The Live Art Almanac Vol 1

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.

Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 31 Issue Number 4 November 2021

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.

Through an exploration of both practice and theory, this book investigates the relationship between listening and the theatrical encounter in the context of Western theatre and performance. Rather than looking to the stage for a politics or ethics of performance, Rajni Shah asks what work needs to happen in order for the stage itself to appear, exploring some of the factors that might allow or prevent a group of individuals to gather together as an ‘audience’.

Vanishing Points is a new anthology of cultural criticism, focusing on the making, watching and conditions of Live Art and performance in the UK today. Vanishing Points is edited by Salome Wagaine, with deputy editors Ava Wong Davies and Ben Kulvichit, and designed by Chani Wisdom.

In June 2020, a group of 23 creative practitioners came together in virtual spaces to think, talk, listen and dream, learning from each other and through the act of dialogue. These writings reflect some of their thinking, on where we are now and some of the paths forward. FIELD notes is a call for change with care and transparency at its core.

This book is packed with thoughtful exercises distilled from twenty-five years of interdisciplinary artist workshops and teaching devising and performance making at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Created and curated by Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, artists who work internationally at the interface of academia and professional practice, this collection provides exercises for devising, composing, and editing original works.

‘The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which my ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into an intensive writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.’ Toine Horvers

10 is the latest and last publication from The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home (2008 – 2018) and looks at 10 persisting problems of the past 10 years, featuring an array of critical and inspiring voices The Institute has worked with over the last decade.

Gómez-Peña Unplugged is an anthology of recent and rewritten classic writings from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a figure who stands alone as unique and ground-breaking in the history of performance art and as the artistic director of transdisciplinary performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society marks a transformation from its sister book, Exercises for Rebel Artists, into a pedagogical matrix suited for use as a performance handbook and conceptual tool for artists, activists, theorists, pedagogues, and trans-disciplinary border crossers of all stripes.