We are delighted to announce the launch of Crossovers the final phase of Performance Matters involving screenings, talk events and DVD publications of artists’ films, documentaries and dialogues arising from our research. Crossovers is supported by Follow on Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Crossovers includes films which look at the multiple histories of performance art as it engages with mainstream TV, appears on the internet, as subculture, in stand-up comedy, and in avant-garde art. Other films explore ideas of performance in contemporary thought, in original filmed conversations with international critics and thinkers working at the forefront of their disciplines.
Three of the Crossovers films have developed from commissioned dialogues and events for Trashing Performance (2010-11) –
Mel Brimfield’s This is Performance Art (Part Two) spoofs the format of the television documentary to tell a history rich in fabulation, willfully and irreverently intertwining stories of twentieth-century experimental theatre and cabaret. See here
Gavin Butt and Ben Walters’ directorial debut, the documentary This is Not a Dream, charts an underground story of artist’s DIY use of moving image technology, from Warhol’s Factory to contemporary London club performance. Watch the trailer here
Oreet Ashery’s Party for Freedom explores outsider artist-collectives of the 1970s, and the pertinence of their gestures and methods, for acting on the politics of the present. The film has developed from a residential workshop held as part of Trashing Performance - see here for more details
Other films in the Crossovers series have developed from Performing Idea (2009-10) andtake the form of filmed exchanges between Adrian Heathfield and leading intellectuals from diverse disciplines whose work has significant impact upon the understanding of contemporary culture and performance.
In addition to the filmed dialogue published with Hélène Cixous, Adrian Heathfield has recently completed the film of his conversation with the anthropologist and philosopher Alphonso Lingis. Three more dialogues are planned for across the year.
The Crossovers DVD series will be released in Autumn 2013.
Crossovers (2013-14) follows on from Performance Matters’ three themed years of interlinked research activities – Performing Idea, Trashing Performance and Potentials of Performance.
In the first year, Performing Idea (2009-10) investigated the shifting relations between performance practice and discourse, event and writing. In the second year, Trashing Performance (2010-11) explored marginal and degraded performance practices in order to produce critical and cultural innovations through non-institutional manifestations and informal disseminations. The final year, Potentials of Performance (2011-12), was led by the project’s postgraduate researchers, and featured a series of dialogue projects across the year asking what lies latent within performance and what does performance hold in store in its testing of the limits of the social, the cultural, the vital and the critical?
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To register your interest and keep up to date with Performance Matters and Crossovers, send an email including your full name to info@thisisperformancematters.co.uk with the subject heading ‘Register me’.