)

A Study Room Guide on Fat in Live Art by Charlotte Cooper.

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The Body in Performance (2005)

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The Displaced and Privilege (2017)

This Guide was researched and written by the artist and researcher Elena Marchevska as part of a LADA research residency for exploring Live Art practices and methodologies in working with the displaced.

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The More You Ignore Me The Closer You Get: Notes on socially engaged practice (2008)

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Uninstalling Normality (2024)

A Study Room Guide on Madness, Mad Pride & Questioning Normality authored by Dolly Sen

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WALKING WOMEN (2017)

This Guide is a record of WALKING WOMEN, a series of events held in London and Edinburgh in July and August 2016 celebrating the work of women using walking in their practice.

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You may perform a spell against the madness (2006)

Works that attempt to what possibly lies ahead, be that a city, a forest, a face, a cultural condition, a time, a language, a room or a sky.

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