A six-week collectively-generated course on and in Fat Performance for fat people.
This DIY is run in partnership with Colchester Arts Centre
Despite the fact that fat people have always existed and have always performed, fat people can be excluded from performance environments just as much as we are excluded from other parts of society. This DIY will gather a group of up to twelve fat people who make performance or want to make performance, whether or not that work is explicitly about fatness, to collectively engage in reading, watching, thinking, talking and in short creative assignments. Everybody will contribute materials with which we can engage. This will become a Fat Performance DIY Workbook/Curriculum that we can, if we decide, offer to our wider Live Art community.
It will also be an opportunity to talk about fatness in our worlds of performance, share our experiences, and support one another to work to dismantle anti-fatness through, with, in and beyond Live Art.
Each week for six weeks from the first week of November. We will meet for two hours on Zoom; the time/day of the week is tbc. In between conversations, there will be agreed tasks/reading/watching activities to do; the Zoom will be a chance to feed back and discuss as a group and in breakout rooms – there will be breaks and we will only go on as long as we collectively need!
This project is for practising performers and performance-makers who are fat. The project is not suitable for people who are not fat, even if they are interested in fat or fatness or have even made work about fat. Fat experience is often misunderstood, particularly by non-fat people who are kind. This is not a ‘body positive’ endeavour, though I would hope we would be positive about bodies of all sorts, which would not exclude difficulties of living a fat life in an anti-fat world.
This DIY welcomes experienced artists as well as those newer to making performance.
However, participants should feel able to get on with tasks, with support if desired, and report back on learning for the benefit of the group.
You are strongly encouraged to read Dr Charlotte Cooper’s fantastic Study Room Guide on fat, entitled Tantalising Glimpses, before applying. If you are not sure if you are fat, this will help you think about it; if you are still not sure, please get in touch and I can provide you with some resources and links.
To apply, please submit around 300 words on why you want to take part. You can write more or less; this is not an exercise in meeting the word count. You can make a video or audio track of no more than five minutes if you prefer. In this you should say something about your experience of fatness. You can also say anything else you would like about what you might hope to experience and what you might need in order to take part. It would be helpful but not mandatory to know about any access needs so that we can begin to plan accordingly.
To apply via video/audio please submit your recording via WeTransfer to [email protected].
If there are more than twelve suitable applications then names will be picked out of a hat.
I am a choreographer living and working in Newcastle upon Tyne. My work starts from the points of view of dance and choreography and results in performances, texts, events and pedagogical encounters that are presented in contexts associated with multiple artforms. I am interested in post-work politics, radical pedagogies, and the potentials of friendship. I have degrees, including a practice-based PhD, in dance and in performance.
I am fat. Right now I am a ‘small fat’, according to the Fat Lip Fatness Spectrum, but I have been fatter (and I have been thinner). I experience some thin privilege. I have made one performance explicitly about fatness, Ophelia is not Dead, which is available in the LADA Study Room. The rest of my work has been focused on other things. You can read more about my work at gilliekleiman.com.
A list of the artist development workshops being run as part of DIY 2020.
Artistic practice as queer civics: a series of online encounters about making better worlds through lived experience, material support, fun, and mutation.
Read moreRestless Study will be a space for people to study which privileges restlessness and distraction over focus and concentration. We will generate, manipulate and circulate objects of study, including text, conversation, image, action, movement, and beyond. We will throw off the shackles of goal-oriented education to reclaim study as a vital, liberatory mode of being in dialogue with others!
Read moreThis DIY project uses performance informed by science fiction, magic, ritual and idiocy to explore how our relationship to the public realm has changed and will continue to change because of COVID-19.
Read moreSocial life marooned like Tom Hanks in Castaway? Don’t befriend a volleyball, get social at Live Art Social (distance) Club!
Read moreA 3-day remote retreat for six producers, curators and arts administrators who have had to undo their present and future work due to COVID-19. This DIY is run in partnership with ArtHouse Jersey
Read moreInterested in using Live Art to create lo-fi short films exploring mental health and queer culture?
Read more“… Money talks, Dirty cash I want you, dirty cash I need you, oho”
Read moreAutobiographical sessions for postcolonial diaspora. Bodies as places of legacy; voice as ancestral calling; sharing stories; rituals; being vulnerable together.
Read moreConversations on expanded multi-dimensional ideas of anatomy, divination, geography and language, seeking to bring transformational movement to ideas of trauma and healing as they are shaped by oppressive systems and given form in our bodies
Read moreThat’s Governance! invites participants to interrogate conditions of governance, and propose, through roleplay, a non-human candidate for Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW)’s Board of Trustees.
Read more“We will each immerse ourselves in a nearby forest and co-generate shared experiences through a series of synchronous somatic exercises and collective reading online. These activities will be the departure point for writing ghost stories and erotica.”
Read moreWhite Vinegar Workshop revolves around the quote from leading New York artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”.
Read moreLeonie and Ishwari will be working to explore alternative processes of mapping time and landscape, moving away from ideas of linearity and colonial legacies of demarcation. Focussing on process rather than production, they will do this using plant-based darkroom printing, fermentation and chorus interventions.
Read moreMake like teenagers and build the Discord fanfiction version of Live Art from your bedroom, under the mentorship of real-life Discord experts (teenagers).
Read moreAn intimate online pleasure LAB for disabled queers exploring Kink as an artistic tool for self-care.
Read moreA workshop aimed at fans and future fans of the late great Katherine Araniello, a queer, crip, red-headed firebrand whose work lives on to disturb and tantalize in equal measure.
Read moreA workshop for artists who lost projects in 2020, sharing what we have lost, learned and gained, creating mourning rituals and (re)discovering our individual and collective resources.
Read moreAn online residency queerying ‘The politics of Intimacy’ within our bodies and lives as well as in our creative practice/s
Read moreA Way Away uses the mode of correspondence course to explore ideas around distance – spatial and temporal, physical and social, imagined and real.
Read moreTaking an experimental journey of gentle sensory under-load, progressively leading up to observing or participating in a full body wrap.
Read moreApply to participate in DIY 2020; workshops developed and lead BY artists, FOR artists
Read moreThe first in a series of workshop sessions for SWANA young people to find out more about creative careers, and exchange knowledge with not only each other, but boss industry professionals smashing it in their fields.
Read moreProfessional development projects – BY artists FOR artists – across the UK.
Read moreIdentity is a complex thing. Difference is beautiful.
Read moreA 3-day expedition to find out what it means to survive as an artist
Read more