DIY: 2016 – Call for Proposals

Professional development projects BY artists FOR artists

Application deadline: noon, Tuesday 22 March with supported projects taking place between July and November 2016

Our Call for Proposals to lead a project has now closed.

More info about DIY. 

More info about DIY 13: 2016. 

One of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had in my professional practice
Owen Parry, DIY lead artist, 2015

I could not recommend it highly enough
Tim Bromage, DIY lead artist, 2015

A brilliant constellation of on-going initiatives that inspire and nurture a spirit of experiment and adventure and that activates the Liminal spaces and communities of learning, particularly acknowledging learning as a life-long process
Katie Etheridge and Simon Persighetti, DIY lead artists, 2015

DIY is an opportunity for artists working in Live Art to conceive and run unusual research, training and professional development projects for themselves and other artists.

DIY understands that the development of a Live Art practice is as much about the exploration of ideas and experiences as training in skills and techniques, and past DIY projects have proved to be invaluable experiences for project leaders, participants and organisers alike.

DIY is all about creating spaces to explore new ideas and test new methodologies. We want to hear from you if have an idea for an exciting, innovative and idiosyncratic Live Art professional development project that offers something different and is geared to the eclectic and often unusual needs of artists whose practices are grounded in challenging and unconventional approaches, forms and concepts.  

We particularly welcome proposals led by or addressing ‘under represented’ artists and practices, and projects reflective of other “politicized” territories.

DIY projects may take any form and can be based anywhere. Each DIY project is placed with a partner organisation and this year’s partners are detailed below – if a partner organisation has a regional remit your DIY project will happen in that region, if it has a national remit it can happen anywhere. We particularly welcome DIY projects that are geared towards partners’ locations. Please make clear in your application your preferred location(s), although we do encourage flexibility in this matter. (Once we have selected the final projects we may ask some proposals to be relocated to ensure an even spread of projects across the country.)

Some DIY partners have written specific briefs for artists to respond to, which cover an exciting and diverse range of themes – see below for full details of partners’ locations and briefs.

Further Information on DIY applications 

LADA have compiled a list of frequently asked questions covering all aspects of the DIY application process and other information related to the scheme. Please read these notes carefully before applying. 

DIY 13: 2016 Partner Organisations and locations

Artsadmin (National), Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (South East), Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff), Colchester Arts Centre (South East), Compass Live Art (Yorkshire), Create (Ireland), DaDaFest (Liverpool), Delfina Foundation (London), Folkestone Fringe (Folkestone), Forest Fringe (National), hÅb (Manchester), Heart of Glass (St Helens, Merseyside), Home Live Art (National), KARST (Plymouth, Devon), Live Art Development Agency (National), Live Art Bistro (Leeds), Marlborough Theatre (Brighton), National Theatre New Work Department (London), Tate Early Years and Family Programme (London) and Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Yorkshire).

Specific Partner Organisations’ Briefs

1. Live Art and Home Live Art (National)
Home Live Art’s work increasingly supports audience participation and exchange. Working primarily in public contexts such as festivals, family friendly events or large-scale participatory projects, Home Live Art is keen to explore this area of work further and breath new life into it. We are interested in working with an artist/s who wants to re-imagine, question or completely re-invent ideas around participation or public engagement. Artists do not have to have previous experience of working in this area, indeed, we are more interested in fresh, unconventional thinking, which might support or challenge this type of work. The Home Live Art DIY project will also include an opportunity to be part of our annual programme at the Latitude Festival in Sussex: The HLA Exchange. A programme of alternative public interactions which are definitely on the mischievous end of Live Art, The HLA Exchange is a useful opportunity to try out new approaches and ideas around public engagement in an open and laid back environment where pretty much anything goes!

An additional fee and expenses will be provided for participation at Latitude, 14-17 July. For further information and questions contact Jane Greenfield.

2. Live Art and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Set in the 500-acre Bretton estate, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is an international centre for the creation, display and appreciation of modern and contemporary sculpture, pursuing a curatorial policy of balance, between established and young artists; object and experience, gallery and open air. One of the founding principles of YSP is to enable access to work by international artists and to a landscape that had been in private ownership for centuries. Previous YSP DIY projects have been led by Joshua Sofaer, Madeleine Botet de Lacaze, Eloise Fornieles and Daniel Belasco Rogers. YSP is keen to enable another DIY project that responds in some way to the Park, whether that is its art, history, heritage, landscape, nature or people, and welcomes the possibility of public engagement as part of the project or concluding in a public event.

This project is supported by Yorkshire Sculpture Park. For further information about YSP please contact Damon Waldock. Please note that YSP in unable to offer camping within the grounds.

3. Live Art and the Domestic (London)
Delfina Foundation (DF) is an independent, non-profit foundation dedicated to facilitating artistic exchange and developing creative practice through residencies, partnerships and public programming. Our home in the heart of London provides a base and context for artists, curators, writers, researchers and interdisciplinary practitioners to expand their horizons both professionally and creatively. Since 2014, DF’s programme has grown to provide a thematic focus to its international residencies. Offering opportunities for critical dialogue around universal issues of everyday life, these themes include The Politics of Food, The Public Domain, and Performance as Process. As a home, occupying two Victorian terrace houses, notions of the domestic are embedded in our day-to-day activities. We encourage DIY applications that respond to the particular domestic environment that we offer. This could include proposals exploring notions of living together, gender politics, public/private, food, interior design, or the family, to name just a few examples.

Applicants should contact Gillean Dickie at Delfina Foundation for more comprehensive details of the resources which can be made available to the project.

4. Live Art and National Theatre New Work Department (London)
The National Theatre New Work Department (based at the NT Studio) provides an environment in which performance makers of all kinds can explore, experiment and devise new work, free from the pressure of public performance. When appropriate, part of the National Theatre’s support of this developmental process involves artists accessing a range of costumes, props and period furniture from past NT productions, and the provision of workshop spaces equipped with lighting rigs, sound equipment, video projectors and sundry other technical resources. The National Theatre encourages DIY proposals which take advantage of any or all of these resources and, if useful, of the expertise of the building's technical department. This DIY project will take place in one of the three workshop spaces at the National Theatre Studio on The Cut in Waterloo, London, the space chosen in discussion with NT staff.

Applicants should contact Sarah J Murray, Deputy Head of New Work at the National Theatre for more comprehensive details of the resources which can be made available to the project.

5. Live Art and DaDaFest (Liverpool)
DaDaFest invite DIY Live Art proposals for disabled-led projects that support our aims to diversify opportunities to explore a diversity of lived experience. We acknowledge that disability cuts across many cultural and identity groups and can be both a shared political viewpoint as well as a personal and unique experience. We’re interested in working with artists who want to consider different ways of working in public space and are keen to explore the themes of independence and interdependence. Proposals may or may not be about disability but we do stipulate that they are disabled-led. The project should take place in Liverpool. The DaDaFest Live Art DIY project could also include the opportunity to be part of DaDaFest International 2016 which takes place from November 18 to December 3 2016. DaDaFest is an innovative disability arts organisation based in Liverpool, delivering an international biennial festival of visual art, live art, theatre, dance and music and other arts events throughout the year to promote high quality disability and deaf arts from unique cultural perspectives.

An additional access budget is available for artists and participants. For further information please contact Cathy Butterworth.

6. Live Art and Remembering (Forest Fringe, Edinburgh)
This year will be Forest Fringe's 10th year at the Edinburgh Festival and as a consequence we're thinking about the importance of remembering. This year our Edinburgh programme will involve a series of restagings of pieces from the last decade and other playful acts of retrospection, and alongside this we're keen to host a DIY project that also engages with acts of memory, questions of documentation and re-enactment or even just the fraught problem of history itself. We're really open as to how this brief might be interpreted – you might want to engage directly with Forest Fringe, it's history and it's programme of restagings, or you might want to consider the idea of looking back more broadly. Ideally this project would be based at Forest Fringe's Edinburgh home at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall for some period during this year's Edinburgh Festival programme, 10-21 August 2016. 

For further information please contact Andy Field.

7. Live Art and Tate Early Years and Family Programme (London)
Tate Familiesand Early Years works with practitioners to produce multi-disciplinary ‘ways-in’ for intergenerational audiences, and aims to represent diverse contemporary practices, challenge preconceptions of children’s capacity for arts engagement, celebrate the culture generated in playgrounds, homes and communities, and promote agency in cultural engagement. As a cultural strategy Live Art offers rich possibilities in work for, with and about children. Its experiential and exploratory nature, and its approaches to, and negotiation of, ideas, experiences, and things, resonates so clearly with the characteristics of childhood learning.  By inviting participation, collaboration, and different forms of engagement with the experience of art, the kinds of permissions, agency and space for play that Live Art offers have a lot to contribute to debates and practices on what it is possible, and permissible, to do with kids, and on what that doing can do. We’re looking to support a DIY that responds to this thinking. This DIY opportunity relates to Playing Up a project for kids and adults developed by Tate Families and Early Years and LADA with Sybille Peters and follows on from previous DIYs working in this territory led by Susannah Hewlett and Rosana Cade & Eilidh MacAskill.

For further information please contact Susan Sheddan.