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.