Organisers

Gavin Butt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Trained as an artist and art historian, his research has now broadened to encompass work across the intersecting areas of performance studies, queer studies, and modern and contemporary art. Much of this work involves rethinking the value of objects, events and knowledges deemed unworthy by so-called serious discourses of criticism and scholarship, in order to pay heed to alternative economies of cultural engagement and pleasure.  His book on gossip and homosexuality in US art, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963, was published by Duke University Press in 2005. He is also editor of After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Blackwell 2004). He is currently working on a new book project exploring ideas of cultural seriousness in the work of contemporary queer performers including David Hoyle, Oreet Ashery, and Bird La Bird, alongside artists and filmmakers Joe Brainard and the Kuchar brothers. He has published widely in books and journals. He has also lectured internationally, and organised scholarly fora and creative events, at numerous academic and public institutions including Frieze Art Fair, the Louvre, Arts Council, AICA, Vienna Festival, InIVA, HAU Theatres, Berlin, New York University, and the Venice Biennale. At Goldsmiths he is also Programme Leader of the MPhil / PhD in Visual Cultures.

Augusto Corrieri is a performance artist, choreographer and writer. Since 2005 he has been developing a solo-led performance practice in the UK and Europe, working on how to make spectators critically aware of their place within the construction of a theatre event. His works include solo and group performances, all of which attempt to reduce theatre to its essential components: the performance Dance Company (2007) uses You Tube to teach a basic sequence of dance warm-ups and theatre games to an unknown cast of 10 performers, who only meet the day before performing the show live. A 2008 commision by Camden Arts Centre initiated a trilogy of gallery-based durational performances that “disappear” as soon as they are viewed: the most recent was The Lasting Image (2010), for the Whitstable Biennale, in which the 4 performers form a still tableaux replicating the advertising poster of the show.
His practice as research PhD project - 'Curtains are ghosts' - focuses on the ways in which contemporary performance is haunted by the architectural and aesthetic ideology of the classical theatre stage. Moving between performance making and writing, the project asks whether the conventions of the classical theatre - the proscenium arch, the curtain, the footlights, and many other binary demarcations of space and time - are still the dominant paradigm for constructing and interpreting the event of performance.

Adrian is a writer and curator of performance and visual art. He is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Roehampton University, London. His work across critical theory, creative and curatorial practice questions the ethics of the encounter between the spectator and the artwork. These enquiries have led to discussions of performance in relation to the status of sensory experience within cultural knowledge, the politics of commemoration and shifts in the perception and presentation of mortality. He has written many essays on live art, theatre and dance. He recently published the monograph Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (MIT Press and the Live Art Development Agency 2009). He is co-editing Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History with Amelia Jones. He is the editor of Live: Art and Performance (Tate Publishing and Routledge 2004), Small Acts (Black Dog Publications 2000) and the box publication Shattered Anatomies: Traces of the Body in Performance (Arnolfini 1997). He has curated many events, including 'Live Culture' (Tate Modern 2003) and 'The Frequently Asked' with Tim Etchells, a durational chain dialogue commissioned by Tanzquartier Vienna (2008). He has taught performance practice and theory in many countries across Europe and Scandinavia, and in America as a Visiting Scholar in Performance Studies at New York University, at Stanford University, and at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was President of Performance Studies international (2004-2007).

Lois Keidan is the co founder and Director of the Live Art Development Agency London. She is concerned with supporting the development of the conditions and contexts within which art, artists, audiences, writers, students and scholars can flourish. From 1992 to 1997 she was Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, presenting a year round programme dedicated to supporting and representing new artists, new ideas and new practices from the UK and around the world. Prior to that she was responsible for national policy and provision for Performance Art and interdisciplinary practices at the Arts Council of England. She contributes articles on Live Art to various magazines and publications and gives presentations at festivals, conferences, colleges, and venues in the UK and internationally. She sits on a number of Boards and Advisory Panels. In 1999 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Dartington College of Arts and in 2009 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Queen Mary, University of London.

Owen G Parry is an artist and researcher based in London. His practice deals with the live and the personal and is loaded with intent and a radical affection for progress and change. A re-occuring feature in his work is the queer body, adorned in all its miserable histories and peculiar guises. Owen thrives off the tension between provoking and inviting spectators and participants. Sometimes mundane, sometimes rediculously spectacular, his work traverses multiple spaces and audiences from the club to the academic conference. Owen has created work for the stage, installation, video and durational frames and is a regular performer with Oreet Ashery, and collaborator of Mitch & Parry with Andrew Mitchelson. He has presented performances at live art and contemporary performance venues and festivals internationally.
Owen's PhD research interests are in queer art and performance practices with an emphasis on artists working across multiple spaces, forms and modes from the nightclub toilets to the gallery and proscenium arch stage. His research engages with artists working in dialectical tension with an institutionalised avant-garde, drawing similarly from these historical traditions and other more degraded and fabulous aspects of underground and popular culture. His writing responds to the event in art practice and looks at the ways the live event functions as a research engine, generating a critical space for dialogue and encounter. Owen is excited by live flesh, boy-on-boy action and encounters with strangers and sees the space of performance often operating within these libidinal economies. For this reason he finds himself in the 'homey' terrain of live art and performance.

Cally Spooner is an artist and producer. Underlying these activities are interests in entertainment and liveness as apparatuses that enable ideas to be publically performed and received. As an artist Cally translates other people's texts, existing artworks, historic events and notation into live productions, to prevent a petrified, singular reading of these sources.
Cally’s productions emerge through writing, collaborative editing, devising and dramaturgy, then end as revisable live events. These are performed by herself, with others, or by others. They eventually translate into published books and print. Since 2007 she has regularly exhibited at institutions, galleries and theatres, including Whitechapel Art Gallery, The Voorduit Theatre (Ghent), CHELSEA Space (London), Basso (Berlin) and The Synagogue Du Delme (France).
As a producer, Cally explores her interests in the practical realization of new productions and since 2005 has worked as a freelance producer of artists’ projects, radio shows and pop music videos. She has worked for numerous institutions, businesses and individuals including STORE gallery (2006 - 2008), The Whitechapel Art gallery (2006), artists Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard (2009/ 2010) and Rough Trade Records (2010 - …).
Cally is trained in Philosophy (BA Sussex) and Curating (MFA Goldsmiths).