Study Boxes

LADA is delighted to be able to offer UK and international promoters temporary installations of bespoke Study Boxes containing hand picked selections of DVDs, books and other materials from the LADA Study Room around specific themes

Installed in Festival hubs and other locations, and curated in dialogue with partners, each Study Box can hold between four to ten items and can be used by audiences for a quick browse or a day-long study.

Study Boxes were first developed in 2012 when SPILL Festival of Performance invited LADA to create a pop-up version of our Study Room for the SPILL Study Café in Ipswich.  LADA curated a selection of 20 Study Boxes containing items which we believed would inspire, excite and intrigue artists and audiences attending the SPILL Festival.

Since then LADA have created Study Box installations for festivals in UK and Ireland including In Between Time / Bristol International Festival, Bristol; Live Collision Festival, Dublin; Hackney WickEd Festival, London; and Tempting Failure, Bristol.

Representing a diversity of artists and practices and reflecting the aims of host festivals, Study Box themes to date have included identity politics, the explicit body, large scale performance, sound and music, activism, ritual and magic, strange theatre, life long performances, participatory performance, critical writing, non Western performance, do it yourself, trash performance, and many more.

After the events the Boxes are catalogued in the Study Room so that users can explore these themes and materials during their visit to the LADA Study Room. 

Please email [email protected] if you would like more information on the Study Boxes.

Responses to the SPILL Study Café:

“Completely brilliant.” (Andy Field, Forest Fringe)

“The openness and democracy of the Study Café is essential in a festival where questions of access are so present. It illustrates the need to offer the work of artists up for wider consumption rather than limited to the tight circle of those in the know. Proximity cuts both ways, and as a group of performance makers, it falls to artists, writers and enthusiasts to collapse these referential gaps between audiences. As funding shrinks and organisations falter, the ability to bring those without any history of performance in, to speak to issues outside of the intellectual concerns of Live Art becomes essential for the survival of the form and any community around it. Open the archive, serve it with coffee and allow reference to enhance, rather than dominate.” (Lewis Church, SPILL Writers Programme)