Support for Artists
The exploratory processes of Live Art demand different approaches to ideas of artistic and professional development. The Agency was set up as a new model of support for Live Art practices and practitioners.
The Agency offers a range of artistic and professional development schemes in collaboration with practitioners, organisations and institutions that aim to respond to, and support, the needs and expectations of artists as they change throughout their career: from those of recent graduates and emerging artists (through Talking Shop and FRESH AiR) to those of artists who have developed a substantial body of work over many years (through the One To One Individual Artist Bursaries in Live Art and Legacy).
The Agency is committed to supporting artists to self determine their own professional development and conceive artistic development strategies that are appropriate for their practice. A key principle of the One To One scheme was self-determination, and DIY also invites artists to invent and run innovative and idiosyncratic professional development programmes for other artists.
To stimulate new processes, encourage new approaches and support different ways of working, the Agency runs performance laboratories, masterclasses and workshops with leading UK and international practitioners, including our partners on the AHRC-funded creative research project Performance Matters. These may take the shape of looking at ideas of process and product in Janine Antoni’s performance laboratory Lore and Other Convergences, to notions of collaboration and cross-racial unity through experimental art in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Masterclass for Live Culture, to methodologies of art and activism in John Jordan’s Creative Resistances workshop.
The Agency uses its Study Room to host short residencies by international and UK practitioners, and informal artists’ gatherings to discuss ideas of artistic and professional development.
