Live Art Development Agency
The Garrett Centre, 117 Mansford Street, London, E2 6LX
Update: Please note that this event has been rescheduled; the new date is Friday 2 February 2024.
A Long Table on Returning, with Lois Weaver, invited guests and you.
Where have we all been these last few years?
What have we learned? and what have we yearned for?
What would it mean to come back and go forward?
What value do we / can we put on community in these difficult times?
We are delighted to invite you to a series of Long Table events running from February until July. Exactly ten years after the Long Table on Live Art and Feminism held at the White Building in Hackney Wick, Lois Weaver returns with an invitation to think collectively about what it means to gather again after some extraordinary years of distance and separation, to explore some of our griefs and possible grievances, and to imagine new directions and possibilities.
Please join us on Friday 2 February 2024 at 7pm for the first event, A Long Table on Returning.
These Long Table events run alongside our LADA Screens programme centred around voice, care and healing.
The Long Table, developed by artist and academic Lois Weaver, experiments with the private form of a dinner party as a structure for public debate where anyone has a seat at the table.
The components are simple: a long table, chairs, a paper tablecloth, pens. Participants are welcome to scribble ideas or comments. There is an Etiquette to be observed. There can be silence. There might be awkwardness. There can always be laughter.
Dozens of Long Tables have been held around the world, on topics as diverse as human rights, arts and mental health, housing crises, technology design, as well as other hot topics like equality, democracy, gender and sex!
The Long Table is open-source. Guidelines and a printable ‘Etiquette’ can be downloaded here.
Lois Weaver is an artist, activist, and Professor of contemporary performance practice at Queen Mary University of London. She is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016-2018 Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow. Lois was co-founder of Spiderwoman Theater and WOW Theatre in NYC. She has collaborated with Peggy Shaw and Split Britches since 1980; their radical vision of what theatre can be was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Obie in 2024. Recent performances include Unexploded Ordnances (2016-18) and Last Gasp; A Recalibration (2021-23). Her experiments in performance as public engagement include Long Tables, Porch Sittings, and Care Cafes, and public facilitator, Tammy WhyNot. Lois’s performance practice is documented in The Only Way Home Is Through the Show: Performance Works of Lois Weaver, edited by Lois Weaver and Jen Harvie (2015). Lois Weaver is a Patron of the Live Art Development Agency since 2017.
We kindly ask the attendees of the event to wear masks to protect those who are disproportionately affected by the ongoing pandemic. We have a limited supply of disposable masks available at LADA but only while stocks last.
LADA and The Garrett Centre are wheelchair accessible by lift and provide gender inclusive bathrooms.
Should you have any particular requirements please email [email protected] and we will be happy to offer further support.
Banner image credit:
‘Long Table: Representing Bodies and Experiences’ at Leonard Bina Ellen Art Gallery (2014). Image by Laura Bluher.
Please join us for the fourth of a series of Long Table events.
Read morePlease join us for the third of a series of Long Table events.
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Read moreAn in-person screening of ‘Crying with my Family’ by Maxima Smith.
Read morePlease join us for the second of a series of Long Table events.
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