The Live Art Almanac is a collection of ‘found’ writing about Live Art, published between April 2006 and April 2008. It brings together 30 texts by different authors; artists, producers, writers, curators and commentators, reflecting the issues surrounding Live Art.

Together, the texts collated in the Almanac cover myriad ideas and areas, some are firmly grounded in their sense of the performative and what ‘Live Art’ as a strategy includes, others cross and expand the borders of what it means to be ‘Live’ or even what it means to be ‘Art’. But happily the Almanac has much more to offer than a definition of Live Art. The wider issues at stake in live work are brought to the table for the reader. The aspirations of the artists creating, the producers shaping and the audience or writer reflecting are all somehow squeezed into this petite Almanac, taking the reader on a journey from the darkest moments of an artists’ self doubt to the most life-changing fragments of inspirational performance.

Collected by Live Art UK through recommendations, many of the texts included have evolved in conjunction with, or have some relationship to Live Art UK and the various initiatives they have instigated over the past two years. One of those initiatives, Writing From Live Art, has been extremely successful and many of the writers who took part in it feature in the Almanac, including Theron Schmidt, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Paterson and Tim Atack. These emerging writers are placed alongside those who have long been commentating in the field of Live Art and Performance, such as Lyn Gardner (Guardian Newspaper) and artists Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment) and Guillermo Gόmez-Peña (La Pocha Nostra). Here, as in previous Live Art Development Agency publications, the agency provides an unmatched contemporary resource and collection of texts that portray a rich and complex area of practice.

In the first text, originally presented as the opening polemic for the SPILL symposium in 2007, Tim Etchells provokes and encourages his readers to ‘step off the stage’, both physically and metaphorically. In its assertions regarding how live art - seen by Etchells as a certain type of theatre involving inspirational artists - implicates the audience to take action, Etchells’ text is almost conclusive. Its instructions are ‘You. Are. Not. Here. To. Record. The. Coming. Quake. You. Are. Here. To. Make. It. Happen… Step. Off. The. Stage.’ With this, the reader is implicated from the beginning of the Almanac, and our inclusion in its call to arms inspires action and response.

The Almanac includes the theoretical, philosophical and questionable aspects of UK Live Art, warts and all. Big issues are tackled. Art’s relationship with politics and political leadership is put under the microscope in both Madeleine Buntings text, ‘Artists are now taking the lead politicians have failed to give’ and Stephen Duncombe’s ‘Politics in an Age of Fantasy’. 21st century cultural and government inclusionist policy terminology such as ‘cultural diversity’ - and the repercussions of these blanket cultural terms - are tackled in Rajni Shah’s ‘Bite-sized Chunks from my Life’. Live Arts’ historical relationship with ‘new media’ and new technologies is also addressed in the ‘Live Art UK: Keynote Presentation’ by John Wyver. All these are insightful texts in our current cultural climate, and timely presentations in our ever new ‘digital era’ with its changing audiences and shifting concerns.

Artist Leslie Hill praises the writing of Guillermo Gόmez-Peña in her review of Ethno Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy, in its ability to not only share well practised thoughts, techniques and theories, but offer inspiration to beleaguered performance artists world wide; ‘His essay “In Defence of Performance” (2003) should be on the syllabus of every performance studies course and should definitely replace Gideon Bibles in the drawers of every hotel room used by performance artists on tour.’ Private moments of grief and hope are shared in obituaries by Brian Catling and Nick Kimberley. The texts somehow distil what an artist truly leaves when they are gone. The birth of projects from nothing more than a flicker in the artists’ imagination is also lived out in Will Pollards’ accounts of the Exchange Places festival in ‘Exchange Places: The Memory of Desire and the Desire of Memory’. Exacting and recounting in almost molecular detail some of the acts, Pollard demonstrates the intense and hefty discourses a performance can create in its moment of existence.

The complex relationship with artist and audience, and the contract that binds it, is revealed in the letter ‘Dear Artist…Love Audience’ from Arnolfini producer Helen Cole. The experiences of those audiences are relayed in individual reviews by Atack, Clapham and Schmidt. These reviews are all capsules of live work that existed in a specific place and time - from the National Review of Live Art, Toynbee Hall and Toynbee Studios respectively - moments that as readers we can plug back into via their writing. But as much as these texts give, they also take away. They install new doubts and raise questions that can be addressed in future artwork, reading and writing.

The voices in the Almanac are diverse in tone and style but most are written by those who are actively involved in Live Art. Inevitably, the only voice missing is that of the public who know nothing of Live Art, but who may encounter it all the same. This gap could critically confine the Almanac, limit it to self-analysis and make the issues it raises self-perpetuated. As such, the Almanac’s success in highlighting the reach and impact of Live Art outside what can be seen as a Live Art community remains a tantalising question. However, in capturing a small section of this activity between 2006 and 2008, and supporting its artists, readers and commentators, The Live Art Almanac shines, and is not only a worthy catalogue of the current condition of Live Art, but is a platform from which new ideas and cultural conversations can spring.

Contributors to The Live Art Almanac are:
Tim Atack, Madeleine Bunting, Barbara Campbell, Simon Casson, Brian Catling, Rachel Lois Clapham, Helen Cole, Stephen Duncombe, Tim Etchells, Ed Casear, David Gale, Lyn Gardner, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Daniel Gosling, Leslie Hill, John Jordan, Nick Kimberley, Adam E Mendelsohn, Alex Needham, Sally O’Reilly, Mary Paterson, Will Pollard, Chris Riding, Nick Ridout, Ian Saville, Theron Schmidt, Rebecca Schneider, Rajni Shah, Kate Tyndall, Mark Wilshire and John Wyver.