Black Performance Theory

Video documentation of THE CALL CENTRE with Artist in Residence Samra Mayanja and Riot + the Ether co-presented with Newington Green Meeting House.

Curated and hosted by Samra Mayanja, THE CALL CENTRE has become a monthly must-see in London’s Live Art calendar. Initiated in and usually taking place in her studio, Samra has created a framework not only about, but in service to, that difficult task that we engage with every day, which is to speak. To say ourselves and to speak ourselves, and to make the decision with every word and every breath not to hide.

For each CALL CENTRE, Samra invites cross-disciplinary artists and writers to share live work with and alongside her. This framework comes from her impulse to contextualise her own work through the artists whose work she loves.

In this special edition of THE CALL CENTRE  Samra stepped out of her 21 seater studio and joined the long-line of dissenting voices that have spoken out in the chapel at Newington Green Meeting House.

Riot + the Ether presented ‘the impossible big’ on Saturday 07 February, 2026.

Video documentation of a one-off event hosted at LADA. Artist Tim Etchells invited performer Rosana Cade and musician Angharad Davies to join him in an encounter working with text loop fragments and violin improvisation. Drawing on Etchells’ practice in which language distorts and transforms through repetition and in dialogue with sound elements, More details are slowly falling in was a collaborative experiment in which three unique artists bring their considerable individual experience and perspectives to play, inventing and exploring sonic material together.

The starting point for the performance was a set of text fragments taken from Etchells’ notebook – overheard comments, puzzling images and questions – which take their place in layers of voice and violin in compositions where texture, energy and musicality are as important as semantics.

The event was hosted at The Garrett Centre on Saturday 21 February, 2026

Unbound Zine: Xiaomei Going Overseas is a 30-minute surreal drag performance mixed with field trip recordings of East and Southeast Asian queer self-publishing heroes.

Screened at LADA at Live Art Bookshop x Queer and Feminist Zine Spirits Across Borders on Saturday 13 Dec 2025.

Shot in a breath between lockdowns in 2021, these teeming forms is a sensate and mythic film, imagining a process of wilding – of entering the land and being opened by it. Memory and desire, history and loss, future and fantasy become porous, contributing to a textural and sensate meditation on living.

Commissioned by ]performance s p a c e[. Presented by ]ps[, ICA (London), VSSL studio, Chisenhale Studioes (2021) and Venice International Performance Art Week (2023). Funded by Arts Council England.

Single-channel video work; duration: 28.33

Nuidey is a short film made on an iPhone. It depicts three middle-aged queers, two of them fat, dancing in the Western Isles in slow motion in June 2024. They are naked.

There is a soundtrack of twangy music and reflections by the performers, which are subtitled. The reflections concern the place, light, rationale; fat subjectivity; what it is to be seen in real life and online; illness and decision-making. The conversation is intimate, the performers know each other well.

The film was conceived of and made by Charlotte Cooper as an expansion of her book Fat Body Work (2025 33editions).

The film was screened as part of Live Art Bookshop: Fat Body Work Launch at LADA on Wednesday 29 October 2025.

F A U L T L I N E S (2022) is a performance video from SITE, screened at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

cock~salt (2025) is a performance to camera by Claye Bowler, screened at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

An online event to celebrate the launch of artist and writer Tara Fatehi Irani’s new book Mishandled Archive, published by LADA. Hosted by Rachel Mars, the event features an excerpt from Tara’s performance of Mishandled Archive with Pouya Ehsaei, a performative presentation by Diana Damian Martin, Mary Paterson, Jemima Yong, Maddy Costa and Holly Revell and special appearances by Giulia Palladini and Joe Kelleher.

Writer and academic Dominic Johnson hosts a rare UK appearance by the US (French based) artist Skip Arnold. They screened a selection of Skip’s videos and other documents, and discussed the body, duration, intervention, commitment, and documentation.

Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content.

A visual diary zine of the Chines photographer SickGirl’s (@eeriesickgirl) Exile Route between 25 Dec 2023 and 16 Nov 2024.