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Steakhouse Live is a collective of artists and producers, creating new contexts for Live Art and performance. Since 2013, Steakhouse Live has curated over 25 events and worked with more than 120 artists making challenging and provocative work.
Steakhouse: Live Writing
In 2016 the annual Steakhouse Live Festival entitled Longer Wetter Faster Better will for the first time encompass a group of embedded critical writers, led / mentored by critic, curator and academic Diana Damian Martin and performance writer and artist Bojana Jankovic.
This is a pilot project focused on developing models of critical writing about Live Art that are formally daring, critically rigorous, contextually relevant and adaptive to the needs of an ever-changing, shape-shifting field.
The project contain three strands:
A series of workshops examining the formal possibilities of writing and criticism in relation to Live Art, engaging with the different histories of criticism in relation to, and as relevant for, Live Art.
Embedded writing, occuring live throughout the period of the festival and published on a dedicated website.
Reflective texts to follow the festival, published in Exeunt Magazine.
The project might also culminate in a publication edited by Bojana and Diana, encompassing extracts of the writing occurring over the weekend, commissioned and reflective texts.
Critical Writing and Live Art
Live Art is an approach to cultural practice, comprising of artists working with liveness across art forms. Foregrounding the importance of the body as a material for cultural and artistic practice, as well as the importance of social, activist and public spaces for debate and representation, Live Art emerged in the late 20th century. The Live Art Development Agency, the leading organisation for Live Art, defines the practice as follows:
Live Art is a research engine, driven by artists who are working across forms, contexts and spaces to open up new artistic models, new languages for the representation of ideas and identities, and new strategies for intervening in the public sphere.
With its varying relationships to public space, questions of representation, identity politics, issue-driven, body-based work, Live Art aims to create ample space for debates on core social, political and artistic issues.
To this effect, critical writing on Live Art should be less oriented towards processes of cultural valuation or legitimation, but more towards a reconsideration, both formal and topical, of the work in question, and the discussions at its heart. We are interested in developing critical writing that seeks to bring visibility and productive challenge to the aesthetic, physical and discursive nature of Live Art practices, and consider their cultural imperative and reach.
Writers
We are looking for three writers to join the project. We are especially interested in writers new to the field, who could bring other areas of experience and discussion to exploring the field of Live Art.
The project is open to writers (researchers or practitioners) working in other art forms, such as visual arts or theatre, as well as those whose work is primarily focused on politics, sociology or a different discipline.
Previous experience within Live Art / performance is not necessary; we are looking for people who consider writing a core part of their profession or practice and who are interested/invested topics the festival explores, such as facets of marginalisation (and popular culture), racial and body politics and audience-festival relationship.
The festival programme is available here. For previous examples of live performance responses have a look at the live durational writing project on Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola!.
The writers will need to be available for the following:
Workshop 1: 7th October (half day)
Workshop 2: tbc, between 4-14th October (half day)
Steakhouse Live Festival: 14th-16th October, taking place at The Yard Theatre, Rich Mix and Toynbee Studios
We can offer a fee/honorarium of £100 to cover expenses.
To apply please send a short CV, together with a cover note on why you are interested in the project and two writing samples (no less than 250 words each) to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]. The writing samples do not need to focus on Live Art or performance; we are interested in your thinking, argumentation and style.