Live Art in Scotland
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Glasgow
Department Name: School of Culture & Creative Arts
Abstract
The Live Art in Scotland project sets out to write a major, missing chapter in the history of experimental arts and cutting-edge performance in the UK, and use that knowledge to inform debates about the future of creative risk-taking as the engine of cultural innovation. Though Scotland has been home to much of the UK's most striking and innovative Live Art (characterised by experimental, experiential and time-based practices) through events such as the National Review of Live Art, existing scholarship on theatre and performance has emphasised a literary dramatic tradition. This means that a significant body of cultural practice - often working in advance of existing styles and tastes to explore new possibilities for the relationship between art and everyday life - has been overlooked to date. This project counters that absence while asking how a history of Live Art in Scotland might inform a broader understanding of the infrastructures needed to foster, support and sustain experimental work in uncertain times. If the future of the UK's cultural economies - and our prosperity as a whole - is tied to creative innovation, how best to support artists and cultural workers seeking new forms and models for artistic expression? How can practitioners, funding bodies and cultural institutions work together to create space for new languages, ideas and strategies for representation?
This project answers those questions by synthesizing archival research in major UK collections with a wide-ranging series of oral history interviews. The first element involves engaging with a range of personal and institutional records in collections across Scotland and the rest of the UK - in the first instance, the Scottish Theatre Archive, the Third Eye / Centre for Contemporary Arts collection and the National Review of Live Art collection. Materials spanning documentation of performances, programming practices, funding applications and personal correspondence drawn from these sources will underpin a materialist account of the conditions through which Live Art has been developed and staged in Scotland. In doing so, the research will consider the relationships between individual artists, groups and the different kinds of institutions working to support and present their work - including building-based organisations or venues like The Arches, funding agencies like Creative Scotland (and its precursor the Scottish Arts Council) alongside festivals like New Territories or the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This archival work will be extended and counterpointed through a series of oral history interviews with Live Art practitioners from across the sector, bringing well-established voices into conversation with other informants including those sometimes omitted from 'official' accounts (including producers, programmers, stage managers and technical theatre workers). Edited excerpts from these interviews will be released as a free podcast series, offering an easy point of access to the project's engagement with Scotland's rich history of experimental performance.
Beyond contributing a missing chapter to the history of theatre, performance and experimental arts in Scotland - and the UK as a whole - this research aims to inform cultural policy discussions concerning 'resilience' in the creative sector (meaning the ways in which cultural and creative workers respond and adapt to sudden changes or 'shocks' such as venue closures or losses to funding). To this end, the PI will collaborate with academic researchers, institutional policy-makers and arts practitioners from across the sector - developing a new major monograph on the history of Live Art in Scotland, and leading a series of symposia and public forums. A unique micro-publication 'zine will reproduce materials drawn from the project's archives alongside specially commissioned artist contributions, and be made available as a free publication online and at key festivals and venues across the UK.
This project answers those questions by synthesizing archival research in major UK collections with a wide-ranging series of oral history interviews. The first element involves engaging with a range of personal and institutional records in collections across Scotland and the rest of the UK - in the first instance, the Scottish Theatre Archive, the Third Eye / Centre for Contemporary Arts collection and the National Review of Live Art collection. Materials spanning documentation of performances, programming practices, funding applications and personal correspondence drawn from these sources will underpin a materialist account of the conditions through which Live Art has been developed and staged in Scotland. In doing so, the research will consider the relationships between individual artists, groups and the different kinds of institutions working to support and present their work - including building-based organisations or venues like The Arches, funding agencies like Creative Scotland (and its precursor the Scottish Arts Council) alongside festivals like New Territories or the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This archival work will be extended and counterpointed through a series of oral history interviews with Live Art practitioners from across the sector, bringing well-established voices into conversation with other informants including those sometimes omitted from 'official' accounts (including producers, programmers, stage managers and technical theatre workers). Edited excerpts from these interviews will be released as a free podcast series, offering an easy point of access to the project's engagement with Scotland's rich history of experimental performance.
Beyond contributing a missing chapter to the history of theatre, performance and experimental arts in Scotland - and the UK as a whole - this research aims to inform cultural policy discussions concerning 'resilience' in the creative sector (meaning the ways in which cultural and creative workers respond and adapt to sudden changes or 'shocks' such as venue closures or losses to funding). To this end, the PI will collaborate with academic researchers, institutional policy-makers and arts practitioners from across the sector - developing a new major monograph on the history of Live Art in Scotland, and leading a series of symposia and public forums. A unique micro-publication 'zine will reproduce materials drawn from the project's archives alongside specially commissioned artist contributions, and be made available as a free publication online and at key festivals and venues across the UK.
Planned Impact
1) Arts practitioners and funding/support organizations working across the fields of Live Art, new and interdisciplinary performance in Scotland.
The PI will curate and run a series of sectoral forums with practitioners, programmers, producers, venue representatives, invited researchers and other stakeholders in sites across Scotland. These events will provide a platform for those currently working across the field of Live Art to explore its history and discover opportunities for collaboration or resource-sharing. The purpose of these events will be to create spaces in which Scotland's distributed Live Art community (focused on the central belt but extending far beyond it) can reflect on the current state of the sector and begin to plan for its future, while also creating pathways for research dissemination in the form of 'lightning talks' centered on material selected from the project's archival sources. A strand of themed discussions will focus on the relationships that exist between individual arts workers (most often working on a project basis) and established organisations in receipt of longer-term funding, facilitating participants to imagine and assess structures of support that better acknowledge and respond to differences in access to resource.
These forums will also support the development and refinement of the project's guide to Live Art infrastructures in Scotland, published to the project's website and distributed/advertised to the sector via Creative Scotland, Take Me Somewhere and the CCA's websites. Initially developed by the PI in consultation with Creative Scotland's Interdisciplinary Performance officer and the project's advisory board, and through feedback in the sectoral forums, this resource will map sources of funding, support and development accessible to practitioners working in Live Art in Scotland. Together, the forums and infrastructure guide will drive understanding of the distribution of responsibilities for risk and resilience across the sector, support challenges to the unexplored assumptions that frequently underpin 'resilience thinking' and use the resulting insights to inform the future direction of (infra)structural reforms.
2) Individuals from the general public interested in experimental performance and arts practices.
Working with a designer, the PI will create and edit an original archival zine, published digitally on the project website and made available as a limited-edition hard copy distributed to key arts venues and festivals across Scotland and the rest of the UK. This publication will comprise the reproduction of images or other documents from the project's primary archives alongside specially commissioned images/texts, and offer an immediately accessible point of entry to the project's engagement with the history of Live Art in Scotland. The archival zine will complement - and signpost - the project's podcasted series of oral history interviews that form one of its central outputs, indicating the ways in which different registers of historical knowledge may intersect, while simultaneously engaging audiences and artists as active participant witnesses in the construction of new historical accounts.
3) The media.
The PI will distribute press releases to promote and advertise the project and its activities e.g. to recruit participants for oral history interviews; on the launch of the archival zine; to advertise the sectoral forums. Targeted media will include: national media in Scotland and the UK; arts industry media (e.g. The Stage, ArtsHub, ArtsProfessional); related bodies (e.g. The National Archives blog, the Live Art Development Agency newsletter). The University of Glasgow's Communications and Public Affairs Office will provide support in the development of press releases and media contacts. This activity will foster and develop the broader profile of the research and of Live Art in Scotland.
The PI will curate and run a series of sectoral forums with practitioners, programmers, producers, venue representatives, invited researchers and other stakeholders in sites across Scotland. These events will provide a platform for those currently working across the field of Live Art to explore its history and discover opportunities for collaboration or resource-sharing. The purpose of these events will be to create spaces in which Scotland's distributed Live Art community (focused on the central belt but extending far beyond it) can reflect on the current state of the sector and begin to plan for its future, while also creating pathways for research dissemination in the form of 'lightning talks' centered on material selected from the project's archival sources. A strand of themed discussions will focus on the relationships that exist between individual arts workers (most often working on a project basis) and established organisations in receipt of longer-term funding, facilitating participants to imagine and assess structures of support that better acknowledge and respond to differences in access to resource.
These forums will also support the development and refinement of the project's guide to Live Art infrastructures in Scotland, published to the project's website and distributed/advertised to the sector via Creative Scotland, Take Me Somewhere and the CCA's websites. Initially developed by the PI in consultation with Creative Scotland's Interdisciplinary Performance officer and the project's advisory board, and through feedback in the sectoral forums, this resource will map sources of funding, support and development accessible to practitioners working in Live Art in Scotland. Together, the forums and infrastructure guide will drive understanding of the distribution of responsibilities for risk and resilience across the sector, support challenges to the unexplored assumptions that frequently underpin 'resilience thinking' and use the resulting insights to inform the future direction of (infra)structural reforms.
2) Individuals from the general public interested in experimental performance and arts practices.
Working with a designer, the PI will create and edit an original archival zine, published digitally on the project website and made available as a limited-edition hard copy distributed to key arts venues and festivals across Scotland and the rest of the UK. This publication will comprise the reproduction of images or other documents from the project's primary archives alongside specially commissioned images/texts, and offer an immediately accessible point of entry to the project's engagement with the history of Live Art in Scotland. The archival zine will complement - and signpost - the project's podcasted series of oral history interviews that form one of its central outputs, indicating the ways in which different registers of historical knowledge may intersect, while simultaneously engaging audiences and artists as active participant witnesses in the construction of new historical accounts.
3) The media.
The PI will distribute press releases to promote and advertise the project and its activities e.g. to recruit participants for oral history interviews; on the launch of the archival zine; to advertise the sectoral forums. Targeted media will include: national media in Scotland and the UK; arts industry media (e.g. The Stage, ArtsHub, ArtsProfessional); related bodies (e.g. The National Archives blog, the Live Art Development Agency newsletter). The University of Glasgow's Communications and Public Affairs Office will provide support in the development of press releases and media contacts. This activity will foster and develop the broader profile of the research and of Live Art in Scotland.
| Description | The project has: 1) mapped a substantial network of collections, archives and other resources that will support further research into the history of live art, performance art and experimental performance in Scotland. These span formal archives held at the University of Glasgow and University of Bristol as part of each institution's theatre collection, photo/image libraries, online digital resources, specialist magazine archives and informal resource collections held by artist-led organisations/galleries. The project has produced a free guide detailing these materials, their connections and possible entry points to enable other interested researchers and audiences to carry out their own research in the field. This resource has been complemented by a new micro-publication, NOW/NOT NOW, which brings together little-seen archival materials with commissioned essays from leading live artists working in Scotland, exploring questions of archiving and memory. 2) undertaken more than 50 interviews with artists and practitioners active in the live art sector in Scotland since the late 1980s. These interviews span artists with training or backgrounds in theatre, performance, visual art, dance and film, revealing the inherently interdisciplinary and sometimes divergent lineages of practice and context which have informed the sector's work. The transcripts and audio recordings of these interviews are now freely available via the project's website and the University of Glasgow research repository. A new and ongoing podcast series offers easy access to highlights from the project's conversations with artists and other culture workers. 3) identified and begun to trace the significance of 'combined arts' as the frame through which live art and experimental performance has been supported in Scotland since the early 1980s. This idea is significant because it describes how funding bodies - and thus funded artists and organisations - have sought to locate interdisciplinary practices in relation to notionally single-discipline structures for the support, development and presentation of theatre, dance, film and visual art. It also reveals the complex relationship of funding and developmental support for live art to support for specific communities of practice (e.g. for LGBTQ+ artists, disabled artists and black and global majority artists). These dynamics will be explored in a forthcoming book authored by the PI. 4) carried out a series of public events engaging practitioners and the general public exploring important aspects of the ecology for live art in Scotland - focusing on artist residencies, international festivals and working outside Scotland's central belt. Documented on the project website, these events enabled sharing of the project's historical insights and created spaces for conversation between people holding different roles (as artists, producers, funders and curators) in the sector exploring concerns about the sustainability and resilience of the expanded live art ecology, pre and post-covid. These public events were preceded by a two-day research symposium with invited speakers from across the UK, leading to the development of a forthcoming special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review and a new book (under contract) on live art and the curation of experimental performance. |
| Exploitation Route | The research resource map will enable other researchers - as well as artists and interested members of the public - to access and engage with the rich history of live art and performance art in Scotland. These resources have been significantly extended and enhanced by the project's creation of a new library of interviews with artists and practitioners whose experiences offer insights into their own work as well as the shifting landscape in which experimental practices have been supported, curated and promoted. A new ongoing podcast series Live And Now offers an easy and accessible first point of contact with that interview collection. Insights from the interviews - along with the project's engagement with 'combined arts' - stand to inform the work of arts organisations and funding bodies in Scotland whose remit includes support for interdisciplinary or experimental practice (specifically, by revealing gaps in existing provision and highlighting examples of good as well as less successful practices from which new approaches might be developed). As a snapshot of the field's development over time, they also stand to inform the trajectory further discipline-specific research (e.g. into the history of dance/choreography, or public art practices). The project's planned monograph (currently under development) will connect the histories of live art in Scotland to wider debates concerning the relationship between support for artist's development and the work of performance curation, revealing the generative tension between process-based methods of discovery and training, and the more pragmatic practices of selecting and programming for festivals or seasons of work. This, in turn, will introduce academic and non-academic audiences to the particular contribution of artist-led initiatives in supporting creative risk and innovation in Scotland, and further afield. |
| Sectors | Creative Economy,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | http://liveartscotland.org |
| Description | In year one, the project mapped the Scottish live art sector through interviews and archival research, historicising the conditions of its development and current existence. Beyond offering a new and valuable guide to support and development resources for artists in Scotland, research undertaken in creating the Live Art in Scotland Practitioner Directory has highlighted the dependence of the sector on artist residencies, and the significance of artist-led activities which are often reliant on short-term or precarious funding models. More affirmatively, this output has drawn valuable attention to the range of possible ways of supporting interdisciplinary artists at different stages of their practice in resistance of a 'one size fits all' approach, and alerted sector stakeholders to the potential for more collaborative or joined-up forms of provision (e.g. through sharing discoveries with the Creative Scotland-funded 'Good on Paper' action-research project and in interview conversations with sector leaders). The first year's work also evidenced the strong but uneven links that have existed between Scotland and the rest of the UK's live art sector over the past thirty years, and which continue to shape work in the present moment. While some artists and organisations have enjoyed close and productive relationships with organisations such as the Live Art UK network, practitioners based in Scotland interviewed for the project also report challenges in accessing or drawing the attention of UK-national agencies specialising in live art. These and other early project insights informed the PI's advisory role on the LADA / Live Art UK Live Art Sector Research report. Through these activities, the project identified the value of further research engagement with the history and political economy of 'combined arts' - not simply as a term marking the conditional inclusion of live art within UK arts funding structures but as a concept advertising the complex historical relationship of live art to underserved and marginalised communities of practice, particularly disabled, LGBTQ and black and global majority artists. Early insights concerning the significant of combined arts were shared through public talks and presentations for sector agencies, as well as through the project's blog. In year two, the project turned to focus on publications and public/sectoral engagement activities. Archival research resulted in the creation of a new micro-publication, NOW / NOT NOW, exploring live art archives, memory and documentation. Through four provocative artist commissions alongside rarely-seen images from major Scottish archives, NOW / NOT NOW created a pathway to the project's archival work while platforming the work and voices of significant contributors to the Scottish live art scene, and further raising their and the project's profile through distribution at key venues during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This creative/critical text complements the project's Research Resources publication, a directory and finding aid developed from the project's research to help navigate diverse audiences through a range of archives, collections and other materials that might support research into live art, performance art and interdisciplinary performance in Scotland. Mapping activity in year one informed the design and delivery of a series of public and sector-facing forums or conversation events, each engaging with a significant aspect of the Scottish ecology for live and experimental performance. In Building A Better Residency, the project brought together artists, venues and funders to explore different approaches to interdisciplinary artist residencies, identifying artists' needs and priorities as well as the challenges and opportunities faced by development organisations in supporting the artists that they seek to work with. In Festival Futures, an invited group of artists and practitioners explored the changing conditions of the Edinburgh fringe and the ways in which arts festivals - in Scotland and further afield - might be reimagined as more sustainable, hospitable spaces for culture workers and audiences alike, engaging in conversation with a public audience. In Curating Cabaret, Curating Queerness, the project turned to focus on a specific corner of Scotland's queer cabaret and spoken word scene to how artists and organisations are working to create and sustain spaces for new work, beyond the concentration of established venues in Scotland's central belt, examining changes of practice during and since the pandemic. In each event, the research's historical perspectives informed the discussion of contemporary conditions, allowing new understanding of recurrent (and even incalcitrant) problems faced by the sector as well as how practices have undergone significant change (and in places, significant improvement) from which wider lessons can be learned. Findings from all three events have been shared on the project website - and will inform a new book on performance curation, now under contract. Perhaps most significantly, year two saw the launch of the full Live Art in Scotland Interview collection. Available on the project website and via the University of Glasgow's research repository, this collection includes the transcripts and recordings of 50 major interviews with artists and practitioners working in live art in Scotland over the past thirty years. This material has begun to be used in teaching and further research, informing the work of performance curators and development agencies, informing a greater understand of how the UK's live art ecology has developed since the late 1980s. Exceprts from the interview collection form the basis of a new podcast series, Live And Now, which histories and contextualises moments of conversation with major artists in the larger history of Scottish experimental performance. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2021 |
| Sector | Creative Economy,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Policy & public services |
| Description | Member of advisory group for the Live Art UK / Live Art Development Agency's Live Art Sector Research report |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
| Title | Live Art Scotland Practitioner Directory |
| Description | The Practitioner Directory is a free resource listing artist residencies, funding schemes and professional development programmes open to interdisciplinary artists working in Scotland. This resource was developed to map the existing infrastructure of provision for live artists, highlighting geographic and art form-specific concentrations and gaps in national provision. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This dataset has revealed the heavy reliance of the sector on short-term artist residencies for artistic development, and their concentration in Scotland's central belt. It also suggests where organisations in the dance sector have expanded their remit to further support interdisciplinary practice following sector-wide disruption over the past decade (e.g. following the closure of the Arches in 2015). These insights have informed the agenda, design and development of the forthcoming sector-facing public engagement forums (planned for Summer 2022). |
| URL | http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/265874/ |
| Title | Live Art in Scotland Interview Collection |
| Description | This dataset holds series of interviews (transcripts and audio recordings) with artists and practitioners undertaken for the Live Art in Scotland project. Spanning the late 1980s to the present, these conversations reflect live art's grounding in a range of different art forms, contexts and communities of interdisciplinary practice. A cross-section of an expansive field as it has developed over thirty years, they offer new perspectives on the conditions in which live art's signature experiments become possible, and the possibilities which live art might enable in return. The audio files are available by request for research and teaching purposes only. Please click 'request data' to begin this process. Interview transcripts and other documentation are available to download from this page. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This collection has expanded sectoral knowledge of activity in Scotland, informing ongoing policy discussions concerning funding and infrastructure concerning the archival preservation of histories of live art and performance art here and across the UK. |
| URL | http://researchdata.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/1379 |
| Description | Interview for Good on Paper research project funded by Creative Scotland |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Interviewed as part of the Good on Paper project, funded by Creative Scotland. This project explores forms of organising informed by performance arts methods as the basis for developing better ways of supporting performance artists in Scotland and improving knowledge around the craft and process associated with performance art. I shared some of the Live Art in Scotland project's early findings, particularly the influence of 'combined arts' as a frame for the support of interdisciplinary and experimental arts practice in Scotland, and proposed thinking about the particular physical infrastructure that performance art might need in the absence of a lead agency or organisation with responsibility for the field. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Live Art in Scotland website and research blog |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | A website sharing the project's outcomes, with an accessible/general audience blog sharing insights and early discoveries from the research updated on a monthly basis. The website includes recordings of talks, digital versions of the project's practitioner resource directory, information about a forthcoming special issue of Contemporary Theatre review, and details of the Live Art: Histories of the present research symposium. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022 |
| URL | http://liveartscotland.org |
| Description | Newspaper coverage of Live Art in Scotland interview collection |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
| Results and Impact | A press release to accompany the Live Art in Scotland interview collection which resulted in a feature article published in The Herald, one of Scotland's national newspapers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-herald-1130/20221015/281925956924945 |
| Description | Pecha Kucha talk for European Researchers Night |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | A short Pecha Kucha-style talk (20 images each shown for 20 seconds) on live art as 'the most important Scottish art you've never heard about', presented as part of a European Researchers' Night event hosted by Aberdeen University. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Podcast series: Live and Now |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | An ongoing podcast series sharing excerpts from the Live Art in Scotland interview collection, contextualised to introduce the broader history of performance and experimental art in Scotland since the later 1980s. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022,2023 |
| URL | https://web.archive.org/web/20221203032837/https://liveartscotland.org/index.php/live-and-now-podcas... |
| Description | Public form / conversation event - Curating Cabaret, Curating Queerness |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Curating Cabaret, Curating Queerness was the third in a series of conversation events staged in spring and summer 2022, each exploring different aspects of the Scottish ecology for new and experimental performance. In this conversation, we focused on a corner of Scotland's vibrant queer carabet and spoken word scene - and a specific collaboration in creating Eat the Rich - to explore how artists and organisations are working to create and sustain spaces for new work, beyond Scotland's central belt. This event offered the participating arts professionals space to reflect on the challenges and success of making space for queer and experimental work beyond Scotland's most populated and developed queer districts, and consider the possibilities for future collaborations in relation to broader, ongoing changes in the sector (including the shift to digital practices during the pandemic). Documentation and materials from the event were made available online afterwards. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://web.archive.org/web/20220818155627/https://liveartscotland.org/index.php/curating-cabaret-cu... |
| Description | Public forum / conversation event - Festival Futures |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Live Art in Scotland: Festival Futures was a public forum event staged in Edinburgh at Summerhall venue in summer 2022 ahead of the first fully live-and-in-person Fringe since the start of the covid-19 pandemic. Through contributions from invited speakers, it focused on the major role that festivals have played in Scotland's cultural ecology - and explored through conversation with an audience of practitioners and the general public how we might re-imagine arts festivals as more sustainable, hospitable spaces for culture workers and audiences alike. Materials from and documentation of the event were then made available online. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://web.archive.org/web/20220814100430/https://liveartscotland.org/index.php/festival-futures/ |
| Description | Public forum / workshop - Building A Better Residency |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Building A Better Residency was a conversation event held at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow, in May 2022 to explore current practices and future possibilities for live artist residencies in Scotland. The event gathered a range of viewpoints and possibilities for future sectoral development, feeding back into the work and plans of the three participating arts organisations: the CCA, the Work Room and Take Me Somewhere. Materials from the day were gathered on the project website for sharing and discussion with a broader UK and international audience of practitioners and support organisations. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://web.archive.org/web/20221203014602/https://liveartscotland.org/index.php/building-a-better-r... |
| Description | Research symposium: Live Art - Histories of the Present |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Live Art: Histories of the Present was a two-day symposium which took place at the University of Glasgow on Wednesday 6th of April and Thursday 7th of April 2022, with presentations from Gavin Butt, Harriet Curtis, Dominic Johnson, Vanessa Macaulay, Phoebe Patey-Ferguson and Heike Roms. Staged as part of the Live Art in Scotland project, it explored the complex relationship between live art and the material, historical conditions which have enabled, fostered, and sometimes constrained the possibilities for experimental and interdisciplinary performance. The event combined short talks from invited speakers with roundtable discussions (modelled on Lois Weaver's 'long table' format) with the wider public audience and invited researchers/practitioners from other institutions, exploring issues surrounding archiving, history-making and memory. Materials and documentation from the day have been made available on the project's website. Presentations and discussions during the event have led to the development of a forthcoming special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review focusing on 'live art in a scene of constraint', co-edited by Greer and Patey-Ferguson, and reflecting on recent developments in and challenges faced by the live art, new work and experimental performance sector. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://web.archive.org/web/20221203021849/https://liveartscotland.org/index.php/live-art-histories-... |
| Description | Talk for Arts Council England Live Art Research Group |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A talk attended by arts council officers with responsibility for supporting live art, combined arts and interdisciplinary practice across England's regions, which generated questions and discussions about their remit in relation to support for single-discipline artists. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Talk for Glasgow Theatre Seminar series |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A talk on live art, curation and the development of Scottish experimental performance for the Glasgow Theatre Seminar series at the University of Glasgow. The event was staged live and simultaneously live-streamed on Zoom for an online public audience. The talk was followed by Q&A and discussion about the Live Art in Scotland project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://liveartscotland.org/index.php/2022/01/05/glasgow-theatre-seminar-performance-art-is-little-s... |
| Description | Talk for the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama - Live art, Scotland and the risk of the radical |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A talk exploring performance curation as a lens for developing an expanded history of Live Art in the UK, with the intention of drawing attention to practitioners and institutions working in live art in Scotland. The talk was attending by c.30 research students and practitioners, sparking discussion of the different conditions faced by artists working across different parts of the UK sector and raising awareness of Scotland-based artists whose work is not yet widely known. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.cssd.ac.uk/events/dr-stephen-greer-live-art-scotland-and-risk-of-the-radical |
| Description | Workshop on archival research and researcher reflexivity for SGSAH summer school |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | c.15 phd candidates attended a workshop on archival and oral history methodologies through the lens of researcher reflexivity, offered as part of the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities annual summer school programme. Participants described greater confidence and clarity in acknowledging their own place within their research, in developing position statements and making conscious methodological choices of research design. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.sgsah.ac.uk/summer-school-2021/tuesday-sessions/headline_794297_en.html |