The D-Word, a nitroBEAT and Barbican event 11th May 2015
An embrace of soil as a martyr’s life is whispered into your ears
An embrace of discomfort as 2 women shake, distort and exhaust your assumptions
An embrace of the city’s periphery, traced by a mass conga of teenagers and adults
Live Art is a research-based artistic practice, driven by artists and producers who work across art forms, contexts and spaces. Emerging from a convergence of practices across the visual and theatre arts over the last 30 years, Live Art began to articulate new ways of creating and talking about art that sat outside existing markets, traditions and discourses.
Live Art’s history and continuing evolution embraces the edges and overlaps of artform & identity.
It embodies an ethos that encourages artists to go beyond category and containment.
In doing so, Live Art demonstrates an alternative attitude towards ‘diversity’ in times of fatigue.
I believe this attitude is the starting point of a cultural strategy – a strategy that looks beyond tick boxes, and compels artists and producers to continually interrogate the margins of their forms and themselves. It asks –
Are we reclaiming representation?
How are we holding space for challenging questions?
And in what ways are we shaping the role of art?
Often artists who locate themselves within the Live Art context define themselves, or are defined by society as different or outside the mainstream. The things these artists have to say may be difficult to hear or experience, but these voices weave a chronicle of living in the UK from the ground.
At In Between Time, we are drawn to Live Art because we believe in its ability to voice difference and to open up worlds to which we may never belong. The artists we come to work with often position themselves beyond and across definable mediums. They have backgrounds in multiple practices, or with little or no formal arts training, they have experienced multiple lives to which they are seeking forms to express.
In Live Art, artists often reclaim representation by using their bodies and stories as the material and site of their artistic expression. Performing your body or history can provide sites of the least restriction to contest society; where cultural and social inscriptions can be rewritten, multiple identities worn and discarded, and fractures in society embodied. In the words of Chicano artist, Guillermo Gómez Peña – ‘Our bodies are occupied territories … perhaps the ultimate goal of performance is to decolonize our bodies.’
In search of freer spaces, Live Art draws breadth and strength from a multiplicity of voices. These freer spaces evolve in the hands of artists themselves who strive to create new artistic languages to represent something they cannot do so elsewhere. This is a space where artists continue to negotiate gender and sexuality, ethnicity, physical ability, and status, as much as they mold artistic form into the durations, frames and spaces necessary to hold their voices.
Reclaiming the representation of both voice and form allow artists to speak to contemporary audiences with a sharper relevance. two years ago, at Fierce Festival in Birmingham, I was led into a pitch-black space to circle around the American artist, Heather Cassils. For half an hour, the flash of a camera was the only source of light and only means to see a fight between a single body and a tower of clay. Flash by flash, the camera began to build up images of Cassils; images that seared in and shuddered out of my retinas: an arm striking, a clenching jaw, a body of muscle and sweat in mid suspension. Cassils, who chooses not to use the pronoun ‘him’ or ‘her’, reveals theirself in a series of illuminations, versions of identity in action, never to be complete.
Reclaiming representation can also take place backstage and in the office. In Between Time’s core team comprises of six women across two generations. None of us were raised in cultural circles where the arts felt like an option. Three of us worked in other sectors before the arts including science, law and real estate. One of us identifies with the LGBT community, another has Malaysian Chinese heritage, another works with a visual disability, and together we encompass however you define the migrant, working and middle class.
For reporting purposes, we name and enumerate some of this as ‘diversity’. But there is something much more integral to who we are that has brought us together. I like to think of this as the same compulsions that have pulled artists towards Live Art practices, the same compulsions that make us challenge traditional forms or the ownership of taste, and the same compulsions that make us champion artists who cannot bear to be contained.
Live Art is embracing and generative, and it is this DNA running through its blood, which demonstrates an alternative attitude towards ‘diversity’.
It reminds us that reclaiming representation is a driving force of creativity that spans not only whose voice is on stage, but how the stage changes because of these voices.
As a strategy, reclaiming representation is a productive force.
It is how art evolves, how art retains contemporary relevance, and how art imagines a future.
If art can act as a space of valuable and necessary contestation, the questions we must next ask are – How is this space held for audiences, bystanders, and the public?
How is this space held for artists who need to say difficult things?
And how is this space held for ourselves. How can we stand behind what we have created?
IBT’s philosophy is that everyone should have access to the most extraordinary and challenging contemporary ideas.
A large part of living up to this, involves tackling the responsibility we feel towards the audiences we engage with, to the artists we work with, and to ourselves.
We hold this space by creating context.
In Between Time is a biennale festival that occurs over two weeks, with an intense four-day programme across multiple venues and public spaces in Bristol. The framing of a festival has allowed us to create a particular invitation – an invitation that temporarily suspends daily life, heightens an appetite for the unknown, and provides the companionship of strangers and friends to build the significance of what you are watching.
In asking people to attend the festival, we ask audiences to trust that we have thought carefully about why and how we are presenting something, and do not expect to receive trust over night.
Questions that we often think about are whose voice we are giving platform to? How is this voice countered and expanded on by others so that no single worldview monopolizes?
We do not produce work to please, and do not pretend that art must find resolution. This is patronizing and inconsistent with the reality of what people experience in their daily lives and the extent to which we seek empathy with others. But we do think carefully about how audiences will receive a work.
Live Art is a training ground for producer muscles. If you are working with unconventional voices who sit across mediums, and where time, duration and location are not prescribed, how a work will be experienced is never taken for granted. This is a productive place to be because it puts you into the shoes of future audiences. And it is these audiences who are always present in the conversations you have with artists and partners.
We think carefully about how we communicate. Extended critical theory or rationale may underpin a work, but we choose to talk about art with a language that speaks emotionally and visually and asks for an open mind. We make our invitation as honest and generous as possible. In-depth conversations around challenging questions, we find, are more useful in open talks or informal and extended conversations.
The context we create is also shaped by others. We are producers who find strength within a community of peer organisations, independents and artists, who champion our work and support us as we do for them. Key support organizations such as the Live Art Development Agency also works alongside 25 producers across the UK to form the Live Art UK Network. This network is on the ground, and its publications, its advocacy and its activities create a critical context for us to operate.
We hold this space in collaboration with artists and ourselves.
With a programme of approximately 50 artists every two years, conversations with artists take place slowly. We begin a conversation by asking what is special about this particular relationship that an artist cannot do with another partner, and that we cannot do with another artist. We hope this engenders an honesty; from the ambitions and resources of both parties, to what we want to make happen together and to what we both may be risking. This could include physical and mental wellbeing of an artist and the journey and reactions of an audience, to how a volunteer encounters a complaint or how we work with the press and social media to manage publicity.
We believe that having these conversations enables both artist and producer to create a more robust context for a challenging work to exist.
At the point of presentation, when an artist is on stage or within the piece they are creating, we step out into the public. We become champion and mediator, holding a responsibility towards both artist and audience. Our main job is to hold a space that is as open hearted to a work as it is open minded to audience reaction.
In this space, we speak about the reasons for why we, as producers, stand behind a work.
In taking a stance, we interrogate our very own values in the face of differing opinions.
This interrogation, which takes place publically and internally, is a potent site. Like the history and ongoing evolution of Live Art, this is a creative space, which if we want to, has the capacity to embrace a multiplicity of voices, to encompass new artistic languages, and to discover partners that create a richer conversation.
In the last edition of In Between Time Festival this February [2015], we worked with artists who seek to activate more complex identities and relationships with society.
Trajal Harrell vogues the desires and aspirations of African-American and Latino LGBT communities in 1960s Harlem.
Jo Bannon opens up albanism through the mysteries a mother weaves to nurture a daughter.
Project O ask us to look and look again, exorcising our relationship with their bodies. Ria Hartley questions why diversity excludes white, able bodied, middle class and heterosexual people.
Asher Craig recounts a life time of advocating for individual and institutional change in Bristol.
We do not label this programme with ‘Black’, ‘BAME’ or ‘diverse’.
Instead, we seek to build welcoming spaces for artists and audiences to engage in challenging questions with compassion.
In situations of anger, fear or apathy, we do the only thing we know how to – and that is to create spaces that ask for permanent negotiation;
Permanent negotiation within ourselves and with others.
Diversity may feel like an obligation, or a fashion trend, in one year and out the next.
But the multiplicity of our voices are not.
The embrace of Live Art tells me a different story.
It tells me that our voices are shaping the role of art into contemporary relevance, and pulling society into negotiation from the ground up.
An artist Brian Lobel once told me a strategy that he employs. He says – I’m not so stupid to think I understand everything. If it doesn’t make sense, I ring up someone affected by my question, and we chat.
So I am trying to listen more to the ground –
More to when a young artist posts on Facebook – How do I retain my integrity?
More to when a battle-worn colleague says – We did that in the 90s whilst another says – Why is that relevant to me?
More to when groups put aside differences in tactics – and say how do we join up our initiatives?
More to when my gut says – Yes this is important. Let’s talk.
‘Producing with a Live Art Embrace’ was originally presented by Joon Lynn Goh at The D-Word, a nitroBEAT and Barbican event, 11 May 2015.