LADA’s Summer Programme: Week 5

Date: 06 Jul 2020 - 13 Jul 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 6 to Sunday 12 July only, the fifth week of our Summer Season features works by:

Once More With Feeling: Jamie Hale
LADA Patron: Lois Weaver
LADA Screens Greatest Hits: Tehching Hsieh
LADA Screens Greatest Hits: Nando Messias
LADA Screens: Keith Khan
About LADA’s Summer Programme

Check out LADA's Summer Programme

The artist wears a pink dress and veil, with a flower crown.

The Pink Supper, Nando Messias, 2019. Image by Holly Revell.

Jamie Hale

Welfare Counting

Inspired by And Counting by Wafaa Bilal, Welfare Counting is a new work by Jamie Hale. Jamie uses permanent marker to ink the names of disabled people whose deaths are ascribed to benefit cuts or ‘welfare reform’ onto their disabled body, while the names are read out into a looped cacophony of sound and projected onto the backdrop behind Jamie’s wheelchair. Jamie’s body becomes a canvas to explore the scale and forced anonymity of the deaths. The resulting chaos reflects the lack of information, official lists, or formal inquiries into many of these deaths, and marks their scale.

A close up of the artist, a young queer person in a wheelchair, wearing eye shadow and a silver jacket.

Jamie Hale, (NOT DYING), 2019. London, Barbican. Image Jamie Hale

Jamie Hale is a writer, poet, and activist exploring the(ir) crippled body as natural, and mechanised, cyborg and canvas. Their first solo show, NOT DYING featured as part of their curated showcase of D/deaf and disabled creatives in autumn 2020 at the Barbican Centre. They have had work published everywhere from the Guardian to Magma and the Rialto. They are currently wrapped up in multiple creative projects showcasing queer disabled lives in all their complexities.

Welfare Counting was invited by LADA for Once More With Feeling, an online programme of four instruction pieces and performance re-enactments. Further works will be presented in the following weeks of LADA’s Summer Programme.

Lois Weaver

Syllabus for A Making Something Manifesto 2007-2020

Created by: Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw and Laura Hunter Petree

www.split-britches.com

Course Description

We wrote the MAKE SOMETHING manifesto in 2007, and times sure have changed since then. The manifesto was originally written for the book Staging International Feminisms, edited by Elaine Aston and Sarah Case. At the time, we were coming out of our work with domestic violence survivors and women in prisons in Brazil and the UK, looking at how to use performance methodologies to generate discussions on human rights.

Thirteen years later, conversations around gender and race have significantly changed, and we are currently in the midst of a global reckoning on human rights. While we may have used different language if we wrote this manifesto today, we still believe that action, activity, and art are interrelated. In this time of uprising it is just as essential, if not more, to make work that asks questions and talks critically about our context.

Course Objectives

Make something to radicalize our future and challenge our worldviews.

Course Structure and Recommended Readings

When making work, we use our current life situation as a starting point to explore. In our current context, we are thinking a lot about our position as white artists, and our place within the Black Lives Matter movement. Course readings have been selected thinking particularly about this context, and we hope they will add complexity to the text we wrote 13 years ago.

Full Text of MAKE SOMETHING: A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change

TASK: Begin

Combahee River Collective Statement

TASK: Make a pact

Guidelines for Effective White Caucuses

TASK: Locate desire

Mapping our Social Change Roles in Times of Crisis created by Deepa Iyer, Solidarityls, and Building Movement Project

TASK: Beg, borrow and steal

Split Britches Performance Archive

TASK: Embrace accident

Charlotte Lagarde, ‘Colonial White’

TASK: Have faith in humour

Xandra Ibarra, Spictacle II: La Tortillera
Xandra Ibarra, Menstrual Rorschach Interpretation

TASK: Rely on your body

Jean Eric Boulin, On French and American Whiteness

TASK: Imagine context

How to Think Differently About Doing Good as a Creative Person by Omayeli Arenyeka for the Creative Independent

TASK: Make believe

Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over. by Sabrina Orah Mark for the Paris Review

TASK: Make it public

Claudia Rankine reading from Citizen
Split Britches: Know How Archive

Learning Activities

MAKE SOMETHING. Anything. Really. Just make something. And send it to us ([email protected]), or send it to LADA.

Split Britches have recorded this video version of their manifesto.

Tehching Hsieh

Outside Again

Outside Again is a documentary, on Tehching Hsieh’s performance work, made by photographer Hugo Glendinning with writer and curator Adrian Heathfield, shot in Taipei and New York.

Returning to the original sites of his performances many decades later, Hsieh momentarily relives and re-enters the works. Some locations have transformed beyond recognition, or fallen into dereliction, while some have remained relatively unchanged. The occasion of these returns prompts Hsieh to articulate his thoughts on art and its outsides, long durations, and the testing of human limits.

Outside Again was directed and edited by Adrian Heathfield and Hugo Glendinning. The film was commissioned by Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan for Doing Time, the Taiwan Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2017, Venice.

The film was first shown by LADA as part of LADA Screens in 2017. Further information about the artists may be found here.

Nando Messias

Shoot the Sissy

Shoot the Sissy is a disturbingly beautiful freak show – a queer menagerie of carnivalesque contortion and florid fantasy. Confronting the everyday danger of death inherent in the queer condition, Messias pulls you into the firing line. Made in response to the shootings at Pulse in Orlando in 2016, the film reflects on the value of queer lives. Shoot the Sissy invites you to witness secret insights into the murky depths of doubt, terror and dreams, bringing compulsive gazes closer to the bold fragility of his trademark body — a Sissy body.

The film was made by Nando Messias and Sam Williams.

The film was first shown by LADA as part of LADA Screens in 2017. Further information about the artists may be found here.

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:

Jamie Hale, (NOT DYING), 2019. London, Barbican. Image courtesy of the artist.

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

LADA’s Summer Programme: Week 5