Rich Jevons talks to Compass Live Art’s Artistic Director Annie Lloyd about this year’s festival in Leeds.
RJ: Could you tell us about the background of Compass Live Art?
AL: Compass Live Art started in 2010 as a consortium of Karen Watson (East Street Arts), Sarah Spanton and myself. We collectively got ACE funding to develop a structure for live art in Yorkshire. So we did a whole programme of activities in that time involving platform events, partnerships with artist-led spaces around the region, workshops, professional development and set up a website.
The festival in 2011 was one weekend and it comprised, similarly to this one, some artists that I’d known for a long time as well as a national call-out for new work to come in that we could particularly place in the city of Leeds’ public spaces.
So that ethos was there right from the start: the events were free, people would come across them in streets rather than have to even know about them or book them. In some ways it was a really nice opportunity to think about the kind of work I’d been doing for years at the Leeds Met Studio Theatre but instead of inviting people into a space it was taking work out to where people were.
There is a similar ethos about the work now: great quality, considered, good artists, a lot of interaction and engagement, but putting it where people were so they didn’t have all those boundaries of cost or knowing about it. All but two of the twenty events are free. Some of it happens in galleries, but most of it happens in public spaces like the market, the Trinity shopping centre, Holy Trinity Church, Cafe 164, the Merrion Centre and City Square.
What would you say are your main aims and intentions?
I always say it’s led by the work, the work comes first. We select a piece and then we decide where that would work. What I’m looking for are artists who have a skill in interacting with people, whose practice is about social engagement. It’s not going to work if you get a street performer or someone who wants to do a play outside.
It’s got to be people whose considered practice is about other people’s involvement and how that works, the nature of it. It’s got to be genuine interaction, something that isn’t going to terrify people and make them run away before they’ve even engaged with it. It takes them somewhere, it isn’t just a fluffy moment.
How do you feel about the delineations between live art, theatre, performance art, installation etc?
I would be happy to get rid of all definitions really because if you knew and understood what those terms mean you’d find all of them in the Compass programme. So we’ve got a gallery exhibition, albeit a sound installation, theatre shows, and interactive out-in-the-street live art practice. I’m a bit tired [of those definitions] and I think most people in the art world are. Most artists happily leap around between them, it’s all interdisciplinary in some way.
For me it’s about the quality of the ideas, it isn’t about what form they take. I do think that when we’re talking to potential participants and audiences that [kind of] language can get in the way. For many people ‘live art’ is a meaningless term.
Yes, it’s like world music – it’s music and in the world, or live art, it’s art and it’s alive!
So can you give us some examples of what to expect in Compass Festival 2014?
Brian Lobel’s piece You Have to Forgive Me… couldn’t be more populist in a sense. He’s using boxed sets of Sex in the City and the project is that you go in and answer a questionnaire which has all of the questions that Carrie Bradshaw ever asked in her series. And if you’re one of the few that gets selected he diagnoses an episode for you to watch.
You sit and watch it cuddled up with a laptop, it’s intimate really, but we will be having a large screen TV so everybody can see the same thing. So it plays this really interesting role between a critique of binge boxed set watching and it’s also quite personal and people can confide relationship problems, some people get very emotional, some might just laugh all the way through. It’s entirely about how you want to take it. But the opportunity to make a real connection and engagement is there in something which on the outside might appear quite flippant.
Reckless Sleepers were in the first Compass festival with Schrodinger which was a very involved physical piece and incredibly dynamic. They do something quite unusual, even in their field of contemporary practice, because they manage to combine physical energy and choreography and such poetic and very thoughtful text work. Often it’s around the sheer impossibility of communication with each other; very breath-taking, very funny, tender, visceral emotion. Negative Space is a kind of sequel, but it stands in its own right, with a largish cast and again is involved, dynamic, interactive, funny, dangerous and rewarding and this the work’s premiere.
There’s also:
- Oliver Bray’s Of This Room takes place at stage@leeds where he will improvise the room that he is in, following his own set of rules, reading the room.
- Helen Coles’ We See Fireworks is a sound and light installation with throbbing light bulbs and a collection of memories capturing moments of performance stories and you can record your own.
- Quarantine’s Between Us We Know Everything is a madcap attempt at making an encyclopaedia that captures all the knowledge in the world.
- Invisible Flock’s If You Go Away is an app for your mobile that you can download and takes you on a trail with a narrative thread, a kind of film noir or mystery.
- Personal Shopper is in Unit 8 of the 1981 Hall in the market and asks people to show them their favourite stalls and people photos of which will then be printed on a canvas shopping bag and part of an exhibition.
- Leeds based Selina Thompson is engaging with notions of body image by imprisoning herself in cake.
- German artist Sylvia Rimat will be setting up a large screen near Morrison’s at the Merrion Centre and typing onto it from her laptop in response to the people around her.
- The prolific Adam Young will be creating a platform for new work at Holy Trinity Church with a bar, music and pop-up work from 15 artists.
- Sheffield Jade Pollard-Crowe deals with cross-gender/dressing by voguing on a red carpet in the Trinity shopping centre. The difference is she has a make-up counter but it’s not make-up it’s facial hair, so she puts on sideboards, moustache and beard.
- Instant Dissidence have been working with wheel-chair bound residents in a Headingley care home creating dances the instructions for which will be played in the headphones of participants in City Square.
- Kings of England is a father and son two-hander that interweaves stories as commentaries on each other’s lives.
Forced Entertainment’s That Night Follows Day… was a originally a performance working with schoolchildren in Ghent which went on to do a world tour. Tim Etchells has now used this as a model to remake this locally with an intense rehearsal period over two long weekends. It consists of a chorus of sixteen 8-14-year-old children reciting back to us all those things they’ve heard adults say to them, it’s a reversal of that. That’s our finale.
What would you most like people to take away with them from the experience?
Generosity – we want people to be intrigued and it’s the expression of community in the heart of the city centre. It’s usually a place which is busy but people are always going through it rather than spending time with something like this. What we’re offering is a bit of a disruption and the possibility to pause for a while, to engage and interact. It’s a gift, which people are free to accept or not.
http://compassliveart.org.uk/festival
13 – 23 November 2014