This Is Performance Art: Performed Sculpture and Dance8th April 2010 – 06 June 2010Camden Arts Centre, co-commissioned by the Yorkshire Sculpture ParkAlso see D1485 and P1517Mel Brimfield’s residency, This is Performance Art, will be a historical reappraisal of performance art of the 20th Century. Through a series of discussions, documentary research, re-enactments and live performance she will undertake an examination of what can be said to constitute the ontology of ‘live art’ within current discourse. This research will form the basis for a documentary film, the first in a series, charting the new narrative through the fragmented and often unreliable documentary record of this elusive art form. The final film will be screened in the Artists’ Studio at Camden Arts Centre at the culmination of the residency along side a series of live performances and re-enactments. Mel Brimfield’s complex practice takes a skewed and tangled romp through the already vexed historiography of performance art, simultaneously revealing and inventing a rich history of collaboration between artists, dancers, theatre makers, political activists and comedians. Meticulously drawn and painted posters and programmes for fictional interdisciplinary cabarets, together with costumes and props, are produced alongside documentary-style films and live works that playfully associate performance art with most significant cultural developments of the last 100 years.

Published to accompany This Is Performance Art: Performed Sculpture and Dance, 8th April 2010 – 06 June 2010, Camden Arts Centre, co-commissioned by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park Also see D1485 and P1518.

Performance Matters 5th October 8.30pm.Musical Pieces / I Wanna Be in That ShowAugusto Corrieri and Owen ParryToynbee Studios.Part of an ongoing investigation into solo performance, Musical Pieces explores the deceptive qualities of perception and attention offered by the theatre, playing with different forms of on-stage concealment and trickery.I Wanna Be in that Show is a performance about wanting to be in a performance. It draws on the feeling of seeing a performance and recognising one’s own desire to be in it or to have created it. It’s about art that drives you to make more art, to revel in its forms and textures and to question the bodies that occupy it.