Live Art performance is, and always has been, a contested and often controversial issue with the slippery and ever changing nature of the field making definitions difficult. Despite strong historical precedents, established methodologies, and traceable lineage, contemporary live art performance strategies are often mistakenly referred to as ‘new’ or ‘emerging’ practices.

The potentials and concerns of live art in relation to such notions of cultural production, and thematics of marginalised existence & embodiment are characteristic of a large body of live art performance works by artists whose esthetics and politics challenge both the art world’s and the media’s version of socio-cultural reality. The desire or need to discover and make connections between a culturally and spiritually dissociated past and our present social and political realities, is embedded in the recurring thematics within live art practices that commonly investigate: identity; conditions of embodiment; the value of social and collective intersubjectivity; the transformative nature of ritual practices; and the status of performance as a social ritual with the capacity to connect distant times with the present.

more to come