Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Leeds Beckett University
Exploring festival performance as a state of encounter
“Festival Performance as a State of Encounter” was an AHRC Research Network funded by the Beyond Text schemehttp://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/
This was the first collaboration between Rebekka Kill, Leeds Metropolitan University and Alice O’Grady, University of Leeds School of performance and Creative Industries. This Research Network led on to the more substantial Small Grant “Environments for Encounter” but had very different methodologies and aims.
In this work we began to explore what we called "Relational performance". This often happens adjacent to the main programming of bands and DJs and yet are integral to both the success of the festival and the way in which memories of the event are personalised and transmitted to others. These performances are often unannounced, informal and responsive to both the time and place in which they occur. We were interested in how new forms of interactive, participatory and experimental performance are emerging within this context.
Our network events were two seminars and two workshop events where we made performance work and installation – see pdf. We explored improvisation and space; the playful arena; the transmission of memory and archiving; storytelling and the role of electronic media such as mobile phones, and we used Facebook as our core repository for the collection of images and stories of this type of practice. We also wanted to reach out and find our which other academic and professional were interested in exploring this with us. These were drawn from a broad range of academic disciplines and professional contexts.
One of our project outputs was an academic journal article Kill, R and O’Grady, A (2013) Exploring Festival Performance as a State of Encounter, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Sage, Issue 12.2 April/July 2013 vol. 12 no. 2-3 pp268-283 ISSN 1474-0222
