TIME
SPACE POWER
Live art in Tāmaki Makaurau An
immigrant
artform
“Live Art” is a term that was created in the United Kingdom and formalised through the creation of the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in 19991. It is used to define performance work that happens outside of mainstream performance practices and, like the performance art movement in the United States in the 1960s, gives artists the space to allow their piece of art to unfold directly in front of an audience in real time and space2. It describes a specific type of art that is not defined by artistic discipline, i.e. theatre, dance, visual art etc, and doesn’t play by the rules of linear thinking, storytelling or philosophy. It is art that places the encounter between the performer and her audience at the very centre of the experience, and through this exchange, lends itself toward exposing power relationships between people, places and things.3
I found out about live art in 2010, through a book lying about in a shared apartment in Brussels, Belgium called LIVE: Art and Performance.4 It was made as a companion to a programme of performance held at Tate Modern, London, in 2004 called Live Culture. I had recently escaped a long-term television soap opera contract playing a stereotypical Indian character, and this trip was my antidote to three years of living in the mainstream public eye. I chose Brussels because it was known amongst my artistic peers as a centre of experimental art and so I lived there for six months indulging myself in as many alternative arty experiences as I could.
A common talking point amongst artists in Brussels was that its large POC immigrant population, its complex history with English, Flemish and French languages, and its reckoning with its bloody, colonial past, is what led to the city being a go-to spot for art that leaned away from language-based performance. The city was full of art that was abstract, emotional and politically charged. As someone who began my life outside of my homeland, India, as an immigrant in Qatar before settling in Aotearoa, this felt relatable in a way I hadn’t experienced before. There were very few plays on offer in Aoteaoroa in the 2010’s that told histories of immigration or colonialism in anything other than exoticized costumes, or through a white and patriarchal lens. What was on offer in Brussels were performances that reflected the contemporary experience of living marginally, performances that reclaimed histories, and leaned into the messiness of being a modern and multifaceted world citizen. These performances moved beyond what spoken language could offer them, making use of bodies, space, time and power relationships as their primary sources of storytelling. I wonder if it was this quality of being an artform capable of centering the immigrant or outsider experience, free from - or at the very least in debate with - the trappings of a colonial gaze, more than anything else that drew me to live art.
As a practising artist and an immigrant with Indian ancestry, I employ live art to further my agenda of processing and healing from the ongoing effects that colonialism has had on me from an early age. I use it to help me meet the barriers between myself and the oppressive forces I live under. I notice that live artists around me, especially young, queer and POC artists, in Tāmaki Makaurau do this too (though some may not frame their work as “live art”). They use this multi dimensional art form to scale the walls between them, the world and others. These are walls that are unseen but physically felt, walls of our bodies, walls of buildings, walls at the border, the walls between people. These walls take time to build and time to scale. They are walls that end up hardened when, as Sara Ahmed writes, “history becomes concrete.”5
Live art carries with it a sense of the elite of high-end, avant garde, experimental art and to this I call bluff. This is a cloak of superiority that has helped the border walls of this artform seem too high for QTBIPOC artists to climb, but as I have set down already, this form flourished in the hands of those who are made to feel that they do not fit. It is more useful for, and often best employed by the historically othered amongst us, than it is for those born into privilege.
I offer the following text to young artists who are drawn to alternative ways of telling their stories through performance. I hope it can be used as a picture of what live art can do to help unbind yourself from your oppressors and as an island for you to rest upon. One that can assure you, that no matter your background, class or status, you are probably already a live artist, it's just a matter of how you look at it.
I found out about live art in 2010, through a book lying about in a shared apartment in Brussels, Belgium called LIVE: Art and Performance.4 It was made as a companion to a programme of performance held at Tate Modern, London, in 2004 called Live Culture. I had recently escaped a long-term television soap opera contract playing a stereotypical Indian character, and this trip was my antidote to three years of living in the mainstream public eye. I chose Brussels because it was known amongst my artistic peers as a centre of experimental art and so I lived there for six months indulging myself in as many alternative arty experiences as I could.
A common talking point amongst artists in Brussels was that its large POC immigrant population, its complex history with English, Flemish and French languages, and its reckoning with its bloody, colonial past, is what led to the city being a go-to spot for art that leaned away from language-based performance. The city was full of art that was abstract, emotional and politically charged. As someone who began my life outside of my homeland, India, as an immigrant in Qatar before settling in Aotearoa, this felt relatable in a way I hadn’t experienced before. There were very few plays on offer in Aoteaoroa in the 2010’s that told histories of immigration or colonialism in anything other than exoticized costumes, or through a white and patriarchal lens. What was on offer in Brussels were performances that reflected the contemporary experience of living marginally, performances that reclaimed histories, and leaned into the messiness of being a modern and multifaceted world citizen. These performances moved beyond what spoken language could offer them, making use of bodies, space, time and power relationships as their primary sources of storytelling. I wonder if it was this quality of being an artform capable of centering the immigrant or outsider experience, free from - or at the very least in debate with - the trappings of a colonial gaze, more than anything else that drew me to live art.
As a practising artist and an immigrant with Indian ancestry, I employ live art to further my agenda of processing and healing from the ongoing effects that colonialism has had on me from an early age. I use it to help me meet the barriers between myself and the oppressive forces I live under. I notice that live artists around me, especially young, queer and POC artists, in Tāmaki Makaurau do this too (though some may not frame their work as “live art”). They use this multi dimensional art form to scale the walls between them, the world and others. These are walls that are unseen but physically felt, walls of our bodies, walls of buildings, walls at the border, the walls between people. These walls take time to build and time to scale. They are walls that end up hardened when, as Sara Ahmed writes, “history becomes concrete.”5
Live art carries with it a sense of the elite of high-end, avant garde, experimental art and to this I call bluff. This is a cloak of superiority that has helped the border walls of this artform seem too high for QTBIPOC artists to climb, but as I have set down already, this form flourished in the hands of those who are made to feel that they do not fit. It is more useful for, and often best employed by the historically othered amongst us, than it is for those born into privilege.
I offer the following text to young artists who are drawn to alternative ways of telling their stories through performance. I hope it can be used as a picture of what live art can do to help unbind yourself from your oppressors and as an island for you to rest upon. One that can assure you, that no matter your background, class or status, you are probably already a live artist, it's just a matter of how you look at it.
Conditional
Ties
Live art feels relatively new in Aotearoa. It is largely unknown as an artform, with the first instance of it being recognised as a category of performance at the Auckland Fringe Festival in 2017 through creating a “Best Contemporary Performance & Live Art” award6. Before then, art that might fall into this category was largely talked about as devised, new performance, multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary. But just as many examples of live art worldwide have been labelled ‘live art’ years after they have happened, it has been practiced in Aotearoa for much longer than we might realise.
In Aotearoa, it can be traced back to groups like Red Mole, the anarchic travelling troupe of multi-talented actors, musicians and poets established by Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell in 1974. They saw themselves as completely original, a group that “shouldn't have any conditional ties to anywhere else, particularly England,”7 but were certainly aware of being influenced by the “incredible rise of street theatre in the US.”8 Red Mole had a style that was highly visual and strongly physical, often employing costume and mask to their extremes. They positioned themselves as outsiders, refusing to be limited by bricks and mortar, and resisting institutional life. They chose to travel and tour instead, giving them a versatile upper hand in staying “truly independent of all institutional structures and therefore able to comment from the outside.”9
Although Red Mole presented an unmistakably alternative performance landscape from the imported dramas of the time, the people involved and their training still lived within the walls of British and European styles of art like Commedia Dell'arte, and the French clowning techniques of Jacque LeCoq. All the while, artists of colour were continuing long-held traditions of using their bodies as sites of art and activism, whether it be through daring to speak their own language, or wearing their traditional garments out in public. Perhaps though, they were boxed in as being indigenous, Pasifika, immigrant or folk artists, rather than experimental, avant garde, or live artists.
As far back as 1881, Indigenous people in Aotearoa have proved their expertise in bringing together their bodies, symbols, rituals and purpose through non-violent activism. Treated as outsiders on their homeland, Indigenous artists have long held instincts of how to use ritualistic action to assert their right to be seen and heard. I think of the children of Parihaka, sitting cross legged, white feathers in hand, in strong and peaceful protest, gazing directly in the eyes of their colonisers. This heart breaking image at once reminds me of the “calm, resourceful, altruistic, and creative,”10 ways in which the Indigenous people of Aotearoa show up in the face of the most violent of oppressors.
In Aotearoa, it can be traced back to groups like Red Mole, the anarchic travelling troupe of multi-talented actors, musicians and poets established by Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell in 1974. They saw themselves as completely original, a group that “shouldn't have any conditional ties to anywhere else, particularly England,”7 but were certainly aware of being influenced by the “incredible rise of street theatre in the US.”8 Red Mole had a style that was highly visual and strongly physical, often employing costume and mask to their extremes. They positioned themselves as outsiders, refusing to be limited by bricks and mortar, and resisting institutional life. They chose to travel and tour instead, giving them a versatile upper hand in staying “truly independent of all institutional structures and therefore able to comment from the outside.”9
Although Red Mole presented an unmistakably alternative performance landscape from the imported dramas of the time, the people involved and their training still lived within the walls of British and European styles of art like Commedia Dell'arte, and the French clowning techniques of Jacque LeCoq. All the while, artists of colour were continuing long-held traditions of using their bodies as sites of art and activism, whether it be through daring to speak their own language, or wearing their traditional garments out in public. Perhaps though, they were boxed in as being indigenous, Pasifika, immigrant or folk artists, rather than experimental, avant garde, or live artists.
As far back as 1881, Indigenous people in Aotearoa have proved their expertise in bringing together their bodies, symbols, rituals and purpose through non-violent activism. Treated as outsiders on their homeland, Indigenous artists have long held instincts of how to use ritualistic action to assert their right to be seen and heard. I think of the children of Parihaka, sitting cross legged, white feathers in hand, in strong and peaceful protest, gazing directly in the eyes of their colonisers. This heart breaking image at once reminds me of the “calm, resourceful, altruistic, and creative,”10 ways in which the Indigenous people of Aotearoa show up in the face of the most violent of oppressors.
*
The Children of Parihaka.
Digital image. Waatea News. Accessed August 22, 2021. .waateanews.com.
Aoteroa knows activism, from Parihaka (1881), to Bastion Point (1977), the Springbok tour protests, captured on film by the pioneer, mana wahine, film maker Merata Mita, to the occupation of Ihumātau (2019). As live art bloomed in Europe, in 2005 during a Waitangi Tribunal hearing, Tuhoe activist Tame Iti took aim with a shotgun at a New Zealand flag (believed to be an Australian flag used as a substitute) and shot it. In an interview with Kim Hill in 2016, Iti shared how carefully this act was planned through days of wānanga prior to the event. “Shooting the flag was all about political theatre,” he says."How do you tell your story? How do you bring a hundred years of hatred of anger to that point? So it's not an academic thing, this is a real thing for us."12
It must be said, that mana wāhine have (and continue) to be at the forefron of radical performance and activism. If an artist shares the lieage of Dame Whina Cooper, Te Whaea o te Motu (monther of the nation), who led the landmark hikoi in protest against the loss Māori land rights in 1975, resistance must be in their blood and bones. Present day performance artists follow in suit; Cat Ruka is yet to be stopped in her surgeon-like dissection of white supremacy from within arts structures; rapper, film maker, and writer Jessica hansell, a.k.a. Coco Solid, uses any and every medium at her disposal to effortlessly (and hilariously) mark the effects of colonialism and class warfare. In Aotearoa, it is mana wāhine who have laid the grounds for others to use action, presence, and making art as lethal weapons against imperialism.
Aotearoa’s Pacific sisters are no less to blame as trail blazers of art activism. Art-anarchists like Rosana Raymond and Yuki Kiahara have spent their career engraving the politics of otherness into the art world. During the nineties and early 2000s, they heralded the coming of Pacific Peoples as artistic mavericks, all while being “unapologetically urban.”11If live art is a form that is used to resist mainstream ways of storytelling, then it makes sense that those who are born into resistance would excel at it.
Despite centuries of coming up against the brick walls of colonialism, artists of colour continue to tread that thin line between art and activism. The feeling of the body, battered and bruised, sweaty and bloody, after repeatedly throwing yourself up against unchangeable surfaces is all too familiar to those who have been pushed to the outside of our society. From this position, it seems astonishing that the centre stages of live art in Aotearoa have been largely filled with white people of skinny proportions, when we have such rich “counter-stories” from our Indigenous and immigrant communities that in themselves “are powerful forms of resistance.”13
It must be said, that mana wāhine have (and continue) to be at the forefron of radical performance and activism. If an artist shares the lieage of Dame Whina Cooper, Te Whaea o te Motu (monther of the nation), who led the landmark hikoi in protest against the loss Māori land rights in 1975, resistance must be in their blood and bones. Present day performance artists follow in suit; Cat Ruka is yet to be stopped in her surgeon-like dissection of white supremacy from within arts structures; rapper, film maker, and writer Jessica hansell, a.k.a. Coco Solid, uses any and every medium at her disposal to effortlessly (and hilariously) mark the effects of colonialism and class warfare. In Aotearoa, it is mana wāhine who have laid the grounds for others to use action, presence, and making art as lethal weapons against imperialism.
Aotearoa’s Pacific sisters are no less to blame as trail blazers of art activism. Art-anarchists like Rosana Raymond and Yuki Kiahara have spent their career engraving the politics of otherness into the art world. During the nineties and early 2000s, they heralded the coming of Pacific Peoples as artistic mavericks, all while being “unapologetically urban.”11If live art is a form that is used to resist mainstream ways of storytelling, then it makes sense that those who are born into resistance would excel at it.
Despite centuries of coming up against the brick walls of colonialism, artists of colour continue to tread that thin line between art and activism. The feeling of the body, battered and bruised, sweaty and bloody, after repeatedly throwing yourself up against unchangeable surfaces is all too familiar to those who have been pushed to the outside of our society. From this position, it seems astonishing that the centre stages of live art in Aotearoa have been largely filled with white people of skinny proportions, when we have such rich “counter-stories” from our Indigenous and immigrant communities that in themselves “are powerful forms of resistance.”13
A Popular Example
A seductive aspect of live art is its tendency towards a multiplicitous, magpie-esque existence and in this magpie-esque way, instead of trying to canvas all aspects of this form, I’d like to steal just a few elements that myself and other artists use as ways to scale those seemingly imperceptible walls around us. They are: our bodies and their personal history, the politics of time and space, and the unseen but undeniable space of power relations between a performer and her audience.14
These elements come from looking at the artform through a performance and theatre-heavy point of view, but the truth is that the roots of live art (in its Western understanding) lie in the visual art world. Many works cited in LIVE: Art and Performance, for example, are defined as live art many years after the fact. So it may be more useful to consider the term, live art, more as a lens through which you can interpret performance or ask questions of it, rather than a way in which to define a work’s legitimacy or claim to the label.
These elements come from looking at the artform through a performance and theatre-heavy point of view, but the truth is that the roots of live art (in its Western understanding) lie in the visual art world. Many works cited in LIVE: Art and Performance, for example, are defined as live art many years after the fact. So it may be more useful to consider the term, live art, more as a lens through which you can interpret performance or ask questions of it, rather than a way in which to define a work’s legitimacy or claim to the label.
Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0. Digital image. Royal Academy. Accessed August 22, 2019. royalacademy.org.uk.
The Serbian conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramovic is probably the most famous artist that would fall into the category of someone who began as a performance artist in the 1970s, but was included under the live art umbrella in the 1990s. Although this is a European example rather than one from Atoearoa, I bring her up because of the popularity of her work. From 2017 - 19 I taught a paper on hybrid art practices at UNITEC’s School of Dance. What I saw was that the clarity of Abramovic’s work was a powerful gateway drug into the world of live art for young artists, especially those who prefered a non-verbal, non-narrative approach to making art.
Abramovic’s performances use a key feature of live art, and that is to explore what “happens to the body when thinking is secondary.”15 This was valuable for feminists at the time who used performance art as a way to engage with “questions that had been systematically oppressed and ignored in Western thought”16 through putting their bodies at the centre of their art. Her work, The Artist Is Present (2010), where she sat in a red dress as the exhibition herself and simply stayed present with MoMA gallery visitors as they sat, one by one, in front of her, is a popular example of the kind of work live art encompasses. However an earlier, more seminal piece of hers that hits the borders of live art, is Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she presents herself and the question “how far [can the] public can go, if the artist herself doesn’t do anything?”17alongside a table of 72 objects ranging from roses and feathers, to a knife and a gun.
Abramovic’s performances use a key feature of live art, and that is to explore what “happens to the body when thinking is secondary.”15 This was valuable for feminists at the time who used performance art as a way to engage with “questions that had been systematically oppressed and ignored in Western thought”16 through putting their bodies at the centre of their art. Her work, The Artist Is Present (2010), where she sat in a red dress as the exhibition herself and simply stayed present with MoMA gallery visitors as they sat, one by one, in front of her, is a popular example of the kind of work live art encompasses. However an earlier, more seminal piece of hers that hits the borders of live art, is Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she presents herself and the question “how far [can the] public can go, if the artist herself doesn’t do anything?”17alongside a table of 72 objects ranging from roses and feathers, to a knife and a gun.
Abramovic’s instructions for Rhythm 0.
Digital Image. Accessed August 22, 2019. Lisson Gallery. Lissongallery.com
The results of Abramovic’s conceptual challenge ended up being a moving, disturbing and deeply personal experience. In her passive state, the artist allowed the audience to take full advantage and exercise their right to follow her instructions as they saw fit. What started as timid and gentle interactions with her body, over six hours descended into a testing of her body’s borders. Thorns are pressed into flesh, her body was moved, displayed, objectified and photographed, before finally being held at gunpoint, all in the name of ‘art’ and within the so-called safe spaces of the art gallery. Over the hours that Abramovic stayed silent, her spectators closed the distance between her body as a concept, and her body as the keeper of herself, and her personal history. At the conclusion of the performance Abramovic reflected, “I started moving, and started being myself, because I was there just like a puppet just for them, and in that moment everybody ran away. People could not actually confront with myself, with me, as a person.”18
Live art thrives on the personal, something that the feminist scholar Peggy Phelan attributes to the energetic rise of personal performance after World War II.19 In Europe, performance moved from “empty formalism” towards an “intensely personal”20 expression, one that showed the body-in-process, in question, rather than a body of decision or premeditated message. Many other post war artists in Europe began to swap formalism and technique in favour of something that “asserted the performer’s personal history and identity as an indispensable content.”21
I use this popular example because in my time as a teacher of live art practices it is the example that captured young artists' hearts immediately. But it must be pointed out that what Marina is praised for has not been historically met with the same approval when performed by POC artists. While Marina is able to lend her alabaster white skin to objectivity, choosing when to drop the veil or not, artists like Rosanna Raymond have found that their “body has always been a contested space. Not so much by myself but by others.”22
Abramovic embodies the politics of art and privilege in more ways than challenging the contract of subject and object, spectator and artist. While she is deserving of the utmost respect, I cannot ignore that she has, like many other white artists, revealed her privilege in spades. In an uncorrected, leaked manuscript of her 2016 memoir, Walk Through Walls, Abramovic was called out on Twitter for her undeniably racist remarks towards Aboriginal Australians. In it, Abramovic horrifically objectifies Aborignal people, while simultaneously fetishing and appropriating parts of their cultural practice for her own. Performance artist SJ Norman, in his response to the controversy shoots an arrow right at the heart of this, pointing out, “I would much rather talk about Marina Abramovic as a lightning rod for the systemic racism that pervades the entire discourse of western art and the markets that govern it, as yet another active vector of white imperialist cultural and political priorities.”23
Live art thrives on the personal, something that the feminist scholar Peggy Phelan attributes to the energetic rise of personal performance after World War II.19 In Europe, performance moved from “empty formalism” towards an “intensely personal”20 expression, one that showed the body-in-process, in question, rather than a body of decision or premeditated message. Many other post war artists in Europe began to swap formalism and technique in favour of something that “asserted the performer’s personal history and identity as an indispensable content.”21
I use this popular example because in my time as a teacher of live art practices it is the example that captured young artists' hearts immediately. But it must be pointed out that what Marina is praised for has not been historically met with the same approval when performed by POC artists. While Marina is able to lend her alabaster white skin to objectivity, choosing when to drop the veil or not, artists like Rosanna Raymond have found that their “body has always been a contested space. Not so much by myself but by others.”22
Abramovic embodies the politics of art and privilege in more ways than challenging the contract of subject and object, spectator and artist. While she is deserving of the utmost respect, I cannot ignore that she has, like many other white artists, revealed her privilege in spades. In an uncorrected, leaked manuscript of her 2016 memoir, Walk Through Walls, Abramovic was called out on Twitter for her undeniably racist remarks towards Aboriginal Australians. In it, Abramovic horrifically objectifies Aborignal people, while simultaneously fetishing and appropriating parts of their cultural practice for her own. Performance artist SJ Norman, in his response to the controversy shoots an arrow right at the heart of this, pointing out, “I would much rather talk about Marina Abramovic as a lightning rod for the systemic racism that pervades the entire discourse of western art and the markets that govern it, as yet another active vector of white imperialist cultural and political priorities.”23
Personal History, Time and Space
The body as a political site, as indispensable content, is an important opening into live art for me. It helps me understand why I, as an artist of colour, have been drawn so strongly to this type of performance. As an Indian woman, my body and bodies like mine have been a site of otherness since they were colonised through British rule in 1858. Their nearly 90-year exercise in superiority over my bloodlines without a doubt shaped my relationship to my body, and therefore my sense of the world around me. I am not surprised, therefore, that I gravitate toward my body as a way to begin wriggling out from under my ruler's thumb. Maybe if I can reclaim the walls of my body first, the rest of the world might not seem so scary.
Artists in Tāmaki Makaurau are thinking hard about body politics, moving strongly away from centring the thin white bodies I saw populating the stages and pages of live art offerings in the early 2000s. For example, instances of “fat rebellions”24 through performance are becoming par-for-the-course in the live art scene in Auckland. As part of the 2019 Auckland Fringe Festival, four-hour durational performance, Jelly Baby, took the destruction of beauty standards quite literally. In Jelly Baby, performer and creator Alice Kirker, invited audiences to methodically destroy items that are thick inlaid with fatphobia. Weight scales, measuring tapes, skipping ropes, and women's magazines were collectively torn apart with a deliberate and calmly encouraged glee, before being preserved as specimens in jars of coloured jelly. Relegated to the past, these specimens of body control lay utterly inert and useless, displayed around the artist as she proudly bathed her fat body in a bathtub, enjoying a well-deserved absolution after four hours of destroying her oppressive forces.
Artists in Tāmaki Makaurau are thinking hard about body politics, moving strongly away from centring the thin white bodies I saw populating the stages and pages of live art offerings in the early 2000s. For example, instances of “fat rebellions”24 through performance are becoming par-for-the-course in the live art scene in Auckland. As part of the 2019 Auckland Fringe Festival, four-hour durational performance, Jelly Baby, took the destruction of beauty standards quite literally. In Jelly Baby, performer and creator Alice Kirker, invited audiences to methodically destroy items that are thick inlaid with fatphobia. Weight scales, measuring tapes, skipping ropes, and women's magazines were collectively torn apart with a deliberate and calmly encouraged glee, before being preserved as specimens in jars of coloured jelly. Relegated to the past, these specimens of body control lay utterly inert and useless, displayed around the artist as she proudly bathed her fat body in a bathtub, enjoying a well-deserved absolution after four hours of destroying her oppressive forces.
Alice Kirker, Jelly Baby.
Digital Image. Provided by the Artist.
The audacious demand on time in this work is what I attribute to it being so successful in the softening of the walls of power held over bodies that are anything but tall, white and skinny. Presented in duration, Kirker insists that time and care is taken with her methodical undoing of body politics. On the night I attend the show, this takes three hours. In hour four, the time is taken to clean the room meticulously, removing any traces of collective destruction before settling down to eat her dinner. It is only after she has cleaned her space of ritual and fed herself that she then allows herself and her audience a sigh of watery relief.
Durational performances test a performer’s body, stamina and ability to relate to their audiences through an extended period of time. It is a well known strategy and in Jelly Baby, Kirker uses it to bring her audience closer to her experience in real time. She actively avoids the mainstream structure of time - notably in a Fringe festival context - that asks for water-tight storylines within sixty minute, three act structures, before the next show is ready to go. We may think of Fringe festivals as spaces for unconventional moments in art, but there is an irony in the need for venues to host as many shows as possible, to make as much money as possible. Shows need to be able to turn around in fifteen minutes, creating a worldwide trend of the tourable sixty minute Fringe show. Jelly Baby lies defiantly against this model, insisting that to understand a different body, you need to be in a different time, “time felt in the body, time not just as progression and accumulation but also as something faltering, non-linear, multidimensional and multi-faceted.”25 Jelly Baby demands the time that her body deserves. Time to play, time to work, time to eat, time to rest, and time to meaningfully share the personal history of her fat body.
Artists from Aotearoa are becoming well-known as game changers in their ability to draw on their personal histories through centring the body in their practice. In a meteoric rise since 2013, the Pasifika-Queer arts collective FAFSWAG has carved out a scene like no other for Queer artists of colour in Tāmaki Makaurau. The multi-disciplined collective has raged through the worldwide artworld, excelling in just about every artform imaginable. They are probably most known for the part they played in providing a platform for voguing in Tāmaki Makaurau. Through the study and acknowledgment of Black and Latinx23 ballroom culture created in Brooklyn, New York City during the mid 1980s, FAFSWAG have laid the foundations for Queer, brown, Māori and Pasifika bodies to take up space in the live art world through movement, fashion and photography for nearly a decade now. The incredible impact on their communities and on the shape of contemporary art in Aotearoa was recognised in 2020 with an Arts Foundation Laureate award, the first to be given to a collective of artists, rather than an individual.
Ballroom Culture was created to provide safe spaces for the LGBTQI+ community to live freely and and express their inner lives and strengths despite being poor and exiled to the fringes of society. Through the practice of catwalking and competing for trophies in categories that range from femme to bizarre, the ballroom scene is responsible for dance forms like voguing, a movement style that features sharp hand gestures akin to the heiroglyphic bodies of Ancient Egypt, combined with flexible body shapes reminiscent of modelling poses in beauty magazines, such as the form’s namesake, Vogue. As expressed through the definitive documentary, Paris is Burning, “voguing is the same thing as, like, taking two knives and cutting each other up, but through a dance form.”26 Voguing provides a safe way of expressing the violence experienced internally and externally by trans women of colour. During a talanoa held as part of The Nest: Street Style Solo Dance Festival, curated by Jahra Wasasala and Ooshcon, at Auckland’s Basement Theatre (2021), Jaycee Tanuvasa (mother of Auckland’s House of Iman) reflects that the South Auckland’s ballroom scene is used “not only as a safe haven to fulfil our fantasies but also bootcamp for life so we can survive and live.”27 This aptitude for creating safe space is something learned from both her Samoan ancestors and her “modern day leaders which is the ballroom community.”28
This specific combination of ancestral strength and the liberation felt through Street Style forms of dance is what characterized Wasasala and Ooshcon’s The Nest, a gathering of five solo works from street dancers of various styles, including Krump, Vogue, Waacking and Hip Hop. Here, Mosiana Webster, aka Nix, stands centre stage in traditional Tongan dress for her solo work, Vast. She begins by diligently following the intricate hand gestures her grandmother is teaching her of the traditional Tongan tau’olunga.
Durational performances test a performer’s body, stamina and ability to relate to their audiences through an extended period of time. It is a well known strategy and in Jelly Baby, Kirker uses it to bring her audience closer to her experience in real time. She actively avoids the mainstream structure of time - notably in a Fringe festival context - that asks for water-tight storylines within sixty minute, three act structures, before the next show is ready to go. We may think of Fringe festivals as spaces for unconventional moments in art, but there is an irony in the need for venues to host as many shows as possible, to make as much money as possible. Shows need to be able to turn around in fifteen minutes, creating a worldwide trend of the tourable sixty minute Fringe show. Jelly Baby lies defiantly against this model, insisting that to understand a different body, you need to be in a different time, “time felt in the body, time not just as progression and accumulation but also as something faltering, non-linear, multidimensional and multi-faceted.”25 Jelly Baby demands the time that her body deserves. Time to play, time to work, time to eat, time to rest, and time to meaningfully share the personal history of her fat body.
Artists from Aotearoa are becoming well-known as game changers in their ability to draw on their personal histories through centring the body in their practice. In a meteoric rise since 2013, the Pasifika-Queer arts collective FAFSWAG has carved out a scene like no other for Queer artists of colour in Tāmaki Makaurau. The multi-disciplined collective has raged through the worldwide artworld, excelling in just about every artform imaginable. They are probably most known for the part they played in providing a platform for voguing in Tāmaki Makaurau. Through the study and acknowledgment of Black and Latinx23 ballroom culture created in Brooklyn, New York City during the mid 1980s, FAFSWAG have laid the foundations for Queer, brown, Māori and Pasifika bodies to take up space in the live art world through movement, fashion and photography for nearly a decade now. The incredible impact on their communities and on the shape of contemporary art in Aotearoa was recognised in 2020 with an Arts Foundation Laureate award, the first to be given to a collective of artists, rather than an individual.
Ballroom Culture was created to provide safe spaces for the LGBTQI+ community to live freely and and express their inner lives and strengths despite being poor and exiled to the fringes of society. Through the practice of catwalking and competing for trophies in categories that range from femme to bizarre, the ballroom scene is responsible for dance forms like voguing, a movement style that features sharp hand gestures akin to the heiroglyphic bodies of Ancient Egypt, combined with flexible body shapes reminiscent of modelling poses in beauty magazines, such as the form’s namesake, Vogue. As expressed through the definitive documentary, Paris is Burning, “voguing is the same thing as, like, taking two knives and cutting each other up, but through a dance form.”26 Voguing provides a safe way of expressing the violence experienced internally and externally by trans women of colour. During a talanoa held as part of The Nest: Street Style Solo Dance Festival, curated by Jahra Wasasala and Ooshcon, at Auckland’s Basement Theatre (2021), Jaycee Tanuvasa (mother of Auckland’s House of Iman) reflects that the South Auckland’s ballroom scene is used “not only as a safe haven to fulfil our fantasies but also bootcamp for life so we can survive and live.”27 This aptitude for creating safe space is something learned from both her Samoan ancestors and her “modern day leaders which is the ballroom community.”28
This specific combination of ancestral strength and the liberation felt through Street Style forms of dance is what characterized Wasasala and Ooshcon’s The Nest, a gathering of five solo works from street dancers of various styles, including Krump, Vogue, Waacking and Hip Hop. Here, Mosiana Webster, aka Nix, stands centre stage in traditional Tongan dress for her solo work, Vast. She begins by diligently following the intricate hand gestures her grandmother is teaching her of the traditional Tongan tau’olunga.
Mosiana Webster, Vast.
Digital Image. Instagram. instagram.com/mosianawebster
What follows is a collage of ancestral hand gestures, autobiographical text and extended Krump solos all charting the dancer's journey of reclaiming herself and marrying her two worlds of Tongan heritage and Krump together. As we near the end of the hour, Webster's dress has shifted from her traditional Tongan dress to the traditional dress of Krump, black cap, large t-shirt and jeans. Newly clad, her chest puffs out in defiance of any limits placed on her. Her foot stamps and her head jerks back in challenge to her audience. Answering this, ten or so people respond, all dancers from her community, rushing through the fourth wall, as if it never existed, on to the stage to egg her on, gas her up and join in on a Krump battle you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else except for a garage in Māngere. It is unclear whether these participants are plants, or just people who refuse to let theatrical codes stop them from doing what they would in the natural habitat of Krump, that is the street, a garage, or car park.
I feel compelled to mention that I’m unsure that Mosiana Webster has come across the term “live art,” or has been taught its intricacies in any school or through access to those upper echelons of art-makers who consider themselves experts on experimentation. Webster came with a particular nonlinear approach to telling her story, drawing on the wisdoms inherent in her ancestry and in the genius of Black culture. Her performance is a shining example of what happens “from allowing the street - in all its non-linear wisdom - to leak into the theatre.”29 It is an example of the will of a BIPOC artist to break free of their oppression through their ancestral lineages of dance. It also shows how this inheritance has more in common with the innovative practices of live art, than it does with mainstream and Western modes of storytelling. Live art at its best can be a wonderful way to rebel and reclaim space for those bodies born in resistance, and Webster’s performance proves that it is not always found in theatres across the privileged Western world today.
Choreographically, Webster’s work throws down a challenge, boldy asking, what forms of dance are considered worthy of being presented to a paying audience, rather than sidelined to the streets, car parks and garages of the city. It’s an idea gaining in momentum worldwide, for example the 2019 Paris Opera’s Les Indes Galante, which invited Krumpers, Voguers, Flexors and Breakers (amongst others) out of the streets and clubs and onto the main stage, in order to subvert an operatic baroque spectacle.30 A preview piece written by Basement Theatre’s Executive Director, Cat Ruka (an arts leader with a background in performance art herself) reveals the uneasy political use of space at the heart of The Nest, and performances like Vast: “theatre venues like ours, which at their core affirm a colonial modality of giving and receiving performance, aren’t necessarily set up to uplift or whakamana the more circular, cypher-oriented covenant of street-born styles.”31
The Nest festival is a compelling moment for me to look at how live art can unearth the politics of space. It follows in the pattern of those artists who are able to interrupt the in-built codes of art spaces. In Rhythm O, Abramovic interrupts the static, objective nature of visual art by placing herself in the gallery, asking her spectators to consider the subjective distance between a person and their art. Jelly Baby challenges the cookie-cutter Fringe model by demanding more than the standard 60 minute slot in order to take her time with her destructive ritual. The Nest reminds us that we don’t need to limit ourselves to finding art in spaces built by the bourgeoisie. We can find it on the streets, and might be surprised by its natural innovative heart.
I feel compelled to mention that I’m unsure that Mosiana Webster has come across the term “live art,” or has been taught its intricacies in any school or through access to those upper echelons of art-makers who consider themselves experts on experimentation. Webster came with a particular nonlinear approach to telling her story, drawing on the wisdoms inherent in her ancestry and in the genius of Black culture. Her performance is a shining example of what happens “from allowing the street - in all its non-linear wisdom - to leak into the theatre.”29 It is an example of the will of a BIPOC artist to break free of their oppression through their ancestral lineages of dance. It also shows how this inheritance has more in common with the innovative practices of live art, than it does with mainstream and Western modes of storytelling. Live art at its best can be a wonderful way to rebel and reclaim space for those bodies born in resistance, and Webster’s performance proves that it is not always found in theatres across the privileged Western world today.
Choreographically, Webster’s work throws down a challenge, boldy asking, what forms of dance are considered worthy of being presented to a paying audience, rather than sidelined to the streets, car parks and garages of the city. It’s an idea gaining in momentum worldwide, for example the 2019 Paris Opera’s Les Indes Galante, which invited Krumpers, Voguers, Flexors and Breakers (amongst others) out of the streets and clubs and onto the main stage, in order to subvert an operatic baroque spectacle.30 A preview piece written by Basement Theatre’s Executive Director, Cat Ruka (an arts leader with a background in performance art herself) reveals the uneasy political use of space at the heart of The Nest, and performances like Vast: “theatre venues like ours, which at their core affirm a colonial modality of giving and receiving performance, aren’t necessarily set up to uplift or whakamana the more circular, cypher-oriented covenant of street-born styles.”31
The Nest festival is a compelling moment for me to look at how live art can unearth the politics of space. It follows in the pattern of those artists who are able to interrupt the in-built codes of art spaces. In Rhythm O, Abramovic interrupts the static, objective nature of visual art by placing herself in the gallery, asking her spectators to consider the subjective distance between a person and their art. Jelly Baby challenges the cookie-cutter Fringe model by demanding more than the standard 60 minute slot in order to take her time with her destructive ritual. The Nest reminds us that we don’t need to limit ourselves to finding art in spaces built by the bourgeoisie. We can find it on the streets, and might be surprised by its natural innovative heart.
Power
Underlying these examples of live art, is an investigation of power: how artists use their relationship with their audiences to talk about it, question it, play with it, subvert it. In 2018, I set about trying to explore this relationship and the effect it can have on my own journey of cultural identity through a solo performance called Fuck Rant.
Throughout my body of work, I have considered the question: what if the unspoken contract between the audience and the performer were a tangible thing? For Fuck Rant, I continued ito explore this question, wanting to find out what it might take to get everyone in the room on the same page together (a phrase often used when negotiating a contract between two entities). Using a game of labelling, I tried to map, define and identify everything in the room. This game was repeated with the audience within decreasing time limits. One of the crucial parts of this mapping and labelling was to identify where the “Fourth Wall” was.
The fourth wall is a concept whose rumour was best spread by the 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot who said “don’t think about the spectator anymore, act as if he doesn’t even exist. Imagine there is a big wall at the edge of the stage separating you from the parterre. Act as if the curtain was never raised.”32 This concept has shaped the experience of live performance since the 18th century so strongly that it governs how we build our theatres to this day. Audiences are on one side of the room, the performer is on the other side, and in between them is an invisible wall, commonly known as the fourth wall. This wall separates the current room into two rooms, in one room is the audience, in the other is the performer. The unspoken contract between the two plays out in the space of that invisible wall.
In Fuck Rant, through playing a frustrating game of trying to categorise everything in the room (a tactic stolen from British colonial rulers) I renamed the fourth wall “The Fifth Wall” (after all, were we not already in a room that had four walls?!) so that I could assert a collective space. I insisted that the current room was not divided into two but that we were in one space together. In renaming the wall, this space became one of constant negotiation between myself and my audience, with power always at the centre. It symbolizes the unseen distance people travel when relating to one another’s differences and was a tangible way for me to understand what my daily power struggles feel like as a woman of colour.
In repeating the action of crossing through the wall, the power shifted, sometimes to me, sometimes to the audience, and each time, the more the structures of power unravelled between us. I cannot speak for my audience, but for me, a part of my personal history was rewritten through manipulating live art techniques to my advantage. That part was one that had me convinced that I learned these techniques from a book in a shared apartment in Europe. But in stepping through that fifth wall and meeting my predominantly white audience repeatedly, I began to remember a different type of border crossing.
From the newly created border of Pakistan and India that my ancestors left behind in 1947, to my parents crossing into the Middle East in 1981, to arriving in Tāmaki Makaurau in 1995, crossing borders is something that my flesh, blood and bones have known long before the term live art was created. Like other artists of colour, coming up against and using our innate skills to navigate, scale or move through borders - those walls intended to either pen us in or shut us out - is what I do daily.
Throughout my body of work, I have considered the question: what if the unspoken contract between the audience and the performer were a tangible thing? For Fuck Rant, I continued ito explore this question, wanting to find out what it might take to get everyone in the room on the same page together (a phrase often used when negotiating a contract between two entities). Using a game of labelling, I tried to map, define and identify everything in the room. This game was repeated with the audience within decreasing time limits. One of the crucial parts of this mapping and labelling was to identify where the “Fourth Wall” was.
The fourth wall is a concept whose rumour was best spread by the 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot who said “don’t think about the spectator anymore, act as if he doesn’t even exist. Imagine there is a big wall at the edge of the stage separating you from the parterre. Act as if the curtain was never raised.”32 This concept has shaped the experience of live performance since the 18th century so strongly that it governs how we build our theatres to this day. Audiences are on one side of the room, the performer is on the other side, and in between them is an invisible wall, commonly known as the fourth wall. This wall separates the current room into two rooms, in one room is the audience, in the other is the performer. The unspoken contract between the two plays out in the space of that invisible wall.
In Fuck Rant, through playing a frustrating game of trying to categorise everything in the room (a tactic stolen from British colonial rulers) I renamed the fourth wall “The Fifth Wall” (after all, were we not already in a room that had four walls?!) so that I could assert a collective space. I insisted that the current room was not divided into two but that we were in one space together. In renaming the wall, this space became one of constant negotiation between myself and my audience, with power always at the centre. It symbolizes the unseen distance people travel when relating to one another’s differences and was a tangible way for me to understand what my daily power struggles feel like as a woman of colour.
In repeating the action of crossing through the wall, the power shifted, sometimes to me, sometimes to the audience, and each time, the more the structures of power unravelled between us. I cannot speak for my audience, but for me, a part of my personal history was rewritten through manipulating live art techniques to my advantage. That part was one that had me convinced that I learned these techniques from a book in a shared apartment in Europe. But in stepping through that fifth wall and meeting my predominantly white audience repeatedly, I began to remember a different type of border crossing.
From the newly created border of Pakistan and India that my ancestors left behind in 1947, to my parents crossing into the Middle East in 1981, to arriving in Tāmaki Makaurau in 1995, crossing borders is something that my flesh, blood and bones have known long before the term live art was created. Like other artists of colour, coming up against and using our innate skills to navigate, scale or move through borders - those walls intended to either pen us in or shut us out - is what I do daily.
In all the examples cited within this essay, there is a fifth wall at work, the function of which is to create a space to reveal the power at play in a performance (and in the society in which the performance is located), and to allow it to shift from side to side. Sometimes that power is held between the artist and the institution, sometimes between the artist and her audience. Sometimes it is blindly wielded by popular bodies. Sometimes it is held in objects or symbols that can be remade through the closing of distance between an audience and their performer. Sometimes it is a safe space for you and your community to inhabit. Sometimes it is in the gaze you hold with those who mean to assert their power over you in a multitude of violent ways.
To show up in this space takes a great amount of hope, and once that hope is activated, a performance can be more than its label or genre. It can be practiced by more than those who have the historical privilege to claim those labels and genres. It can become a way to, as Rebecca Solnit suggests, “write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.”33
If live art is a form that hinges on exposing power relationships from an outsider’s perspective, then, no doubt, it belongs to those who have been historically othered or marginalised through the gaze of Western colonisation. The form is built to resist and “to resist is to retrench in the margins, retrieve ‘what we were and remake ourselves’.”34 and although this form has an empirical lineage, and operates largely in colonially codified spaces, the performances it encompasses “have also become spaces of resistance and hope.”35
1 Live Art Development Agency, “LADA”
2-3 Sofaer. What is Live Art?
4 Heathfield. LIVE: Art and Performance.
5 Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life, 103
6 Auckland Fringe "2017 Auckland Fringe Award Winners."
7 -9 Neill. Red Mole on the Road.
10 Solnit, Hope In The Dark, The Untold History of People Power, 16
11 Raymond, “A Walk Through My Eyelands, Pacific Arts Legacy Project”
12 Iti. "Tame Iti: artist and activist." By Kim Hill. Saturday Morning, Radio New Zealand.
13 Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies - Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2
14 Sofaer. What is Live Art?
15-16 Phelan, ”On Seeing The Invisible,” 17
17 Millica. Marina Abramovic on Rhythm 0.
18 Millica. Marina Abramovic on Rhythm 0.
19 Phelan, ”On Seeing The Invisible,” 18
20-21 Heathfield,"After the fall Dance-theatre and Dance-performance," 285
21 Raymond, “A Walk Through My Eyelands, Pacific Arts Legacy Project”
22 Norman, “Sarah Jane Norman Responds to Marina Abramovic”
23 Kirker, "Jelly Baby."
24 Heathfield. LIVE: Art and Performance.10
25 Bailey, "Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” 365-386.
26 Livingston, Paris is Burning.
27-28 Jaycee Tanuvasa, talanoa with Ooshcon as part of The Nest: Street Styles Solo Dance Festival,
Basement Theatre, 17/07/21.
29 Ruka, “Cat Ruka Talks The Nest”
30 Cogitore, Les Indes Galantes by J-P. Rameau : "Forêts paisibles"
31 Ruka, “Cat Ruka Talks The Nest”
32 Diderot, Discours Sur La Poésie Dramatique
33 Solnit, Hope In The Dark, The Untold History of People Power, 24
34-35 Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies - Research and Indigenous Peoples, 4
To show up in this space takes a great amount of hope, and once that hope is activated, a performance can be more than its label or genre. It can be practiced by more than those who have the historical privilege to claim those labels and genres. It can become a way to, as Rebecca Solnit suggests, “write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.”33
If live art is a form that hinges on exposing power relationships from an outsider’s perspective, then, no doubt, it belongs to those who have been historically othered or marginalised through the gaze of Western colonisation. The form is built to resist and “to resist is to retrench in the margins, retrieve ‘what we were and remake ourselves’.”34 and although this form has an empirical lineage, and operates largely in colonially codified spaces, the performances it encompasses “have also become spaces of resistance and hope.”35
1 Live Art Development Agency, “LADA”
2-3 Sofaer. What is Live Art?
4 Heathfield. LIVE: Art and Performance.
5 Ahmed, Living A Feminist Life, 103
6 Auckland Fringe "2017 Auckland Fringe Award Winners."
7 -9 Neill. Red Mole on the Road.
10 Solnit, Hope In The Dark, The Untold History of People Power, 16
11 Raymond, “A Walk Through My Eyelands, Pacific Arts Legacy Project”
12 Iti. "Tame Iti: artist and activist." By Kim Hill. Saturday Morning, Radio New Zealand.
13 Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies - Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2
14 Sofaer. What is Live Art?
15-16 Phelan, ”On Seeing The Invisible,” 17
17 Millica. Marina Abramovic on Rhythm 0.
18 Millica. Marina Abramovic on Rhythm 0.
19 Phelan, ”On Seeing The Invisible,” 18
20-21 Heathfield,"After the fall Dance-theatre and Dance-performance," 285
21 Raymond, “A Walk Through My Eyelands, Pacific Arts Legacy Project”
22 Norman, “Sarah Jane Norman Responds to Marina Abramovic”
23 Kirker, "Jelly Baby."
24 Heathfield. LIVE: Art and Performance.10
25 Bailey, "Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” 365-386.
26 Livingston, Paris is Burning.
27-28 Jaycee Tanuvasa, talanoa with Ooshcon as part of The Nest: Street Styles Solo Dance Festival,
Basement Theatre, 17/07/21.
29 Ruka, “Cat Ruka Talks The Nest”
30 Cogitore, Les Indes Galantes by J-P. Rameau : "Forêts paisibles"
31 Ruka, “Cat Ruka Talks The Nest”
32 Diderot, Discours Sur La Poésie Dramatique
33 Solnit, Hope In The Dark, The Untold History of People Power, 24
34-35 Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies - Research and Indigenous Peoples, 4