- rethinking why performance matters through the matter of performance
Performance Matters is a three-year creative research project bringing together artists, curators and academics to investigate the challenges that contemporary performance presents to ideas of cultural value. A collaboration between the Live Art Development Agency, the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at University of Roehampton, 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 numerous events and activities: collaborations between artists and writers on creative dialogue projects; a series of practical workshops; two public international symposia; the development of two innovative PhD projects; and a series of talks focused around the project’s concerns.
The Performance Matters website carries information about collaborators and events, announces news stories and updates on activities, as well as being a space for expanded writings, ideas and images about and around the issues at the heart of Performance Matters.
Between 2009 and 2012 Performance Matters moves through 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 of the project, framed under the theme Potentials of Performance (2011/12), looks towards possible futures and focuses on timely questions of promise and transformation. What lies latent within performance? What awaits to be realized, developed, and made legible? 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? Potentials of Performance will revolve around activities, dialogues and contributions by the associate researchers from both Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Roehampton. Watch this space for details of activities and events.
The Performance Matters team are creating an online archive of text, photo and video documentation of various project activities, which can be viewed on the Performance Matters website. Documentation of the Performing Idea and Trashing Performance Public Programmes can be viewed in the Agency’s Study Room and in the British Library.
A range of books and dvds by Performance Matters contributors are available on Unbound.
Performance Matters is of interest to a range of scholars, artists, curators, cultural workers and audiences across the fields of visual art, performance, theatre and dance. Performance Matters seeks to generate a new field of possibilities for research on, and as, contemporary performance; one which will find further fruit in the future practices of new generations of artists, performers and theorists.
Performance Matters is co-directed by Dr. Gavin Butt of the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, Prof. Adrian Heathfield of Drama, Theatre and Performance, University of Roehampton and Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency.
Performance Matters website: www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk
Download Performance Matters Press Release (November 2009) here
Performance Matters launch event: Friday April 30, 2010
Performing Idea events: October 2010
Trashing Performance events: October 2011
Books and dvds by Performance Matters contributors available on Unbound
Keep up with Performance Matters Dialogue and Research projects on Words & Images
Performance Matters is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
To register your interest and keep up to date with Performance Matters, send an email to info@thisisperformancematters.co.uk with the subject heading ‘Register me’.
