Tag: LIve Art Ireland

workshop at Live Art Ireland

In the week of June 10th, I will lead a two-day workshop for Live Art Ireland. Participants will be in residence at Milford House, and will have spent the previous week working with Marilyn Arsem. We will work with ideas of trace, score, notation and mapping to look at how performance endures or is lost, what we hold onto, and what can be passed on or let go. Using drawing, actions, sharing and witnessing, we will make a body of performance writing.

Considering Time in Performance, Saturday 15th June, 12.00 to 21.00hrs.

There will be a sharing and showing of work by participants at Live Art Ireland on Saturday 15th June. The artist participants are: Ann Conmy, Carlos Tejo, Georgia Lale, Alisa Alho, Marianne Marcote, Natalie Rise, Nicole Panneton, Rob La Frenais, Silke Michels, and Deej Fabyc.

Tickets are available on a Pay What You Choose basis via Eventbrite HERE

‘cream of the crop’ for SOAK, Plymouth on 25th January

On January 25th I will present a new performance peice as part of the SOAK Live Art event at Leadworks in Plymouth. Organised by Sarah Blissett and Kerry Priest, SOAK is a bi-monthly live art series with a number of performers each time, bringing together live art, experimental performance, film, spoken word and music. For SOAK I will perform ‘cream of the crop’, a development of the research and testing I did on residency at Live Art Ireland in October 2023. Looking at grass and plant life, at rural life, at the impact of the dairy industry, the piece considers interaction of human and other-than-human systems. Simple actions with props and tasks are structured into a sequence, threaded through with spoken text. There are bin liners, a bucket, gloves, knee pads, a body, and words that slip between contexts of climate, sport, and agriculture.

Tickets etc via Eventbrite HERE

Screening: Three Games for Grass

Three Games for Grass: Hay Bale Circuiting, Grass Bucket Head Crawl and Bale Bouldering

Short videos screening as part of Alive & Kicking, Live Art Ireland, Saturday 9th December

While on the ‘grass’ residency in October 2023, I worked in the fields near Milford House, responding to the place, to the evidence of farming, to processes and materials used in the growth, harvesting, and storage of grass. Playing with buckets, fertilizer bags, hay and silage bales, I considered the grass as a crop, as fodder and as having economic value in the production of milk or beef. Close to the ground, walking through the fields each day, I was aware of plants as indicators of environmental damage, of ecological disruption, as impacted by human activity. The playing began to take shape as a set of new games or sports, drawing on the tradition of local sports in rural Ireland, from parish-level GAA to the Community Games to school sports days. There is also a sense of gamification expanding into all areas of life, the continued prioritising of growth models along with notions of progress, despite compelling evidence of climate crisis and environmental breakdown. The performer-player embodies an intersection of sport and agriculture, weaving his way among the abandoned hay bales, manoeuvring a bucket across a field, wrestling with plastic-wrapped silage bales. What is winning in these systems? How are conditions on the ground? Where is the benefit when the scores are totted up?

grass bucket head a

On the ‘grass’ residency at Live Art Ireland, Milford House, Tipperary. A still from a short test video, me with a bucket in the grass.

For the past week I have been trying out some moving, acting, sounding, and voicing. Working with props that connect to grass as part of the dairy industry, as a crop and as fodder and as having economic value within the production of milk. Also working with an awareness of plants as indicators of environmental damage, of ecological disruption, as impacted by human activity. I have used tasks as ways of developing movement, of generating sounds, of prompting actions, and of allowing focus to shift to doing in the moment. The grass rustles, the plastic sack crackles, the bucket clunks and rattles. Out in the front field at Milford House, I hear the busy road, I see various agricultural projects in the fields around me, I feel the grass wet, prickly, rough, soft, I smell the soil and in among the stems I see that activity of invertebrates, insects, spiders, worms carries on regardless of my daft action above them.

The video is up on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/872367421?share=copy