National Arts Education Archive - Tom Hudson

Heike and Rebecca spent two days at the National Arts Education Archive at Bretton Hall, in Yorkshire. Bretton Hall used to be part of the University of Leeds, specialising in music, art, drama and teacher training courses in the main. It's been closed for a few years now, and the campus is an eerie place; it looks like a normal university, but all signs of life have disappeared.
We were there to look through the Tom Hudson collection. Hudson was an artist, but is better known as an art educator. He was appointed as head of Cardiff College of Art in 1964, and introduced courses that emphasised the creative process, and innovative ways of approaching art. It was during his time in charge that the ‘Third Space’ for performance art or time-based art was established.

The collection contained lots of exciting finds, including colour slides of performances, and films of colour experiments, in which students were dressed and painted in greens and purples, then filmed walking through Cardiff. We hope to be able to make some of this available in the future on our database.

There has been some uncertainty over the future of the archive. Bretton Hall is now being turned into a luxury hotel and conference centre. Fortunately, several institutions have agreed to jointly run the archive, and the collection will remain intact.

Workshop presentation in Bristol

Heike presented Oral Histories of Performance and ran a workshop on using oral histories to document performance work at the Digital Documentation and Performance training event, hosted by JISC Digital Media and the University of Bristol Drama Department in Bristol on the 23 – 25 September 2009.

 

(Detail of Becoming-snail performance by Paul Hurley, which was being documented through various means by the workshop participants– Photo: Sara Popowa)

The event consisted of three one-day enquiries into the topics of creating, managing and delivering digital documentation of performance work, which mixed presentations with hands-on practical workshops. More information on the event can be found here: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/training/digital-performance-seminars/

Symposium presentation in Newcastle

Heike presented 'An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales' at the NOTES on a Return symposium, which took place at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the 4 and 5 September 2009.

Project Steering Committee

We're pleased to announce that our steering committee has been appointed, and we will hold our first meeting on September 2nd in Chapter, Cardiff. The members of the committee are drawn from a variety of backgrounds, including art history, performance studies, archival expertise and practising artists. They are:

Mr David Alston, Arts Council, Arts Council of Wales
Dr Ivor Davies, Artist
Prof Sioned Davies, Chair of Welsh, Cardiff University
Mr Arwel Jones, Director of Public Services, National Library of Wales
Prof Adrian Kear, Head of School of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth
Prof Mike Pearson, Professor of Performance Studies, Aberystwyth University
Dr Dorothy Rowe, Senior Lecturer in Art History, University of Bristol
Prof André Stitt, Centre for Fine Art Research, CSAD, UWIC

Heike and Rebecca are very pleased that they have agreed to join the project, and we look forward to working with them.

Research Themes

The project will be focussing its research primarily around the following themes:

1. Performance and Pedagogy - the emergence of performance art in the context of new approaches to art education at Cardiff College of Art, Newport School of Art, the Barry Summer School etc in the 1960s. Of special interest here is the work of Tom Hudson and John Gingell at Cardiff.

2. Networks, Internationalism and Student Politics - the role of student-run university art festivals in Swansea, Aberystwyth, Cardiff and Bangor in the late 1960s

3. New Infrastructures – the emergence of art centres at Cardiff (Chapter and Sherman), Aberystwyth and Swansea (Taliesin) and their role in the development of performance art in the early 1970s

4. British Performance Art between Theatre and Art in the early-mid 1970s. This will include a closer look at the work of Shirley Cameron, Roland Miller, Rob Con, Ian Hinchcliffe, Welfare State and others.

5. Performance Cymraeg - the emergence of Welsh identity as a theme in performance art in the late 1970s, including a discussion of the influence of the performance art pavilion at the Wrexham Eisteddfod 1977 and the work of Paul Davies.

If you have information to offer on any of these themes or the events mentioned we would be pleased to hear from you!

Research Assistant starts today!

We are very pleased to welcome Dr Rebecca Edwards to the project! For a little background information on Rebecca's previous work see the blog entry on the 15 May.

Second phase of the project

The second phase of the project (1 July 2009 - 30 September 2009) will be devoted to:
- inducting and training the new Research Assistant
- arranging archive visits and interviews
- organising existing materials and updating the project database
- undertaking research in various archives, primarily in the National Library of Wales

American Fluxus artist Philip Corner participating in the Assembly Line happening, organised by Tom Hudson, Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre in Cardiff, September 1965. © Tom Hudson estate

Guest lecture in Frankfurt

Heike presented a guest lecture, entitled 'Performing the History of Performance: Re-enacting 1960s Performance Art', at the Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft of the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe- Universität Frankfurt today (30 June 2009). Heike was invited by Professor Hans-Thies Lehmann.

A scene from the Aberystwyth Fluxconcert 1968–2008 'redo', organised by Heike in November 2009 in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the original event. More information available at:  http://www.performance-wales.org/english/events/AberystwythInFlux.htm

re-launch website and database

The project website has received a bit of an overhaul - the new version is launched today:
http://www.performance-wales.org/

We have also updated the project database - the new version will become publicly available online at a later date. For the time being, the previous version of the database is still online at: http://www.performance-wales.org/english/archive/database.htm

Research Assistant appointed

We are pleased to announce that we have appointed Dr Rebecca Edwards to the post of Post-Doctoral Research Assistant on the project. Rebecca conducted her doctoral research into the English-language Welsh music scene of the 1990s at the History Department at Swansea University under the supervision of Prof. Chris Williams. She was awarded her PhD in 2008 for her thesis ‘To show from where we came; Cool Cymru, pop and identity in Wales in the 1990s'.