Theatre

I’ve been asked to explain to you a) what Live Art is and why it might appeal to you; b) why Chelsea Theatre is presenting a season of Live Art, ‘Sacred’, from September 5 2006, and why it plans to become a dedicated Live Art venue and to convince you c) to come to the Chelsea Theatre. In 750 words, for 125 quid.

Being an artist, I’m comfortable with the budget. I’m less comfortable with the implications. I suspect I’ve been asked to write this because I trained as an actor, and was one, before becoming a director, losing interest in the whole business, and migrating into that ghetto known as Live Art, where I have worked for 20 years. Feature continues

The assumption might be that I understand ‘you’, the regular reader of these pages, that I might be a bridge between ‘the theatre’ and ‘Live Art’. I am being asked to articulate what Live Art is – and it’s hard enough to articulate what my own work is, without being asked to speak for everybody else. And the sector is so diverse that almost anything I say will be disputed by someone.

I don’t want to resort to lame jokes about ‘Live Art’ versus ‘Dead Art’ – tempting as they might be. I don’t want to write in academic terms, nor in its bastard pidgin cousin, Arts-Council-funding-application-speak. To talk about ‘performativity’ or ‘the body as site’ is about as useful a way of conjuring up the beauty, excitement and shock that Live Art can deliver, as describing Ibsen in terms of the artificiality of naturalism, or of the way psychoanalysis and Scandinavian nationalism came together to create some of the first truly ‘female’ characters in Western drama.

I really don’t want to suggest that Live Art is better than more conventional forms of naturalistic theatre. These forms of theatre have been influential on strands of Live Art, and Live Art has been enormously influential on conventional forms of theatre.