LIVE ART

Phoebe Patey-Ferguson

“Live art is concerned with all kinds of interventions in the world and all kinds of encounters with an audience. Live art offers a space in which artists can take formal and conceptual risks, try out different ways of working, consider ideas of process, explore aspects of their practice, and investigate relationships with an audience. It offers artists choices and approaches that can impact on, or inform, their evolving practices and provide a context to look at different mediums of expression.”

  • Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine, ‘Live Art in London,’ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2005), p.76

Live Art loves an intervention. It thrives on a shifting encounter, an experimentation in process, or an investigation into ways of connecting and taking risks. It is in this spirit that we invited contributions for this online edition of Interventions, bringing together works that respond to, extend or complicate the key themes of the ‘Live Art: Radicalism and Complicity in a Scene of Constraint,’ Special Issue of Contemporary Theatre Review. These contributions further highlight the resilience, experimentation and urgent socio-political engagement of contemporary Live Art practices, offering glimpses into practices and strategies that are unfolding and engaging across the UK and connecting globally.

In the midst of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Farah Saleh’s work Balfour Reparations confronts the UK’s colonial legacy in Palestine and its ongoing complicity in the denial of Palestinian political rights and self-determination. This work powerfully deploys counterfuturism to collectively imagine an attainable future of self-determination for Palestinians. Saleh’s sound work, and its accompanying text which outlines their participatory lecture performance, orientates towards a liberatory future through what André Lepecki terms ‘speculative pragmatic mobilisation’ to interweave a cross-medium approach where ‘allowing for the plurality of forms’ can ‘support open dreaming’ and an ‘urge to action.’

Other pieces continue to foreground Live Art’s critical engagement and capacity to reshape a confrontation with a world experiencing catastrophes. Miranda Whall’s multi-modal project spanning durational performance, live event, film and installation When Earth Speaks 2024 engages with live data streams from a soil sensor network in the Cambrian Mountains of Wales. Through durational drawings, performances and collaborations, Whall proposes reconceptualising our relationship to environmental data, inviting audiences to ‘hang out with the data’ and consider it an active, communicative presence rather than a passive resource. In exploring alternative, co-creative modes of engagement with the other-than-human, Whall’s contribution outlines how this work resists extractive logic and invites audiences to become collaborators and caretakers in a shared dialogue with the earth.

Contributions explore how Live Art enables vital spaces of collaboration and encounter within persistent conditions of precarity and austerity. Gao Shuyi and Bill Aitchison’s dialogue traces the rapid emergence of Last Minute Live Art (LMLA) as a key promoter of experimental performance in Chinese cities, supporting emerging artists across diverse spaces. Kerry Priest’s vivid account of the SOAK (Support Our Artist Kin) Live Art nights in Plymouth demonstrates how bringing together artists across disciplines under a Live Art banner has brought an affirmation of liveness and galvanised an unconventional community of artists. While situated around 400 miles north, Violet Vincent McLean frames the evolution of Glasgow’s Nocturnal scratch night, with its commitment to championing the unfinished and the half-formed, as an ‘inescapably queer’ form of adaptability and resilience.

Live Art’s queer approaches to time, space and relationality are central to Marcus Bell’s poetic reflection on Home Live Art’s 25th anniversary salon held in autumn 2025, curated by SERAFINE1369. Bell proposes that the radical potential of the event lay not in a search for permanence but in the transformative possibilities of the ephemeral, the transient and the decomposing – ‘the fleeting and ephemeral work of transition.’ In considering the possibilities opened up between this ephemerality of the performance moment, the decay of memory and the supposed capturing of documentation, Nicol Parkinson’s proposal of ‘retrospective listening’ to archival recordings aims to resist fixing tendencies of the visual record. In attending to the ambiguities of the sonic trace, Parkinson argues, we may open up space for new imagined performances and understandings of the past in the present.

Spanning diverse forms, contexts and concerns, the contributions affirm the current verve of Live Art as a site for creative, critical and academic experimentation. Tracing ways in which an open-ended field of practice fosters new forms of assembly, catalysing and dreaming, these works show how even in scenes of constraint, Live Art can find ways to ooze between the gaps, take root in the fracture and coalesce around points of resistance.

Interventions editorial by Phoebe Patey-Ferguson. Contemporary Theatre Review’s Special Issue, Live Art: Radicalism and Complicity in a Scene of Constraint, is co-edited by Stephen Greer and Phoebe Patey-Ferguson.