New Website

Our new bilingual website is up and running - containing extracts from over 40 interviews with artists, administrators and audience members and access to a fully searchable database, documenting nearly 700 performance events created in Wales between 1965 and 1979: www.performance-wales.org

Website Launch

We are very pleased to announce that the new website and database will be launched this Friday, 17th June at the Cyfrwng Conference in Cardiff.  The website includes clips from the 40 solo, sited and group interviews that we've conducted over the past two years with artists, administrators, former art students, teachers and audience members.  Our new, updated database can also be found on the website, with information on over 700 events in Wales between 1965 and 1979, including performances, concerts, interventions, teaching events and peformative protests.  The database is fully searchable and contains images, memories and other traces of the work that we have discovered during the course of our research.  Please take a look, and let us know if you have more information, or if it jogs any memories.

Finally, Heike and Rebecca would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the project, especially our interviewees who have been so generous with their time and sharing their archives with us - diolch yn fawr!

Coming towards a close

Heike and Rebecca are coming towards to end of the project, winding down the research and focussing more on the outputs of the online, searchable database and the collection of interviews that will be deposited in various archives.

We will be releasing more information about this over the coming weeks, and also launching our new website.

We will also be presenting our findings at various conferences, including the Performance Studies International Conference in Utrecht at the end of May.

In the meantime, if you would like to contact us, please continue to email mail@performance-wales.org

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.