Interview with Dek Leverton

Rebecca met with Dek Leverton this week, a former member of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, and a founder of Pauper's Carnival.  Pauper's Carnival was formed in Cardiff in the mid-1970s, with a core membership of Dek and former drama teacher Vanya Constant. 

They produced new, unique performances at Chapter and also at a number of other sites and performance spaces in Wales, and have been mentioned by a number of our contributors as being memorable and beautifully crafted.

Dek is pictured (right) holding a photo of Clown Dances, from 1977.  Pauper's Carnival collaborated with other groups, including Moving Being, Pip Simmons and Brith Gof.

Interview with Roger Ely

We met with Roger Ely this week at his home in London.  Roger studied at Leeds College of Art and was a contemporary of Dave Stephens.  His tutors included John Darling and Jeff Nuttall, and Roger went on to become a key figure in the performance art scene as a writer, artist and programmer.   

In 1977, along with Neil Butler, Roger put on the first Brighton Festival of Contemporary Arts, featuring the likes of Shirley Cameron, Roland Miller, Throbbing Gristle, IOU and many, many others.  Then, in  1979 he was one of the founders of Primary Source magazine which sadly ended after 8 issues but is still a great read if you have the opportunity.  Roger has also toured as an artist, including with Dave Stephens and Ian Hinchliffe as Matchbox Purveyors.

We hope to meet with Roger again before the end of the project, but would like to thank him for meeting with us and contributing to our research.

Conversation with Janek Alexander

Heike was invited to chair a public conversation today with Janek Alexander, director of Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, about his performance work in the 1970s and 1980s. Janek was part of an extraordinarily vibrant and diverse performance scene, which included Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, Pauper's Carnival and Moving Being, all resident at Chapter in the 1970s.
Janek made an extraordinary debut in 1976 with Howard Hughes, a performance described by Mike Pearson as ‘a tour de force’. He went on to create ten more substantial pieces of work in a quest to develop a new form of minimalist "anti-theatre". Previously unseen video footage, rare audio recordings and contributions from former collaborators (Karen McGregor, Karen Lucas, Dave Perry and Paul Turner) and Alexander himself explored this unique body of work and the first decade of experimentation at Chapter.

More information: http://www.chapter.org/20742.html

Interview with Marty St James



Marty St James on 'Mr & Mrs', HTV (1977) Image courtesy of Marty St James


  We interviewed Marty St James, Professor of Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire and former student of Cardiff College of Art at his London studio this week. Marty has been making performance work since his late teens, working with Ian Hinchliffe, Rob Con, Roland Miller and Shirley Cameron amongst many others.


At Cardiff, he made a number of pieces for the symposium that John Gingell ran in the Reardon Smith auditorium, and made an appearance on the HTV show 'Mr and Mrs' as part of his final year show. After graduating, he continued to produce conceptual and performance pieces around Wales, including his 'Morris 1000 Dancing' which visited a number of towns and villages, and 'I'll See You' which he presented at several art centres.


We would like to thank Marty for allowing us to interview him, and also for his help in identifying some of the images of his work that we have found in different archives.

Sited interview: Mike Pearson at Chapter

Yesterday we travelled to Cardiff to interview Mike Pearson around the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff.  This followed on from the series of sited interviews we did with Mike around Cardiff last November that included various spaces within Cardiff University, Llanover Hall and the Sherman Theatre. 

Mike has been involved with Chapter since its inception 40 years ago, and was one of the first people to move into the building and produce work, firstly with Transitions, later with Cardiff Lab.  He also witnessed many performances by a number of artists and groups including Nigel Rolfe, Pip Simmons and Moving Being.

We hope that this will be the first in a series of interviews around Chapter with people.

Thanks to Mike for his recollections and taking us on a tour of the building as he knew it, and to James Tyson and his colleagues at Chapter for making this possible.

Lectures and Presentations

It's been a busy summer - we have been doing a number of presentations and lectures about the project at different events - here are some of them.
For a full list visit: http://www.performance-wales.org/english/events/lectures.htm

SYMPOSIUM PRESENTATION AND CHAIR (Heike): "Living Archives - Session with Rose English and Anne Bean"
Performing Idea symposium, part of Performance Matters, Goldsmiths University of London, Roehampton University and Live Art Development Agency, funded by an AHRC Research Grant, Whitechapel Gallery and Toynbee Studios, 6 October 2010. Details

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CONFERENCE PRESENTATION (Heike): "Performance art (in) history: disconnecting traditions, connecting histories"
"TAPRA: History and Historiography Working Group", TaPRA THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE RESEARCH ASSOCIATION conference, Glamorgan University, Cardiff 9–11 September 2010. Details

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PRESENTATION (Heike and Rebecca): What's Welsh for Performance?- Creating a record of performance art in Wales
"Documentation and the Cultural Record" session at Culture Colony-Y Wladfa Newydd launch day, 7 September 2010, Aberystwyth Arts Centre. More information and documentation; response

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CONFERENCE PRESENTATION (Heike): "Teaching the Avant-garde - (Mis)Performing Pedagogies"
"MISperformance -an inverted approach to doing Performance Studies (international?) - PSi15 follow-up event" conference, Rijeka, Croatia 3–5 September 2010.

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PRESENTATION (Heike and Rebecca):"'Welsh Not': Performing Wales in 1970s Performance Art"
"Theorizing Wales: Gender, Culture, Politics" conference, Swansea University, Gregynog 12–14 July 2010. Details

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CONFERENCE PRESENTATION (Heike): Performing An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales
"[Record] [Create] Oral History in Art, Craft and Design (Oral History Society Annual Conference 2010)" conference,Victoria & Albert Museum London, 2+3 July 2010. Details
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Interview with Dave Stephens

We travelled down to Brighton this week to meet with Dave Stephens at his home.  Dave is originally from Cardiff, and studied for his Art Foundation at Cardiff College of Art before moving to Leeds College of Art for his degree.

At art college Dave began performing monologues on different subjects; sometimes confessional, sometimes provocative, he went on to tour the UK, Europe and North America.  His final show was at the Central School of Art in 1985 and he has not performed since.

We would like to thank Dave for his generosity and hospitality, and for talking to us about his performance career.  Also, we'd like to thank Matt Page for filming the interview for us.

Swansea Fringe Festival and Newport College of Art

This week, Rebecca met with Robin Hall and David Hurn. 

Robin came to Swansea to work with the Open Cast Theatre, and later worked for the Swansea Fringe Festival for several years during the 1980s.  The festival brought many performers to the city, including the then-unknown comedians Paul Merton and Arthur Smith.  He worked closely with the performance artist Rob Con who was also the festival administrator in its first year.

David is a member of Magnum, the photographers cooperative, and founded the photography course at Newport College of Art nearly forty years ago.  He was also a colleague of the artist Keith Arnatt and taught Arnatt photography, and later curated an exhibition of Arnatt's work called 'I'm A Real Photographer'.

We would like to thank David and Robin for their time and contributing to our research.

Project featured on The Wire website

The project has been included by Rhodri Davies on his Wire magazine portal link (click the title to this blog entry and if should take you straight there).

Rhodri is featured in the 'Invisible Jukebox' section of the new edition of the magazine, and an MP3  of his installation room harp at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle is available here: http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/4675/

Research trip to London and interview with Mo Tingey

We spent much of the last week in London, visiting the archives at the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and listening to a number of oral history interviews held at the National Sound Archive at the British Library.

We also interviewed Mo Tingey for the project.  Mo was one of the people who staged the Fluxus events at the Aberystwyth Arts Festival in 1968, along with Brian Lane - she was then known as Maurene Sandoe.  Mo brought along to the interview some beautiful leaflets and boxes that she had made back in the 1960s, containing paper dolls, small boxes that made sounds, sound scores and stage directions.  These were made in small numbers and sold to people, part of the idea about making art accessible and available to everyone.

We'd like to thank Mo for meeting with us and contributing to the project.