Performing Rights Manifestations Introduction
Full programme details and bookings www.psi12.qmul.ac.uk
Taking place across the campus of Queen Mary, University of London, Performing Rights Manifestations is a gathering of some of the most exciting and influential artists and activists from across the world for a four day programme of events and activities investigating relationships between human rights and performance.
Performing Rights continues a six year partnership between Queen Mary, East End Collaborations (EEC) and the Live Art Development Agency, and is a 'manifestation' of a shared belief in the potential for performance to effect social, political and cultural change. In a time of war and globalization, artists around the world are working with performance based practices to test innovative ways to confront abuses of human rights, to activate links between international and local communities, and to give voice to the disembodied and disenfranchised. The programme of activities we have assembled for Performing Rights is a response to the extraordinary creative strategies that contemporary artists and activists are using to communicate issues of human rights, and the impact these are having amongst artists, activists, curators, thinkers and policy makers alike.
Created in dialogue and collaboration with UK and international artists, academics, curators, and activists over the last eighteen months, Performing Rights Manifestations is a programme of events spanning a diversity of performance and time-based practices. From studio based performances, public declarations, lectures, debates, installations, screenings and presentations to interventions, workshops, residencies, experimentations, quizzes, guest appearances, and special events, Manifestations attempts to represent new models of relationships between art and activism and the role of artists, and performance itself, in the understanding, enactment and sustenance of human rights.
In reflecting some of the ways in which performance can be a generativeforce for action, agency, illumination, embodiment, representation,empowerment and protest, Performing Rights Manifestations hopes to stimulate public debate; and equip, empower and inspire all kinds of people to consider different ways of tackling issues of human rights and effecting change.
Performing Rights Manifestations was conceived as an event that would leave behind a legacy and contribute to the continuing development of performance-based practice as a means by which human rights can be understood as part of evolving cultural and political processes. At the centre of Performing Rights Manifestations is the Library of Performing Rights, housing materials submitted by artists, writers, academics and activists from around the world. A Library of Performing Rights has been created as a living archive of performance activism in support of human rights. Beyond these four days in June 2006 it will be transported, reassembled, and expanded at different locations and in response to specific geographical and cultural issues.
Performing Rights invites us to consider What can performance do for human rights, and human rights for performance?
Performing Rights is financially assisted by Arts Council, England; L.C.A.C.E.; Queen Mary, University of London; Live Art Development Agency; Crucible; Joy Tomchin.
Please note: The Manifesto Room, Library of Performing Rights, Gallery of Utopias, Conference Plenary sessions, and all installations and daytime performances are free with a Day Pass or with a conference registration ID. Conference registration and Day Passes do not include performance tickets which must be booked and paid for separately.
Lois Weaver (Queen Mary/East End Collaborations) and Lois Keidan (Live Art Development Agency)
Performing Rights Manifestations daily schedule
Performing Rights Manifestations full programme details
Performing Rights Manifestations participants Biographies
