Skip to main content

The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor, and Leisure in 1960s New York

Notes

Analyzes artistic performances, social performances, archival remains, and memoirs of the underground theater scene in 1960s New York. 

Artist / Author Giulia Palladini
Publisher Northwestern University Press
ISBN 978-0810135222
Reference P3458
Date 2017
Type Publication

Keywords

Similar items

Live Art Bookshop: Globus Hystericus Book Launch

Artist/Author: Kainulainen & Latva | Digital Reference: EF5450 | Type: Digital File

Audio recording of the UK launch of performance art duo Kainulainen & Latva’s book Globus Hystericus, published in 2025 by Finnish publishing house Taide.

Finnish performance art duo Kainulainen & Latva have been making extraordinary performances in both their native Finland and internationally since 2014. Informed by narratives of personal trauma, twinned with accounts of Finnish folklore, they have produced a prolific and unique body of work from their profoundly intimate and collaborative dynamic.

Performance artists Katri Kainulainen and Maximilian Latva gave a presentation with video clips and slides of their practice, followed by a Q&A session with special guests Dominic Johnson and Martin O’Brien. Key themes explored in the neurodivergent duo’s work include trauma, power relations and gender issues.

The event was hosted at LADA on Wednesday 22 July, 2026.

Unfixed Archives: Holders of Liveness – Podcast Launch

Artist/Author: Sophie Barrett-Pouleau | Digital Reference: EF5432 | Type: Digital File

Unfixed Archives is amonthly radio show podcast on RTM radio, taking listeners on an audio journey that investigates how archivists and artists work with performance, why they do what they do, and what happens to performance once it’s ‘finished’.

Audio recording of the Unfixed Archives: Holders of Liveness – Podcast Launch on Friday 27 June 2025.

Unbound Zine: Xiaomei Going Overseas

Artist/Author: Oyester | Digital Reference: EF5429 | Type: Digital File

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.

these teeming forms

Artist/Author: Joseph Morgan Schofield | Reference: EF5428 | Type: Digital File

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

Artist/Author: Charlotte Cooper | Digital Reference: EF5427 | Type: Digital File

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.

COMMUCRACY NOW!

Artist/Author: Oozing Gloop! | Reference: EF5424 | Type: Digital File

The world’s biggest and only autistic green Drag Queen, Oozing Gloop is back and inspiring people to re-imagine the structures that govern their lives. Defying usual understanding of meaning and belonging, this world to come is run via a new economy of government – Commucracy!  (But what the fuck is Commucracy? Read the manifesto.)

Follow Oozing Gloop on this epic trip, where you’ll find psychoactive solutions for psychopathetic citizens trapped behind the very screens that are there to help them communicate. From the highest to the lowest Oozing Gloop will seek to link the universal to the particular to revive the democratic impulse and pose the communist hypothesis.

Commucracy Now! is a companion piece to Glooptopia!, Oozing Gloop’s latest theatre show, and is a direct challenge to the notion that people with Autism “struggle with social imagination”, and also to the simple fact it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We have a wealth of apocalyptic omens, disaster movies and critique; but zero 21st century post-capital-culture. Oozing Gloop defies this with revolutionary zeal and determination to open radical new spheres of imagination and fantasy! Just as we got through that, we can get through this!

This video was screened as part of Land, Material, Memory at Tate Britain on Saturday 28 February 2026.

Beer Advertisement (Dyke, Just Do It)

Artist/Author: SWEATMOTHER | Reference: EF5418 | Type: Digital File

Beer Advertisement (Dyke, Just Do It) (2025) is a two-cannel video installation by SWEATMOTHER, presented at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

cock~salt

Artist/Author: Claye Bowler | Reference: EF5414 | Type: Digital File

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.

The Rules of Watching: Interactive Talk

Artist/Author: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Symoné | Reference: EF5412 | Type: Digital File

Video documentation of an interactive talk from artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Symoné. It explored agency and spectatorship in the intersections between live art and gaming.

Mishandled Archive: Book Launch and Celebration

Artist/Author: Tara Fatehi | Reference: EF5411 | Type: Digital File

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.

BECOMING AN OBJECT: An evening with Skip Arnold

Artist/Author: Skip Arnold | Type: Digital File

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.

Radical Rediscoveries: Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement 1969–1987

Artist/Author: Susan Croft, Jane Arden, Pan Gems, Hesitate and Demonstrate, Melissa Murray, Natasha Morgan, Winsome Pinnock | Reference: P4314 | ISBN: 978-3-945247-36-5 | Type: Publication

This collection brings together six seminal works of British alternative feminist and women’s theatre from the archive, with a contextual introductory text by Dr. Susan Croft, co-founder of Unfinished Histories.

Donation

£