Module description
This module addresses intersecting histories of performance and live art practices of the past fifty years, including Happenings, Body Art, Performance Art, and Experimental Theatre. In this module, students will consider how various media and art forms - including theatre, painting, sculpture, film, and photography - come together in live art practices. We will engage closely with the formal, political, and theoretical challenges posed by live art, including issues of spectatorship, duration, embodiment, liveness, ephemerality, and documentation, and consider the ways in which different discourses emerging out of the visual arts, theatre, and performance studies variously frame and understand live art practices. By the end of this module, students will have an awareness of the history of live art as it has emerged over the past half century in relation to movements in theatre and the visual arts, including familiarity with a range of key artists and live art works. They will have the skills to interpret and analyse performance and live art works, including being able to place them within a broader historical and theoretical context.