Video documentation of contributions to the Performing Idea Symposium, investigating the shifting relations between performance practice and discourse, event and writing; Toynbee Studios, 5-9/10/2010.

Includes nine files, containing videos of contributions on In Silence, Performative Writing, Reciprocal Aesthetics and Living Archives.

Performance Matters: Performing Idea Dialogue ProjectIn Silence – a conversation with Graeme MillerTim Etchells and Graeme MillerEtchells’ research project In Silence convenes a series of encounters with experts and professionals whose daily work and life practice leads them to an interest and investment in silence. Silence – death to the comedian, transcendence to the priest, a right in the eyes of the law – is after all not the negative space of speech but rather a complex piece of social communication, which functions in contexts as a statement, as transitional state (instrumental route to something) and indeed as a goal or objective all of its own. In a linked set of videotaped interviews Etchells will explore the diversity and complexity of silence as it is constructed and read, investigating both its utility and its blankness, as it is deployed and broken in different situations. Tim Etchells has begun his weblog for In Silence.

PromisesJoe Kelleher, Giulia Palladini, Silvia Bottiroli9th October 2010, 3.30pm Toynbee StudiosThe dialogue has already begun. It begins with the appearance of the work. A 39 year-old theatre festival, for example, in a town without a theatre; a festival that breaks with four decades of tradition in order to re-examine and renew that tradition; that addresses the urban texture not as a void that needs filling but a space of generation; that imagines a spectator in motion, whose trajectory is governed, as curator Chiara Guidi writes, by a sensation of lost powers, and by tiredness perhaps, but who may be capable of conjuring from this trajectory ‘a place filled with promises.’ Or else the emergence of a new practice, work still in its nascence, work being done with the young, for example a company dedicated to the non-spectacular rigours of collective dance, and to mining the minimum pause, tracing the presence of a rhythm, as director Claudia Castellucci puts it, between one beat and another. But also then the channels, the forums, the platforms of exchange through which events and practices such as these and many others are debated over and contested and sustained, by a self-reflexive critical writing, and also by a commitment, as the editors of the journal Art’O: culture and politics of the scenic arts put it, to the idea of a future of performance even in those spaces most emptied out by current ideology.Joe Kelleher’s dialogue for Performing Idea is being pursued through an engagement with events, practices, and platforms such as these, and with the people doing this work, artists, curators, arts administrators, writers and other spectators, who have taken into their care and are mapping out, sustaining, and re-inventing the promises of performance in the Italy of the early twenty-first century.