DIY: 2015 – Daniel Oliver ‘Awkwoods: A Rural Retreat’

Experimental adventures in awkward participatory performance

Project Summary

A three-day performative and immersive workshop about awkward audience participation and immersive performance. It is for artists working within experimental theatre, Live Art and Performance Art who have an invested interest in audience participation. It will consist of a series of discussions and workshops exploring awkwardness and audience participation. Importantly, it will also be an awkwardly facilitated 3-day immersive performance itself. The participants and Daniel will live together, working, eating, and sleeping in the same space. Our experiments, interactions, and discussions will occur within the loosely fictional framework of a 'rural retreat' called 'ORK WOODS' (when in reality we will be in a large room in London). These 'woods' will be constructed within from parcel tape, dirt, sticks and so on. On the third day of the project we will open up ORK WOODS: A Rural Retreat to invited participants, who will enter into the world we have created and have the opportunity to experience a series of awkward participatory performances that take place within that world. May contain naturists.

Application Deadline: Deadline passed.

Dates, time and location
Friday 18 – Sunday 20 September. London.

The Artist

Daniel Oliver creates participatory performances that layer precariously maintained fantasies with clunky, immanent reality, foregrounding the liveness inherent in working with unprepared participants. They are unashamedly dyspraxic, embracing a lightly off-kilter relationship with co-ordination, social interaction and executive planning. Each show emerges as a farcical dictatorship, held together with parcel tape, decorated in mud and tinfoil, and always on the brink of collapse. Daniel has recently submitted a PhD thesis entitled 'The Efficacy of Awkwardness in Contemporary Participatory Performance' for the Drama Department at Queen Mary University of London.