The LIFT Long Table on Performing Rights

Lois Weaver and the Live Art Development Agency

As part of LIFT Festival 2008's Six Adventures in Conversation
Friday 4 July, 18.00 – 19.15
The Lift, Southbank Centre Square, £5

Conceived by the artist Lois Weaver, The Long Table is inspired by Marleen Gorris' film Antonia's Line. The central image of the film is a dinner table that grows longer and longer as Antonia's family welcomes more outsiders and accommodates more eccentricity.

The Long Table experiments with participation and public engagement by re-appropriating a dinner table atmosphere as a public forum, and encouraging informal conversations on serious topics. It is literally a very long table set up with chairs, microphones and refreshments where anyone and everyone is welcome to come to the table, ask questions, make statements, leave comments, or simply sit, listen and watch.

The Long Table on Performing Rights is an invitation to explore the role of performance in communicating issues of human rights, to look at the new relationships between art and activism, and to debate the responsibilities of artists, organisers, activists and audiences in the understanding, enactment and sustenance of human rights.

The Long Table on Performing Rights is a collaboration between Lois Weaver of Queen Mary, University of London and the Live Art Development Agency that builds on Performance Studies international (PSi)#12: Performing Rights (London, June 2006), Performing Rights Vienna for Tanzquartier (March 2007), and Performing Rights Glasgow for NRLA (February 2008).