Breaking the frame

Video documentation of  an online book launch and discussion marking the publication of the 6th issue of NS*, “Final Transmission: Performance Art and AIDS in Los Angeles” on 1st May, 2021.

Featuring editors Brian Getnick and Tanya Rubbak, and contributors Chris Freeman, Alexandra Juhasz, Sheree Rose, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Ruben Esparza and Philip Littell, for a wider discussion about AIDS, performance art and crisis.

NS, the performance art journal of Los Angeles, is a 6 volume archive of performance art production in LA from 2011 to 2016.

View the book Final Transmission: Performance Art and AIDS in Los Angeles in our catalogue here 

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

shado Issue 2 : Global Womxnhood

Feature on poet and performer Tolu Agbelusi.

Mclarrity, Spike (2021) White rabbit : celebrating ten years of Barnes’ White Rabbit.

This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker’s career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, ‘How to Live’ and ‘Diary Drawings’ – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners.

This title offers the gender-bending performances of Dlane Torr, creator of the Man for a Day workshops. This book documents and contextualizes the development of Torr’s internationally celebrated workshops, as well as her own ongoing experiments in performing gender-play in theaters, galleries, and clubs.

This article presents the research and performance practice behind ‘The Performing Solidarity Project’.

Training Utopias

Performance Research Volume 25 Issue No. 8 December 2020

Pg173-174

Training Utopias

Performance Research Volume 25 Issue No. 8 December 2020

Pg69-75

Contemporary Theatre Review Volume 32 Issue Number 1 February 2022

p46-60

Contemporary Theatre Review Volume 32 Issue Number 1 February 2022

p4-20

Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 31 Issue Number 4 November 2021