- rethinking why performance matters through the matter of performance
The Performance Matters website is now live:
www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk
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 Roehampton University, 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 will comprise numerous events and activities: collaborations between artists and writers on creative dialogue projects; a series of practical workshops; two public international symposia; the publication of a substantial book; 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 will move through three themed years of interlinked research activities – Performing Idea, Trashing Performance and Potentials of Performance. In the first year, Performing Idea (2009/10) will investigate the shifting relations between performance practice and discourse, event and writing. In the second year, Trashing Performance (2010/11) will explore 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), will culminate its processes in the creation of a book that will focus on questions of performance affect, political and cultural possibility.
Performance Matters will be 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, Roehampton and Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency.
Download Performance Matters Press Release here.
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’.
