Keeping it LIVE: Press info > Press pack
Keeping it Live- 3 days of Live Art in Hertford 8th-10th May 2008
Held for the first time this year 'Keeping it LIVE', a major performance festival and a major coup for Hertford’s art scene brings a dynamic new strand to Courtyard Arts centre’s existing exhibition programme. Part of Courtyard’s annual Bridge Arts Festival and Open Exhibition ‘Keeping it LIVE’ will feature a jam-packed programme of eclectic live art performances, interactions and video work that trace and expose the breadth of Live Art activity today. Featuring a plethora of new and established artists from up and down the country, and from abroad, this festival is not to be missed. A unique chance to play witness to and take part in a range of exciting contemporary live works that will astound, amaze and entertain - and at times leave you a little baffled.
Keeping it LIVE is hosted by Courtyard Arts Centre, and creatively produced by Holly Darton and funded by the Arts Council East. Holly is keen to place Live Art firmly as part of the visual arts and to create new opportunities for Live work to exist alongside more traditional art forms within the region.
Keeping it LIVE is a free event with everyone welcome- from those with no previous knowledge of Live Art to artists working in the field. It kicks off on Thursday 8th May at 7pm with an informative evening exploring what exactly Live Art is. Holly Darton will present ‘The Performance Pack’, conceived and created by Joshua Sofaer in association with Tate Modern and The Live Art Development Agency… “devised for those with an interest in contemporary art but little knowledge or experience of performance- based practice, The Performance Pack will introduce some of the key issues of performance within the context of fine art”. Jenny Hunt concludes the night with her Performance on Performance- an “introductory guide to performance art with political sentiments, comments made with condiments, speculative spitting, politically correct nakedness, and audience interaction coloured by poetic props and fizzy pop, providing a satirical narration on preconceived ideas of performance and its eclectic history”.
Friday 9th May showcases work from 5 artists and performers including Richard Layzell (London), a highly established artist and performer who has shown work both nationally and internationally and will launch his new book ‘Cream Pages The Dialogues of Tania Koswycz and Richard Layzell’ during the festival.
Also performing is Mary Hurrell (London), Sam Hasler (Bristol) and Katherina Radeva (Bulgaria) who will be carrying out a 2-hour durational work exploring Bulgarian Folklore using raw materials such as wine and garlic. The performances will happen in and around a variety of spaces at the Courtyard from 7pm-9.30pm.
Saturday 10th May features 4 more artists from 2 pm including work from Claire Blundell Jones, a Leeds based artist who, for the festival will be blowing tumbleweeds around the town of Hertford. She has blown her genuine American tumbleweeds through Hastings, Sheffield, Leeds, London and Finland. She uses a leaf blower to escort her tumbleweed, to make it tumble in a natural way as possible. Together, the artist and her prop can connote awkwardness, tension, embarrassment, alienation and desolation. Her practice includes performance, video, installations and participatory public art. She creates work mainly in the public realm, which develops directly out of the relationship built between the audience and herself.
Also performing is Mel Donohoe (Suffolk) and Chloe Dechery (France) in collaboration with Chris Eley and Lucy Foster who through playful investigation of movement, sound and spoken word will “attempt to look at what it means to do something and to be seen doing it”. At 6pm Dan Whitehouse (Hereford) will be performing using a cross-pollination of sound (dusty vinyl and film clips), vision and action. Encapsulating the cult iconography of popular culture; the people, places, races and faces, he invites the audience to come and have a dance and be bombarded by the wistful reverberations that lie within.
The festival concludes with a collaborative performance from Jenny Hunt and the festivals creative producer Holly Darton who describe their performance as being “Embarrassing, sad, funny and all too familiar. Revealing the indispositions only shared between two friends who quite literally believe they can take on the world with their dance moves. This work is not about anything specific, it’s about what it means to be human”.
These performances coincide with the private view for the Courtyard’s annual ‘Open’ exhibition.
Full details from Courtyard Arts website at www.courtyardarts.org.uk . Or contact Holly Darton on 07833 308121 or Hollydarton21@hotmail.com for information and/or further images.
Holly Darton Biography
Holly graduated from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in 2003 after completing an Art Foundation at Hertford Regional College where she now works as a lecturer. She now lives in Hertford and continues to make-work in a studio on a local chicken farm. For the past 6 years much of Holly’s work has been as one half of an active collaborative practice titled ‘Ben and Holly’ as well as creating solo work alongside projects that enable her to work with a range of individuals including educational projects, workshops for artists on subjects such as ‘reworking the day job’ and creating situations and facilitating periods of time for creativity to occur both individually and as part of a group, enabling a range of people to engage in art. She is interested in the relationships she forms with people, everyday occurrences and physical movement as a way of expressing emotion. She represents this through a range of performance and video works. She has shown work both nationally and internationally including a 23 day duration work at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a month residency at Colchester Arts Centre working with Franko B, performing at Expo Festival Nottingham, The Chisenhale Gallery London, and at the Bodily Functions Festival in Cork, Ireland.
“Live art is a term used to describe experimental practices and processes that exist outside of more traditional art practices. Live art allows for play, process and circumstance without an emphasis on product. It allows artists to explore issues and ideas that are about experience rather than object. It provides an umbrella for work that happens and disappears, that’s not already been pinned down, that’s not a business but a conversation, a language, a feeling, a site, a ceremony, a moment, atmosphere, a happening, a walk, a duration, something beautiful, a spectacle, a question, expression, sacrifice, it’s a comment, unifying, human, its everything and nothing, its you and me and us and here and now, its live”.
The event happens at Courtyard Arts Centre, Port Vale Hertford SG14 1AA.
Image - Claire Blundell Jones: ‘Tumbleweed’
Image credit: Jennifer Taylor