Interview with Clive Robertson

Rebecca and Heike met with Clive Robertson this week in London; Clive is an artist, critic and publisher, now based at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.

After studying at Plymouth and Liverpool art colleges, Clive went to Cardiff College of Art in 1967, in part attracted by the new teaching approaches being pioneered by Tom Hudson and his colleagues.  He recalled Robin Page, a Fluxus artist, coming to Cardiff to give his Action Lecture on War as part of the regular symposiums held by the college.  Clive also talked about his own work, more information of which can be found on our database.  Clive went on to complete at MFA at Reading University before moving to Canada and establishing the W.O.R.K.S.R.E.P.O.R.T. - more information on this can be found on Clive's webpage (click on the title to this blog entry above).

Interview with Cameron & Miller

Copyright: Shirley Cameron (Private Collection)

Heike and Rebecca travelled to a very cold, snowy Sheffield this week to meet with Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller.  Cameron and Miller have performed together for over forty years, and during the early 1970s were based in Swansea.  The photo here was taken during the Swansea One Week College of Art, which was attended by a number of our other contributors as art students, and a number of famous names including Jeff Nuttall, Marc Chaimowicz and Ken Campbell.

Heike has interviewed them before about their work as part of the 'What's Welsh For Performance' project.  This time, we focussed on the networks of performers, venues and festivals that made up the 'scene' in Britain during the 1970s.  Shirely and Roland were also kind enough to let us look through their archive of documents, photographs and ephemera.

Interview with Nigel Rolfe

Nigel Rolfe is an artist based in Dublin, and a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art.  He has been making performances and video art for over 30 years and in 1977 he was part of a group of international artists invited to take part in the Eisteddfod in Wrexham as part of the Welsh Art Council's programme How the Past Perishes, How the Future Becomes/ Fel y darfuÕr gorffennol - fel y del y dyfodol.  Nigel created a piece called Towers that elicited a somewhat hostile reaction from some quarters of the press.  He was later invited to re-perform the work at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff by the curator, David Briars. 

Heike met with Nigel to discuss his work and his memories of the Eisteddfod, and of the performance scene at this time.  For more information about Nigel's work, click on the heading to this blog entry.  Further information can be found on our website - http://www.performance-wales-org/

Interview with Richard Frame

Rebecca met with Richard Frame this week; Richard was a contemporary of Dave Stephens at Cardiff College of Art and collaborated with him on several conceptual pieces during his Foundation Year.  He was also a member of the 'Myself and Others' group run by John Gingell and Di Setch. 

Richard later went to study at Newport College of Art where he continued to use performance and conceptual ideas within his work - with some of his fellow students, he formed a group called The Gay Dogs, notable because none of them could play their instruments or sing - this was in 1973.  He also performed as part of the Portsmouth Sinfonia in Newport and at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Interview with Keith Wood

Keith Wood came to Cardiff College of Art in 1966, and began making performances as a student.  Some of these were solo affairs, such as an explosion in the car park during one early experimentation, while others were done in collaboration with other students, including John Danvers. In a number of the interviews, Keith has been named as being very influential on his fellow students and others that he worked with later on.

After leaving college, Keith continued his interest performance, firstly with his own group, the Keith Wood Group, and later with Highway Shoes - Chapter's company in residence - before leaving for the USA, a regular theme in his later work.  For more information on these, please see the database on our website, http://www.performance-wales.org/

Rebecca and Heike met with Keith to talk about his early interest in performance and its development, along with some of his productions, including The Nighthawk which starred Mike Pearson, and The Gospel According To Lenny, about Lenny Bruce. 

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.

Group Interview 3 - Former Cardiff College of Art students

This week we met with four former students from Cardiff College of Art, as Cardiff School of Art & Design was then known. We were fortunate to be allowed to hold the interview at UWIC's Howard Gardens campus, where they had studied during the late 1960s and 1970s with (amongst others) Tom Hudson and John Gingell. A tour of the building prompted lots of memories from their student days.

 

We would like to thank Prof André Stitt, Debbie Savage and Nicola Brown for their help in arranging for us to use Howard Gardens. We'd also like to thank our interviewees, Colin Ainsworth, Tim Diggles, Suzy Peters and Mike Shaw, for travelling to Cardiff, lending us material from their personal archives, and for their memories and stories.

Interview with Sally Roberts Jones

Rebecca interviewed Sally Roberts Jones this week, about her memories of the Commonwealth Poetry Conference, which took place in Cardiff in 1965 as part of the Commonwealth Festival.  Poets and writers that attended the conference included Clive James and Les Murray of Australia, Alexander Trocchi, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and George Macbeth. 

The Conference included a happening organised by Tom Hudson at Jackson Hall in Cardiff called 'Assembly Line' - this was possibly the first happening to take place in Wales, and among to participants was the American musician and composer Philip Corner.  We would love to hear from anyone who remembers the poetry conference or took part in 'Assembly Line' - email mail@performance-wales.org

Rebecca and Heike would like to thank Sally Roberts Jones for her sharing her time and memories with us.

Interview with David Briers

David Briers was the Visual Arts Organiser at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff between 1976 and 1984, responsible for programming the galleries.  Rebecca went to interview David this week his interest in performance art, and his time at Chapter. 

Among the artists that David invited to the centre was Nigel Rolfe, who had caused outrage in some areas of the press following his 'Towers' performance at the National Eisteddfod at Wrexham in 1977 (or as the Daily Mail put it, 'The Welsh art of paying an Irishman to demolish bricks with his head').

David invited Nigel Rolfe to do a performance of the 'Towers' piece, and also one called 'Treatment of Individual Parts' (see above and right - copyright Steve Benbow).

If you remember seeing this, or any other performance work in Wales during the 1960s and 1970s we would love to hear from you.

Heike and Rebecca would like to thank David Briers for his help with the project.

Presentation at the ICA's Live Weekends

Heike will be presenting the project at the ICA's Live Weekends this weekend, together with artist Ivor Davies.

'What's Welsh for Performance?' Archiving the history of performance art in Wales 1965-2010 - featuring Ivor Davies in conversation with Heike Roms on Destruction in Art London / Edinburgh / Durham / Bristol / Swansea 1966-1969

22 May 2010 - 2.20-4.45pm, Lower Gallery, ICA Institute of Contemporary Art, The Mall - LondonSW1Y 5AH
Admission Free
As part of ICA's LIVE WEEKENDS: Futures and Pasts - curated by Tim Etchells
More information on the event here:
http://www.ica.org.uk/24606/Talks/Live-Weekends-Futures-and-Pasts.html

Interview with Isabel Hitchman

Rebecca interviewed Isabel Hitchman today - Isabel worked at the Arts Council of Wales during the 1970s and was involved in the founding of the Oriel Gallery.  Along with holding regular exhibitions, Oriel was also a book shop and, on occasion, provided a space for performance.  This photo shows a performance by former Cardiff School of Art and Design students Marty St James and Anne Wilson, called 'Perfect Moments'. 

We would like to thank Isabel for her hospitality and her time, and for helping with our research. 

Interview with Wyndham Heycock - Barry Summer School

Heike and Rebecca met Wyndham Heycock, co-director of Barry Summer School with the artist Leslie Moore, from 1962-1973. It was during this period that the school reached its peak, attracting artists and musicians from across the world to teach at Barry, including George Brecht, John Epstein, Roland Miller, Terry Setch, Harry Thubron, Ernest Zobole and jazz musicians including Larry Adler. We'd like to thank Wyndham Heycock, and his wife Sally, for their help with the project.

The photo below is of a group of students listening to Tom Hudson speak at the Summer School around 1965 (click on the photo to enlarge it); if you can identify any of the people in the picture, or you attended any of the art or music courses during the 1960s and early 1970s - please email us at mail@performance-wales.org

Future Presentation - London July 2010

Heike will be presenting a paper based on her oral history work at the annual conference of the Oral History Society:

"Performing an Oral History of Performance Art in Wales" - "[Record] [Create] Oral History in Art, Craft and Design (Oral History Society Annual Conference 2010"
Victoria & Albert Museum London, 2+3 July 2010

Presentations - London April 2010

Heike presented a paper based on her oral history work at a symposium in London this week:

An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales', at the "Oral History/Theatre History: Past - Present - Future" conference, Rose Bruford College London, 17 April 2010.
More information:http://www.str.org.uk/events/other/archive/oralhistory2010.shtml
 

Future Presentation - Theorising Wales Conference, July 2010

Heike and Rebecca will be presenting a paper at the Theorising Wales conference, organised by Swansea University. The conference will be held at Gregynog Hall between 12th and 14th July.

The paper will consider the emergence of Wales and Welshness as concerns in visual art practice in the late 1970s, with particular reference to the practice of performance art & the National Eisteddfod of 1977.

Further details about the conference can be found here: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/CREW/Conferences/TheorisingWales/  

Interviews with Joan Baker and Anne Gingell

Rebecca met with Joan Baker and Anne Gingell today, to hear their memories of Cardiff College of Art from the 1960s and 1970s. 

Joan Baker studied art at Cardiff, before going on to teach at other colleges including Bath.  She returned to Cardiff and taught there for 38 years, working closely with Tom Hudson.

Anne Gingell moved to Cardiff in 1966 when her husband, John, took up a teaching post at the college. John Gingell was very interested in performance, and his ‘Alternative Studies’ course at the college laid the foundations for the establishment of the Third Area, later to become the Space Workshop.

We are still looking for former students from the college. If you took part in performances with John Gingell, or were one of the students experimenting with performance and sound in the early 1960s (or earlier!) then we would love to hear from you.

Thanks to Joan Baker and Anne Gingell for their support for the project.

Interview with Sybil Crouch, Taliesin

Rebecca interviewed Sybil Crouch today, of Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea. Sybil was a student in Swansea and later went to work for West Wales Arts based in Carmarthen, taking charge of their art programmes. Part of our discussion was on the Swansea University Festival in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which included work by Gustav Metzger, Ivor Davies and Jeffrey Shaw. If you attended the festival or Pavilions in the Park or perhaps saw Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller as Cyclamen Cyclists in Swansea Docks then we would love to hear from you.

If you wish to jog your memory try our database, which contains over 2000 entries of performance art events in Wales and is available through the project’s website at http://www.performance-wales.org/

 

Thanks Sybil for sharing your memories with us.

Presentations in Glasgow and Liverpool

Heike gave two presentations on the project over the past week.

Heike contributed to a roundtable on Remembering Performance as part of the 30-anniversary edition of the National Review of Live Art Festival in Glasgow. Other participants included Claire MacDonald, Richard Layzell, Fiona Wright and Paul Clarke.

Sunday 21 March 2010, 11am -1pm at The Arches in Glasgow.

Further details are available at:

http://www.newmoves.co.uk/event-list-2010-national-review-of-live-art/40-national-review-of-live-art/697-remembering-performance-panel-discussion 

 

Heike presented a paper on her research into the development of performance art at Cardiff School of Art in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the Sculpture & Performance Conference, organised by the Henry Moore Foundation and the Tate Liverpool.
Friday 26 March 2010, 2pm at Tate Liverpool.
Further details are available at:http://www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk/hmi/research/research-events/sculpture-performance

For future presentations visit http://www.performance-wales.org/english/events/lectures.htm

Interview with Glyn Jones

Glyn Jones was the Head of the School of Fine Art at Cardiff College of Art between 1972 and 1999.  Born in the Rhondda, he studied at Cardiff in the 1950s, before going to the Slade School of Fine Art in London.  Glyn has exhibited widely and is a member of the 56 Group.

We spoke to him about his career as a teacher and artist, and also about the development of Cardiff College of Art and of performance art in the college with the establishment of the so-called "Third Area" and later the "Space Workshop". 

If you were a student during this period, we would love to hear from you; please email mail@performance-wales.org

We'd like to thank Glyn for his support, and for sharing his memories with us.

Anti-bodies/Zoo Reunion

We are continuing the work on John Gingell's archive and this week interviewed three of his collaborators from the early 1970s.  John Danvers, Charles Garrad and Ken Hickman were all members of the Zoo Group, an artists' cooperative co-founded by Gingell in the early 1970s. 

John, Charles and Ken travelled down to Cardiff, to John Gingell's former home, to meet with us.  Along with talking about the Zoo Group work, Charles and John were students at Cardiff College of Art during the time that 'Alternative Studies' was being established, which went on to become the Third Area/Space Workshop.

The three were also members of the group 'Anti-bodies', which produced work around Europe in the early 1970s.

The interview summary will be available online on our website at some point soon.

We'd like to thank John, Charles and Ken, and also the Gingell family for their time and support and for contributing to the research.

Next, we hope to meet with more former students from Cardiff who were involved in performance work during this time.  If you would like more information about this, please email us at mail@performance-wales.org

Ian Breakwell exhibition in Derby - Unword (Swansea 1970)

The QUAD in Derby currently shows a retrospective of the late British artist Ian Breakwell.
Breakwell presented a number of performance pieces in Wales in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including UNWORD 4 at the Swansea University Arts Festival in 1970. A film documentation of the seminal UNWORD series, made with film-maker Mike Leggett, is on show at the QUAD.

Ian Breakwell: The Elusive State of Happiness
QUAD Gallery, Corridors and Digital Screens
13th February 2010 – 18th April 2010
http://www.derbyquad.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/ian-breakwell

For information on UNWORD 4 go to:
http://www.performance-wales.org/english/archive/1970/1970.htm

Interview with Christine Kinsey, co-founder of Chapter Arts Centre

Christine Kinsey, along with Mik Flood and Bryan Jones, founded Chapter in Cardiff over forty years ago.  Chapter has become an important site in Cardiff for the arts, and one of Christine's (many) roles was in programming the gallery spaces, along with renovating the building, working behind the bar, designing publicity, managing the administration and a host of other jobs.

Rebecca has been to interview Christine this week about the founding of Chapter and the early years, the arts scene in Cardiff at the time, and the experimental work that flourished in Chapter.

Thanks to Christine for her time and sharing her memories. A transcript summary will be posted on the project website in the near future.

First Group Interview - Aberystwyth Arts Festival 1968

We held our first group interview last weekend with five former Aberystywyth University students who had been on the organising committee or attended Aberystwyth Arts Festival in 1968.  The '68 festival brought Fluxus to Aberystwyth with a three-day happening organised by Brian Lane, Rainbow Day and the First Dream Machine.  It included a concert of experimental electronic music, poetry events and a Fluxclinic, where particpants had their body-parts weighed, measured the capacity of their mouth and were tested for x-ray vision.

The amount of material on the festival that the group has kept was wonderful, including original leaflets from Brian Lane's 'Leaflet Concert', responses to requests to be patron of the festival (including Cecil Day Lewis, Raymond Williams and Jennie Lee), letters from Brian Lane and lots of posters. Topics covered in our conversation, apart from the Arts Festival itself, included art and politics, the 1960s underground scene, the student revolt of 1968 and links between the anarchist movement and Welsh-language activism at the time.

We are now adding all this material to the database and working on a transcript summary of the interview, all of which we hope to make available soon.

Thanks to Bob, Ian, John, Jonathan and Steve for returning to Aberystwyth and for sharing your memories, and for organising it all back in 1968. 

Finishing theme one and moving on...

The first theme of the project, performance and pedagogy, is nearly complete (well, the collection part at least).  Beck is putting the final touches to the database having processed the huge amount of material we collected from John Gingell's archive - over 1800 images!  Hopefully, we'll update the online database this month, and this material will be available on the website.  It includes many performances that we didn't know about before, along with photos and information about all manner of work carried out by John Gingell with his students and the ZOO group during the late 1960s and early 1970s.  We're indebted to John's family for giving us access to the archive, and for their help in piecing things together.  Thank you!

And on to theme two...  We're now going to be looking at networks, internationalism and student politics, and are beginning by holding a small reunion in Aberystwyth next Saturday.  We have invited a few former students who were involved in the Arts Festival in 1968 and are looking forward to hearing their memories of the events.

If anyone else has any information about, or attended, the festival, please get in touch with Beck and Heike at mail@performance-wales.org