Criticism : In Search of Its Placing

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of The Cholmondeleys dance company, founded in 1984 by Lea Anderson, Teresa Montano, and Gaynor Coward. Inspired by the DIY culture of post-punk UK, they wanted to create something that resonated with their friends, blending dance with the energy of fashion, music, and club culture of the 1980s.

They named themselves The Cholmondeleys, like a band. Emerging from this vibrant time, their performances featured collaborations with British artists, including choreographer Lea Anderson, costume designers Sandy Powell, Emma Fryer, Simon Vincenzi, composers Drostan Madden & Steve Blake, and lighting designer Simon Corder. Together with their sister company, The Featherstonehaughs (founded in 1988), they produced over 87 works, both live and on film, performing in the UK and internationally. This rich creative legacy is captured in an archive of images by photographers such as Chris Nash, Pau Ros, and Matilda Temperley, now presented together for the first time in this celebration of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs.

Documents the work of fourteen performance artists who marked the personal and political resonances of the new Millennium in a series of site-specific actions. Contrasting with the epic, populist and homogenising nature of the official celebrations, these works focused on forgotten and ephemeral experiences, enacting small but significant interventions in the public sphere.

Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the relationship between the normative imagination defined as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of affective capitalism. Porta analyzes gender, fashion, artistic creation, and surveillance from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that now comes not from the state or mass media, but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones, and driven by a juridical compulsion, become the axes of societies of control. In this way, the distinctive pathology of our times gives rise to a globalized game: normopathy for all.

This Workbook is the result of RESHAPE – REflect, SHAre, Practice, Experiment, a bottom-up, collaborative research and development project that brought together artists, art workers, and organisations from Europe and the southern Mediterranean to create alternative ways of working towards a fairer arts ecosystem. The project was a response to the challenges of the art sector, infusing its practices with fairness, solidarity, and sustainability and aligning them with with society and its evolutions. The authors – including artists, scholars, and critical thinkers – analyse and contextualise current challenges, thus outlining the spirit of our times that informs and inspires the prototypes.

What position does America occupy in the recent history of western philosophy?

At a time when the syntagm “America” has come to crystallize a certain understanding of the world order, interrogating the place that it occupies in our intellectual and haunted tradition is also a way to engage critically with the violence attached to it. America’s self-understanding involves violence, but this violence may well be different from what we imagined.

Video documentation of an online conversation with artist Keith Khan, in June 2020. This conversation followed an online screening of Khan’s film ‘Z’ as part of our LADA Screens programme. Joseph Morgan Schofield (LADA) caught up with Keith remotely for a discussion considering ideas of faith, devotion, eroticism and ecstasy in relation to Z.

Audio documentation of a lecture given by Malik Nashad Sharpe, on the subject ‘Horror for the Live Context’ on 8th March 2025 at The Garrett Centre.

Culminating his Study Room residency, this talk highlighted some of the utility of making horror as a performance practice, and explored the genre’s potential as a framework for seeing, reading and working with contemporary live performance. During his residency he approached horror as a research tool to tease out an alternative tradition of choreographic practice that contains social resonance and fantastical outcomes, and constitutes a suggestive and speculative lens through which performance can be contextualised.

Artworks referenced and shared in this talk:

‘Shoot’, Chris Burden, 1971, ‘Carcasse’, Piotr Pavlensky, 2013, ‘Rhythm 0’, Marina Abramovic, 1974, ‘American Psycho’, directed by Mary Harron, 2000, ‘Nope’, Directed by Jordan Peele, 2022, ’10 Cloverfield Lane’, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, 2016,  ‘Saw’, directed by James Wan, 2004, ‘Le Manoir de Diable’, directed by George Meillies, 1890, ‘All of us are Dead’, directed by Lee Jae-kyoo; Kim Nam-su, 2022, ‘Untitled Nostalgia 3’, Tiraan Willemse, 2025, ‘Presage’, Elie Autins, 2022, ‘Goner’, Malik Nashad Sharpe, 2024

This is an audio file. For a version with closed captions, please visit our vimeo channel

Maska 196-197 summer 2019 edition on Re/De-Generation. In Slovenian and English.

From the special edition of Maska on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia. In Slovenian and English.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

pg.49-57

Hyunjin Kim contextualises siren eun young jung’s audio-visual work at the 2019 Venice Biennale in relation to queer performance in South Korean history.

Performance Research Vol 6. No. 1. Spring 2001

Departures

The first of three related issues which engage with the migrations of people, performance and performance cultures, generating writing around differing geographies and histories of travel and travelling performance in a diversity of written and visual forms.

Reviews : All Over the Map

A Review of ‘A Woman Who…Essays, Interviews, Scripts’ Yvonne Rainer

by Claire MacDonald

pp. 121 – 123