Reclaiming the Right to Performance

What do the invention of anaesthetics in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Nazis’ use of cocaine, and the development of Prozac have in common? The answer is that they’re all products of the same logic that defines our contemporary era: ‘the age of anaesthesia’. Laurent de Sutter shows how large aspects of our lives are now characterised by the management of our emotions through drugs, ranging from the everyday use of sleeping pills to hard narcotics. Chemistry has become so much a part of us that we can’t even see how much it has changed us.

In this era, being a subject doesn’t simply mean being subjected to powers that decide our lives: it means that our very emotions have been outsourced to chemical stimulation. Yet we don’t understand why the drugs that we take are unable to free us from fatigue and depression, and from the absence of desire that now characterizes our psychopolitical condition.  We have forgotten what it means to be excited because our only excitement has become drug-induced.  We have to abandon the narcotic stimulation that we’ve come to rely on and find a way back to the collective excitement that is narcocapitalism’s greatest fear.

Reading Ecologies: Transforming Publishing in Africa calls for insurgent publishing, aesthetic and epistemic struggles of independent publishers from the African continent and diasphora.

Dinner with America is the second in a trilogy of performance installations addressing the complexities of cultural identity in the 21st Century. Where the first piece in the trilogy, Mr Quiver (Nuffield Autumn 07), explored Indian and English stereotypes, this piece questions what America means to us.

As the performance space shifts and transforms around the audience, it gently uncovers themes of consumerism, rights, ownership, voices, hopes, harvest and division in a visually compelling and unusual piece of work.

This booklet was published in November 2008 to accompany the touring production of Dinner with America by Rajni Shah Theatre. All images, films and texts were made during and as part of the creative process. They are designed to illuminate both the core and outlying ideas that inhabited the artists’ thinking at the time of making the show, between February 2007 and November 2008.

Each essay shares two fundamental premises. First, that the oppression of gays and lesbians is not an isolated case, and therefore their struggle is necessarily part of a larger movement for social liberation. And, second, that the experience of gays and lesbians uphold the basic tenets of a foundational Marxism, and that they are uniquely placed to contribute to a revitalisation of Marxist theory.

The Library of Performing Rights is a unique resource containing over 250 items submitted by artists, activists and academics from around the world that examine the intersection between performance and Human Rights.

The catalogue is available here and is continuously updated.

Please note the Library is currently housed in the Study Room but is a touring Library so please contact LADA before your visit to check it is not out on the road.

From the age of Aristotle to the age of AIDS, writers, thinkers, performers and activists have wresteled with what “performance” is all about. At the same moment, “performativity”–a new concept in language theory–has become a ubiquitous term in literary studies. This volume grapples with the nature of these two key terms whose traces can be found everywhere: in the theatre, in the streets, in philosophy, in questions of race and gender, and in the sentences we speak.

Published on the fifth anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, Artwash is an intervention into the unsavoury role of the Big Oil company’s sponsorship of the arts in Britain.

A book about theatricality and spectatorship in the early twenty-first century. In a wide-ranging analysis that draws upon theatrical, visual and philosophical approaches, it asks how spectators and audiences negotiate the complexities and challenges of contemporary experimental performance arts.

Immersive Life Practices talks to Chicago-based artists and authors about life as an art practice and art as a life practice. The contributors explore a range of concerns, from how to be holistic, ethical, or practical; to how to balance life and work; to formal questions of how to represent a never-ending project.

A collection of essays on the installation and performance work of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. Contributors: Domenico Scudero, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Irma Arestizabal, Roberto Pinto, Simonetta Lux

Kalb weaves his impressive historical knowledge of theatre into detailed descriptions of marathon productions he has seen and studied.

A retelling the history of art practice and exposing the ways in which neoliberal norms and values have seeped into every aspect of our lives.