LADA’s Summer Programme: Week 3

Date: 22 Jun 2020 - 29 Jun 2020
Location: Online
Price: Free

Black Lives Matter – Please contribute to a cause that’s important to you where you can, whether it’s financially, in-kind, or through direct action. Here are a few suggestions: Ways you can help, a master list of donations, petitions, and resources from the US; Split a donation between 70+ community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organizers in the U.S; The National Mikey Powell Memorial Family Fund, supporting families and campaigns affected by custody deaths in the UK; Donate to Black Lives Matter UK, a coalition of Black liberation organisers across the UK.

LADA's Summer Programme

During these times we strive to remain a resource for our community by keeping our calls open, developing new opportunities for artists to be artists, offering a wide range of free resources, and developing this online Summer Programme that draws upon the incredible resources and resourcefulness of the artists and organisations who work with, around, and for Live Art.

Online this week

Available from Monday 22 to Sunday 28 June only, the third week of our Summer Season features works by:

Guillermo Gómez-Peña
SWAGGA
M21
Tim Etchells
Neil Bartlett
Keith Khan
About LADA’s Summer Programme

Check out LADA's Summer Programme

A female performer stands in a bathroom, with both hands pulling her hair above her head, staring into a mirror.

'Z', Keith Khan, 2020. Still from video. LADA Screens, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978, and since 1995, his two homes have been San Francisco and Mexico City. His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations.

His artwork has been presented at over one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT), the Performance Art Week Journal of the Venice Biennale, and emisférica, the publication of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU).

Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. As of 2020, Gómez-Peña is working with his troupe on multiple reenactments of his “living archives” project, publishing two anthologies, a new enhanced Pocha Pedagogy book (with La Saula) and creating a border opera titled “WE ARE ALL ALIENS” (featuring classical concert pianists and Mariachis) and producing a documentary portrait of his beloved troupe in collaboration with filmmaker Amber Bemak.

Under the multiple pandemics, Gómez-Peña and his close colleagues have built a “Barrio Zoom Broadcasting Station” where he presents weekly live performances, virtual poetry slams, classroom visits and conducts 1:1 mentorships.

LA LOCA. Image curtesy of artist

SWAGGA

A Study on Camera

In 2014 Project O (Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small) began working with Charlotte Cooper and Kay Hyatt on a show called SWAGGA. The work is rooted in dance and draws on other performance traditions, including a live soundtrack by Trash Kit and original compositions by Verity Susman. This collaboration was remarkable because it featured untrained dancers with the kinds of political bodies – fat, queer, older – that are rarely treated as creative, expressive or worthy choreographic subjects. Over two years SWAGGA was refined and performed for audiences around the country. Katarzyna Perlak documented the process and in 2016 created SWAGGA: A Study On Camera, a creative response to the live performance. The result is an extravaganza of mess, antisocial emotions and intersectional feminist sensibility.

SWAGGA: A Study On Camera was first screened by the Live Art Development Agency in 2018 as part of the LADA Screens programme, a series of online screenings of seminal performance documentation, works to camera, short videos, films and archival footage.

SWAGGA: A Study On Camera by SWAGGA. Image by Katarzyna Perlak.

M21

M21: From the Medieval to the 21st Century was a May 2012 Bank Holiday weekend of Live Art events by some of the UK’s most radical disabled artists on the streets and in the surroundings of Much Wenlock, the birthplace of the modern Olympic Games.

M21 brought together the history of this small Shropshire town with the politics of Live Art through specially commissioned performances by sean burn, The Disabled Avant-Garde, Invalid Film Crew, Noemi Lakmaier, Simon Mckeown, Alan McLean, Tanya Raabe, The Wandering Jew and Ann Whitehurst.

M21: From the Medieval to the 21st Century was first screened by the Live Art Development Agency in 2017 as part of the LADA Screens programme, a series of online screenings of seminal performance documentation, works to camera, short videos, films and archival footage.

The M21 film was made by the Invalid Film Crew from Croatia, and was created both as part of M21 and as documentation of M21. M21 was commissioned by the Unlimited programme, part of the London 2012 Festival and Cultural Olympiad, and produced by DASH in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency.

The Disabled Avant Garde, Wendeville and Manlock, 2012, Much Wenlock. Image credit Richard Foot. LADA Projects, M21 From the Medieval to the 21st Century, in collaboration with DASH

Tim Etchells

Better Days (Fragment)

In this short performance to camera Etchells presents work in progress using the phrase ‘We’ve seen better days’, which changes through a process of vocal repetition. As with much of Etchells’ solo performance work with language, the looping and transformation of the text occurs through shifts in tone, energy and delivery as the piece goes on. In Better Days this embodied process is mirrored by the movement of the hand-held camera, the shot lurching back and forth with Etchells’ movement, revealing brief glimpses of the space in which it’s filmed, the bright light from windows and other elements of the scene. Shifting from the statement that we’ve “seen better days” to an announcement that we’ll “see better days” Etchells performance – filmed at home on the day of Far Right demonstrations across the UK – acknowledges the weight of the tough political circumstances in which we find ourselves and at the same time seems to contain a confident expectation that change for the better can come.

LADA artist Patron Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer based in the UK. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as leader of the world-renowned performance group Forced Entertainment and in collaboration with a range of visual artists, choreographers, and photographers. His work spans performance, video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. He is currently Professor of Performance & Writing at Lancaster University.

Seen from Here: Writing in the Lockdown is a collection of stories, flash fiction, poems, autofiction and conceptual writing gathered during the April and May Covid-19 lockdown, bringing together UK-based writers, poets, performance makers and artists. The collection is edited by Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat and 100% of the proceeds go to support The Trussell Trust, a UK-wide network of foodbanks.

An image of Tim Etchells. He is a white man wearing a blue jacket.

Tim Etchells, image courtesy of the artist.

Neil Bartlett

This film is a unique record of Bartlett’s 2017 re-mastering of A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, his solo meditation on the life and work of pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon. A Vision of Love was acclaimed as one of the defining queer performances of the decade when Bartlett originally performed it in London at the height of the first wave of the British AIDS epidemic in 1987 ; thirty years later, to celebrate the inclusion of Solomon’s work in Queer British Art 1861-1967 exhibition, Bartlett revived the piece for one night only in a collaboration between Tate Britain and the Live Art Development Agency.

Neil Bartlett is an author, theatre director and performer. Since starting work in 1982 he has made radical new performance work in many strange and beautiful places, including Southwark Cathedral, several derelict warehouses, a working hospital lecture-theatre, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern – and the Lyric Hammersmith, where he was artistic director from 1994 to 2005. Leading cultural producers with whom he has collaborated include the Manchester and Edinburgh International Festivals, the Holland, Aldeburgh and Brighton Festivals, Duckie, Artangel, the National Theatre, 1418NOW and LIFT. In 2016 he gave an uninterrupted six-hour reading of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis in the chapel of Reading Gaol, a performance which has since been watched online in fifty-eight countries around the world; in 2019, he worked for an even larger audience, creating 24 HOURS OF PEACE, a one-off , 237,000-word-long performance for Remembrance Sunday delivered live at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester and also broadcast live – in its entirety – by Resonance FM. A complete recording of 24 HOURS OF PEACE is also available online. The first of his five novels, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, first published in 1990, has just been reissued by Profile Books. You can find out more about all of Neil’s work, and contact him here.

A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep was first screened by the Live Art Development Agency in 2017 as part of the LADA Screens programme, a series of online screenings of seminal performance documentation, works to camera, short videos, films and archival footage.

Neil Bartlett, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, 2017, Tate Britain. Video still. LADA Projects, in collaboration with with Tate Britain for Queer British Art 1861-1967

Keith Khan

Keith Khan’s new film Z is our summer LADA Screens. Z is inspired by the movements of penitence and suffering of devotional rituals in Spanish Catholicism. Z is available to watch online until July 19, accompanied by a filmed conversation with Khan.

Watch 'Z'

A orange tower block is shot from below, against a blue sky.

'Z', Keith Khan, 2020. Still from video. LADA Screens, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Summer Programme

Between Monday 8 June and Sunday 19 July, LADA is presenting an online Summer Programme – weekly offerings of screenings, talks, presentations and ‘live’ online events that draw upon the incredible resources and resourcefulness of the artists and organisations who work with, around, and for Live Art. This programme will include contributions by LADA’s artist Patrons, a selection of LADA Screens Greatest Hits and the presentations of Once More with Feeling – a series of instruction and reenactment pieces commissioned by LADA during the Covid-19 pandemic.

During these times we strive to remain a resource for our community: responding to the pandemic, and the associated states of isolation, lockdown and distancing, LADA has compiled this ongoing list of support and resources for artists and arts workers, have sought proposals for two online, collaborative home-based residencies, and begun a series of ‘Lockdown Lists‘ which draw attention to the ways in which contemporary and historic Live Art practices speak to the issues and conditions of lockdown.

Check out LADA's Summer Programme

A shirtless man dances with his back to the camera. His arms are extended, christ like. He is in the desert, beneath a big blue sky.

'Z', Keith Khan, 2020. Still from video. LADA Screens, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Artist is lifted into the air by hellium balloons

Cherophobia, Noëmi Lakmaier, 2016. Pinhole image by Tina Rowe.

Banner image credit:

SWAGGA, still from video, 2016. Image courtesy of the artists.

Part of LADA's Summer Programme 2020

A season of weekly offerings of screenings, talks, presentations and ‘live’ online events.

LADA’s Summer Programme: Week 3