Performance in an Age of Precarity

Continuing the proposal of revealing unique studies about key-moments of experimentalism in the performing arts between the 1960’s and today, this series is structured transnationally and encompasses various contexts, seeking to question dramaturgic and aesthetic contaminations. In this scope, the TBA Zoom room will host three conferences where the present and the past are articulated together, either through the re-enactment of a performance that is a historic milestone of Yugoslavian experimentalism, presented by Janez Jansa through a revisitation of his work reassembling Pupilija, papa Pupilčki and the Pupilceks, originally from 1969 and reconstructed in 2006; or through the mapping of contemporary experimental British creation in the midst of precariousness, presented by Maddy Costa and Andy Field in their work Performance in an Age of Precarity.

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Performance in an age of Precarity by Maddy Costa and Andy Field is an anthology of essays that attempts to sketch a map of the UK’s contemporary performance landscape in the period between the financial crisis of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020. Each essay focuses on a particular artist, including Alexandrina Hemsley & Jamila Johnson-Small, Dickie Beau, Forced Entertainment, Scottee, Selina Thompson and Tania El Khoury.
By turns poetical, autobiographical, analytical and discursive, these essays aspire to imagine a new vocabulary for speaking and thinking about the radicality of live performance.
This is an opportunity to talk to the authors as part of TBA’s ongoing series Histories of Experimentalism.