When Fluxus Came to West Wales: A re-search in 12 actions – or, does a network have a margin?

 This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordIn November of 1968, Brian Lane, a little-known London artist with extensive contacts to the international neo-avant-garde, came to the small Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth to stage a three-day programme of experimental art. Among the events was Lane’s Fluxconcert by and for Fluxus, featuring now classic Fluxus scores by artists including George Maciunas, George Brecht, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts and Mieko Shiomi. The article recounts the various efforts the researcher undertook to find out more about Aberystwyth’s Fluxus past, culminating in a reenactment of the original concert exactly forty years later

Training for performance art and live art

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordRadical remoteness?: training for performance art and live art in the age of social distancin

Notes from Lockdown

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recor

Book review: Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960 by Lara ShalsonCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 206 pp, ISBN 9781108426459 (hardback)

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordBook revie

What is the impact of theatre and performance?

What are the ways in which we can think through theatre’s impact on the world? The question itself contains several assumptions that deserve to be examined: claims around usefulness, applicability, causality and measurability, or the nature of the relationship and interdependence between artistic and socio-political domains. Different traditions of performance practice entail different understandings of impact. How, if at all, can such impact be traced, measured and assessed? This question raises a vast number of thorny issues and debates in theatre and performance scholarship, pertaining to methods of research, organizational modes of justification and ethical motivations of theatrical practices. Using an example of a community based production by lesbian feminist theatre collective Siluetas from Guatemala/El Salvador, the chapter points to the difficulties around impact assessment and suggests ways of expanding these criteria to include qualitative and interpretive aspects, in order to avoid restricting the question of impact to the tyranny of evidence and numbers. This implies re-shaping concepts such as participation or empowerment, unburdening them from the pressures of policy, governance and hollow trickle-down promises, and imbuing them with the unorthodox potentials offered by performance practice