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.