The Live Art Garden Initiative is a trans-disciplinary arts project supported by the Networking Artists’ Networks Initiative (NAN) through a-n The Artist Information Company. It consists of a collection of independent site-specific projects, focusing on gardens and landscaped sites and involving the creation of new garden environments in which site-specific live arts will be established.
The Live Art Garden Initiative began in 2004 as an art, architecture, sound and ecology project. It follows on from related research and projects that have been undertaken since 1994, and is directed by Lauren Goode, who has a particular interest in performance, dance, Deleuzian Philosophy and landscape architecture, all of which closely inform the initiative’s work. Current artists include: Charlotte Bernstein, Sonia Davin-Smith, Régine Elliott, Claire Keating, Fabrizio Manco, Maria Llanderas, Helen Palmer and Carla Vendramin.
Involving both professionals and researchers, artists operate directly with the live situation as a moving phonic surface, rather than as a representational setting, such as in a theatre. All artists’ research is essentially immersive, engaging the body or self with the environment (possibly in extreme conditions), utilising sensory processes to embody movements that are interwoven with the surroundings. Essentially, these are processes that “dissolve the figural, rather than depicting characters” according to Lauren Goode.
The (Untitled) work at Greenwich Park in 2005 was a series of five durational performances. As a performer Lauren Goode found herself working for an extended time on embodying the bounce of a nearby leaf. She comments, “I take a little twig. I am tapping onto it. I understood there was a response from the birds with this tap. There are temperatures in the breeze. The passers by – the audience – noticed these. They were affected by the change.”
Adding to the small body of work, Goode plans to create a Site Pilot Project over a 3-year period to realise the practice. Goode is presently searching for the site, where people will visit and encounter artists working and performing at different stages of their process.
Currently the Initiative is presenting the “Arts Review Series”, one of few London performance research-based trans-disciplinary symposiums. The Art Review Series is designed to further the research of the Initiative, and expand networks. Topics cover: live art and mixed media performance; landscape architecture and sustainability; critical studies and philosophy; biophysics; acoustics; ecology; and sound art.
The Art Review Series is led by the artists’ and researchers’ own line of enquiry, designed to engage with their ongoing practices through review, feedback and critical exchange. They use only key words to guide each talk, with one session a month since September 2006.
Key words for the 20 January review are: durational, immersive performance and consciousness. Presenters include: Ajaykumar, Charlotte Bernstein, Sebastian Lexer & Emmanuelle Waeckerle, Maria Llanderas, Lawrence Upton & Dr John Levack Drever. Key words for the 14 February review are: ecology and interactivity; sensing; responsive systems. Presenters include: Robert Davis, Professor Johnny Golding, Helen Palmer, Dr Aura Satz, Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead.
Experimental research processes exist as a live knowledge, and are therefore important in their own right. But how does the Live Art Garden Initiative currently impact on the London contemporary performance scene? In plain words: it doesn’t, as it isn’t that well known. To date, such projects exist as fringe performance, often relating more to science communities than artistic. Immersive techniques in performance practice however, are growing rapidly, though have been used by Butoh and Bodyweather practitioners since their conception in 1950’s and ‘70’s respectively. And site-based practice is harvested incessantly by such market leaders as Performance Art Laboratory (PAL).
Projects like the Initiative highlight the essentially one-tracked path of the above-ground London (comparatively highly funded) performance scene. More importantly the Live Art Garden Initiative impacts on the participants of the work, and the passers by that incidentally experience the live art.
It may be only a matter of time before London majority audiences demand to not only see (from a comfortable chair), but to experience bodies that hold greater significance than a Shakespearian body, or a contemporary ballet body: possibly a Deleuzian body? Only then as a community will we move dance and performance into the realm of creation with contextual relevance.
The current climate in political, social, and economic affairs gives rise to presume there is a need for art to become more relevant to its surroundings. With the natural shift towards artists crossing over disciplines to present work and research, and teaming up with other disciplines outside of art, such ambitious projects as the Live Art Garden Initiative turn the dream of meaningful art into a reality.
Meanwhile, there are a few places left in the Art Review Series. To reserve a place, email Lauren Goode: lauren@liveartgardeninitiative.org.uk or visit the website of the Live Art Garden Initiative.
