Performance Matters Archive

This e-journal edition from performingborders gathers artists and practitioners exploring how their work crosses borders—territorial, cultural, political, and personal. Rooted in connection, resistance, and shared struggles, these contributions reimagine collaboration and solidarity across time and space. With a foreword by their long-time collaborator Diana Damian Martin, this collection is a tapestry of methodologies and practices grounded in survival and creative resistance.

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

From the special edition of Maska on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia. In Slovenian and English.

Article in Consented Issue 9 : Environment

This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker’s career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, ‘How to Live’ and ‘Diary Drawings’ – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners.

On Ageing (&Beyond)

Performance Research Volume 24 Issue No 3 April/May 2019

pg 40-48

Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 31 Issue Number 4 November 2021

Contemporary Theatre Review Volume 31 Issue Number 3 August 2021

Owen Parry interviews “legend, icon, wild-hearted demoness bad-girl bitch” – Penny Arcade.

DANCE THEATRE JOURNAL Vol 24 no.3 2011
pg43-47

Applying a queer phenomenology to unpack the importance of a multiplicity of Self/s, the book guides readers to be academically rigorous when capturing embodied experiences, featuring exercises to activate their practices and clear introductory definitions to key phenomenological terms. Includes interviews and insights from some of the best examples of transgressive performance art practice of this century help to help unpack the application of phenomenology as Bacon calls for a queer reimagining of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’

Letter To My Little Queer Self (LTMLQS) is a collection written by invited contributors in their words and in their own styles. LTMLQS is the third publication from hotpencil press. hotpencil press was stablished by Libro Levi Bridgeman and Serge Nicholson in 2009.  Foreword by performer and comedian Krishna Istha.

This book explores the practical, philosophical and aesthetic implications of performers working in pairs. It focuses on a ten-year period in the work of Karen Christopher, alongside wider reflections on the duet as a concept in artistic and social life. The book presents an investigation of the entanglement of form and practice seen through the lens of the smallest multiple unit of collaboration: the pair.