Potentials of Performance

Following Performing Idea and Trashing Performance, the third year of Performance Matters is now here: Potentials of Performance. What lies latent within and around performance? What awaits to be realized, developed, and made legible?

The year will revolve around activities, dialogues and contributions by the associate researchers from both Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Roehampton.

The year's theme looks towards possible futures as it seeks to address timely questions of promise and transformation. What does performance hold in store in its present-day testing of the limits of the social, the cultural, the vital and the critical? What are its potentials to transform civic social bodies and the production of subjectivities more broadly? And how might the failed promise of democracy in contemporary Europe and beyond necessitate a rethinking of the very promise of performance? In short: what can performance do?

Performance Matters

Performance Matters is a creative research project exploring the challenges that contemporary performance presents to ideas of cultural value. The project asks whether such forms of cultural practice are now being taken seriously in culture more broadly, and how they may possess the potential to refashion understandings of what, and how, things matter in the contemporary world.

Performance Matters comprises three themed years of interlinked research activities, Performing Idea (2009/10), Trashing Performance (2010/11), and Potentials of Performance (2011/12).

Full documentation of all Performance Matters' events and acitvities is available for viewing at the Live Art Development Agency's Study Room and at the British Library. Video extracts of the Performing Idea Public Programme (Oct 2010) are also available to be viewed online. Extracts from the Trashing Performance Public Programme (October 2011) will be available online shortly

A range of books and dvds by Performance Matters contributors are available on Unbound.

How to get involved

To register your interest and keep up to date with Performance Matters, send an email including your full name to info@thisisperformancematters.co.uk with the subject heading ‘Register me’.