Crossovers: A Performance Matters DVD series

Crossovers will develop a series of DVD publications to amplify the dissemination and impact of cutting-edge film-works arising from the Performance Matters research activities. These eight films - including creative documentaries, an artist's feature film and specially recorded in-conversations with leading intellectuals - address marginal and untold histories of performance in inventive ways, and raise issues around the place of performance in new directions of contemporary thought.

The project will result in the professional post-production and distribution of these highly original and diverse works, making them available in screening formats and as purchasable DVDs. Alongside this, screenings to targeted media-industry professionals will be organised and contextualizing launch activities with major cultural sector partners will be mounted for diverse audiences.

The commercial dissemination, screening and contextualizing events will combine one-way and interactive engagements that will facilitate knowledge exchange. Contextualising events will significantly broaden the audience and critical reception of the research concerns of Performance Matters beyond its existing substantive academic and artistic audiences, especially to popular art, media and film festival audiences.

Through carefully considered interactive engagement, and follow-up events, Crossovers will also develop new and sustainable relationships between media-industry and other public-sector professionals and the individuals and institutions associated with the project. Building on the way that Performance Matters developed the research engagement of public sector partner the Live Art Development Agency, Crossovers will not only foster development of the Agency's publishing arm, but will also lead to sustained forms of knowledge exchange between performance scholars/organisers and film festival directors, video distributors and commissioning TV editors.

In this way, Crossovers is designed to build sustainable professional relationships around performance studies media-products that will have lasting effects beyond the period of the award.

The non-academic beneficiaries of this project fall into three distinct categories: the cultural sector partner and its organisational collaborators; specific invited media professionals and other cultural sector workers; and numerous audience members for the film works (and contextualising events) with interests in contemporary art, film, performance, club, sub-cultures and popular thought.

The impacts achieved in the last three years of Performance Matters (evidenced in an Impact Case Study for both institutions in the coming REF) focused on the generation of new ways of thinking, the forging of new forms of creative expression, and the impact on participating cultural organisations in terms of their cultural practice and expansion of their user constituencies. Considerable change has been initiated for the main cultural sector partner and charity LADA (as evidenced in their supporting letter). The major programme of research work over the last three years has substantially developed LADA's educational, training and creative research profile, has generated new aspects of its archival and commercial publishing activities and expanded its user community in terms of its reach and diversity. This Follow-on Funding project will help to move the agency's work into active collaborations with committed new media and visual arts organisations; will help transform the nature of its publishing activities towards accessible moving image production and distribution; will create greater interaction with journalists and broadcast media, and through these means will considerably extend its user community in terms of scale and genres of interest. This will be achieved within the one-year period of the award. Further impact is envisaged beyond this point, however, as LADA will continue to build on the media relations and publications programme initiated by follow-on funding, adding new titles and expanding its users still further in subsequent years.

Specific influential media professionals and other cultural sector workers are targeted by the screening and knowledge exchange strategy in this project, which will create further pathways to impact in a range of film festivals and programmes, galleries, critical reviews and other cultural events. Crossovers will enhance and shape an interest in performance and its discourses in the public sphere, both through debate at the screening events, and in negotiating, where possible, further dissemination of Crossover titles through broadcast, exhibition and sale. We will gather evidence of impact both from professional attendees at our screening events (through audience surveys), and through keeping a log of all reviews and programmes that take on Crossovers films.

The audience for these accessible DVD works (and their contextualising events) spans diverse constituencies of interest across the arts and popular thought, and will shift these constituencies' understandings of the status, cultural and critical potentials of performance. Wide, popular, interdisciplinary dissemination of this kind strengthens audience attendance across the sector and deepens and enhances the quality of engagement with performance-related cultures and thinking.

As an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation LADA has considerable expertise in monitoring audience numbers and engagement through quantitative and qualitative means. Quantitative indicators the partners will use will include DVD sales, audience attendance figures, audience surveys demographics alongside self-nominated mailing list database figures. Qualitative indicators will include audience and participant surveys and testimonies from key contributing artists and organisations. The partners will monitor and report back on the initial impact through these means, feeding this analysis into their monthly managerial evaluations. As impact is ongoing it will be consistently monitored by LADA in these ways beyond the term of the award.