WORKSHOPS
Alastair MacLennan
Workshop title: ‘…PROVIDING…’ Duration: 70mins
Description: The workshop will engage individuals, duos/trios and groups, involving all participants as a teaching/learning unit. Focus will reside in developing and activating concentration, intention, insight, innovation, flexibility, adaptability and being ‘present’, moment by moment. References will be from the ‘art of life’, negotiating actuality in the here and now, emphasising fusion- interfusion-diffusion, embracing ‘both/and’ considerations, beyond either/or dualisms.
As well as ecology of natural environment, there’s ecology of mind, body and spirit, interfused, three in one. Our challenge today is to live this integration. Already we’re late. Time we have is not so vital as time we ‘make’. Time is now.
James King & Brian Patterson
Workshop title: ‘Exercises in Spontaneity’ Duration: 60mins
These exercises serve as warm-up exercises for a group performance. Group improvisation reflects life, a synergistic process involving subtle and complex encounters among and between individuals. Generally, these situations go unnoticed, but all take place in the present, as Karen Barad expresses it, the ‘‘thick-now’ … shot through with the eternal’ becomes exaggerated moments in life–time for the performance artist. As in life, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the next five minutes, so group work encourages us to be awake to ourselves, others, and the context. In this awareness of being present in the present moment is our freedom, which is reflected through our spontaneity, to be ‘response-able’ to ourselves and others. How we interact with others reflects who we are as individuals.
Please bring an object you want to work with and a found object. Something you pick up randomly on the way to the workshop.
PRESENTATIONS
Dr Veronica Cordova de la Rosa
Presentation: LAPER
Live Art and Performance Group (LAPER) is a performance art platform founded in 2015 in Oxford by Dr. Veronica Cordova de la Rosa. The platform emerged from her artistic research into experimental performance practices and collective modes of working. LAPER supports the development of live art through artist-led meetings, research-led gatherings, and public presentations. It engages with performance as a live visual medium composed of image, action, and object, often situated within specific contexts or sites. As director, Dr. Cordova de la Rosa has organised numerous performance art meetings and three International Performance Art Festivals: Elastic (2017), Squash & Stretch (2018), and Lead (2019). These programmes brought together national and international artists working across experimental and live art practices. LAPER has received funding support from the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University, Santander Awards, Oxford City Council, and occasional support from established artists in the UK. The platform has supported visiting artists presenting work to student and public audiences in Oxford, facilitating exchange between experimental performance practices and the city’s academic and cultural contexts. LAPER facilitates opportunities for artists to present and document their work within performance and exhibition contexts.
Dyana Gravina
Presentation: Procreate / IKLECTIK Art Lab
Dyana Gravina (They/She) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, birth doula, activist, mover, community builder, and author of Embodied Histories (2025) and Integrated Care: From Individual to Collective Systems (2026). She holds an MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture from Birkbeck, University of London. She is the founding director of Procreate Project and of Mother House Studios, an artist studio with integrated care. Gravina is also a birth doula working with vulnerable communities and a certified birth educator, and currently works as a curator at IKLECTIK.
Her interdisciplinary and curatorial practices focus on intergenerational feminist collective organising, care, identities, and genealogies, as well as decentralised networks of knowledge sharing and collective memory. Working within a queer and anti-capitalist patriarchal framework, they use tights as a material language to tell stories about class and gender, weaving together sacred rituals, acts of care, and rebellion. Gravina’s work spans writing, movement, photography, sculpture, and sound visual installations.
She has curated and collaborated with institutions including the RCA, King’s College London, LADA, Mimosa House, the Women’s Art Library, and the Science Gallery London. Her performances and lectures have been presented across the UK and internationally at venues including ICP (New York), Art Basel, Venice International Performance Art Week, and Unit London, among others.
Pierce Starre
Presentation: SPILL YER TEA
Pierce Starre is an artist based in Liverpool whose multidisciplinary practice emerges from the complex and shifting intersections of their lived experience as a non binary, queer, working-class, neurodivergent individual raised by Deaf parents who communicate using British Sign Language. Their practice seeks to examine the heteronormative, neuronormative, ableist and capitalist narratives that shape how lives are understood and valued. Drawing from lived experience alongside a critical engagement with cultural, historical and contemporary discourses, their work spans live performance, sculpture, textiles, objects, text, and still and moving images to create immersive experiences that foster connection, reflection, discussion and transformative possibilities.
In May 2023, Pierce presented a performance work titled Nest at Communitism in Athens, as part of Darkness Visible produced by iconic performance artist Ron Athey. Pierce also performed as part of the CO-CREATION LIVE FACTORY “Dissenting Bodies Marking Time” at Venice International Performance Art Week in January 2020.
Pierce has received commissions from Acciones Al Margen, Arts Council England, Unlimited, METAL Culture, Heart of Glass, DADAFest, Liverpool Independents Biennial, Word of Warning and Disability Arts Online. They have shared live performance work as part of ]Performance Space[, Perform Istanbul and Performance Platform.
Pierce is a board member of Broken Grey Wires, a UK-based contemporary art organisation that explores and responds to mental health, psychology, and neurodivergence through art, aiming to reduce stigma, empower artists, and foster community dialogue around these experiences. Pierce is also a member of UK based performance artists/organisers collective OTHER. The collective is formed of individuals who are living and working at the intersection of being queer, neurodivergent, disabled, survivors. Their work is informed by their marginalised identities and experience, necessitating safe, supportive and caring environments within which to initiate, develop, perform, tour, document, exhibit, and disseminate work.
Pierce runs SPILL YER TEA, a queer and disabled artist-led platform that has gained national and international recognition as a vital platform supporting performance art. This initiative focuses on care, community, and accessibility. It aims to support and promote the work of queer marginalised artists while also making meaningful contributions to the broader Performance Art ecosystem in the UK and beyond.
Brian Patterson
Presentation: Bbeyond
Brian Patterson is currently finalising an M.Phil research titled: Performance Art in Northern Ireland: An Evolutionary, Devolutionary, or a Revolutionary Mediational Space? – or, more simply, What is Performance Art, the Art of?
He first witnessed performance art at Available Resources (AR) in 1991. This event affected the rest of his life, transforming him from a painter into an installation artist, and eventually a performer. In 1995, after returning from the USA, he became involved with Catalyst Arts, witnessing Exchange Resources (a follow-up to the AR project) at Catalyst. He later served as one of its directors from 1996 to 1998, afterwards coordinating the Flax Arts International studio programme until 2004.
In 2001, he instigated the setup and coordination of Bbeyond. On the summer solstice of 2008, he initiated Bbeyond’s Performance Monthly meetings, which continue to this day. In 2016, he helped initiate and coordinate Same Difference: Equinox to Equinox, a worldwide event, during the September Equinox, involving 284 performance artists from 27 countries across 45 locations, from New Zealand to the west coast of Canada.
In 2021, he produced a major publication on Alastair MacLennan’s Actional Poetics, to which he also contributed an essay. Outside his performance practice, he enjoys painting.
PERFORMANCES
Kris Canavan
Performance: ‘Aktion(s) of Being’
Straddling the line between self care and self loathing, ‘Actions of Being’ roots itself as a visceral act of quiet defiance, that comes from the gut. Stark, simple, raw and honest.
Violent and vulnerable, yet comfortable in it’s murky depths of filth, ‘Actions of Being’ reminds us that things aren’t always black and white – there are always shades of grey.
Born in the North of Ireland in 1980, Kris Canavan is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centres on body-based aktions and visual art. Since 2001, they have used their body as a primary site of manipulation —sculpting, contorting, and piercing the physical form to explore themes of love, loss, shame, social decay, and collective trauma. The work they make serves as a radical reaction against societal constructs that seek to subjugate non-conforming identities.
Helen Davison
Performance: ‘The Time I Set My Heart By (second iteration)’
Inside one of the observatory domes, 9 glass clock fronts and a thimble are laid out in a circle – each is assigned a material. Over a period of 3 hours, the artist explores how they resonate with each other, sonically within the space and as starting points to initiate vocal improvisations.
Helen Davison is a process-led performance artist whose practice explores the moments where communication fails, leaning into action, gesture and sound to share experiences of otherness. Through the palpable qualities of the voice and the resonances of the body, Davison seeks moments of connection outside of self, with a desire to reach cathartic transformation.
Christine Donaghy
Performance: ‘A woman in the shape of a monster’
My live performances gather and respond to residues of myths, cultural narratives, and historical legends from a feminist perspective, and are grounded in my own experience inhabiting a female body as a site of unfolding inquiry.
This work at Bidston Observatory emerges as a physical dialogue with Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Planetarium’ and the historical path of the astronomer Caroline Herschel. I sit with Rich’s phrase, ‘a woman in the shape of a monster,’ wondering how we might hold space for the historical isolation and misreadings of women who dared to look upward. Layered into this search is the myth of Cassiopeia, bound to her chair and cast into the stars to turn upside down—a punishment for simply being seen.
Performing within the domes of Bidston observatory, a place of rigid scientific observations and measurement, I find myself mapping these threads of celestial containment and scientific erasure onto my own physical form. Using my presence as a living, listening instrument in front of an audience, I am asking how we might gently untangle the ancient myths and institutional structures that have long sought to restrain, objectify, or marginalise women.
Through quiet, responsive actions, a site built for detached observation becomes a shared space of visibility, exploring what it means to occupy history and space on our own terms.
Beth Greenhalgh
Performance: ‘Sleepwalking Before Bed’
My works often take the form of spontaneous experiments with body, movement, sound, and installation. The work is site-responsive, curiously exploring place, ritual, history, and uncertainty. Inner landscapes and intuitive explorations merge with these physical places. Conscious and unconscious thoughts become patterns for vibrant investigation and play. Nothing is ever definite, but things happen with reason. Transformed material unfolds a scene inhabiting body and environment.
Sorcha Keeve
Performance: ‘String Theory’
In this work, I will be exploring themes of connectivity between bodies, using two white shirts as the canvas for this. String theory in short, is the theory of everything, so playing on this pun, the work will utilise various textiles like wool and string to illustrate connections between the two bodily vessels. We are knowingly and concurrently unknowingly putting up walls between one another based off factors like political identity, sexuality, gender, etc but in this current climate with what direction we are moving in, it is more important than ever to unite and celebrate what we do and don’t have in common and amalgamate into one.
Sorcha Keeve, originally from Donegal, Ireland, utilises their practice as a way of confronting and unraveling previous experiences and feelings. Specialising in sculpture, lens, and performance art, the artist aims to create bodily manifestations of what lies in the psyche and simultaneously string together a cohesive narrative of lived experiences. Through abstracting forms and manipulating material, the final body of work encapsulates the aforementioned aspects of Keeve’s practice, constructing a solidified collection of lived truths through materiality.
Elaine Mcginn
Performance: ‘Ag Dul Ar An Mbád – Taking The Boat’
Within the time of this performance I include the travel on the ferry, as part of the work. Considering the Journey has been usually undertaken in secret. Despite legal changes in both the Republic and The North of Ireland the ‘Liverpool Ferry’ continues to represent the struggle of women’s reproductive experiences.
I am a Belfast born artist, currently living and working on the North East coast of Ireland. I have been active in areas of performance, community art and art education from 2004 and since then, presented work locally and internationally. My background is in art therapy and have engaged regularly with art projects within interface community settings. My creative practice uses performance as an instrument to navigate and explore themes and stages of ambiguous loss. My live work develops through small action studies, durational concepts and responses to place.
Ash McNaughton
Performance: ‘KYTHE (II)’
KYTHE moves across thresholds _ between strata, across planes.
Forces gather and shift with the body, where weight, balance, and duration are negotiated in real time. Pressure accumulates and redistributes.
From Proto-Germanic kunþijaną _ to bring into shared knowledge _ and Old English cȳthan _ to reveal or make known KYTHE speaks to the moment in which something internal becomes perceptible: a revealing, a manifestation, a coming into presence.
Here, revelation is not immediate but emergent. It forms through process, force, and duration _ where past and present fold into one another, and what has been carried begins to surface.
KYTHE asks what the body holds, absorbs, and carries forward _ and how these accumulations move across time, beyond linearity; through return, echo, and recurrence.
Ash McNaughton is an action-based performance artist whose practice unfolds through process-led, time-based explorations of material, movement, and sound. Working with site-responsive, durational, and ritual elements; they explore thresholds between body, environment, and matter. Rooted in endurance, repetition, and embodied enquiry, their work navigates states of transformation, precarity, tension, and accumulation.
Through a queer and neurodivergent lens, Ash’s practice attends to memory, transcorporeality, and that which lies in-between, holding in reverence spaces where identities, materials, and experiences remain in flux. Their current research enquiry, Petrified Forms, explores how performance relics might be transformed into sculptural forms, where embodied action, memory, and pressure become sedimented within matter. Here, material processes operate as an alternative archive of the present moment, holding traces of cultural, political, and social experience in suspension rather than stasis.
Ash’s work has been presented across the UK & Europe, including at Aberdeen Art Gallery, Tramway (Glasgow), Whitechapel Gallery (London), and Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy). They hold a BA (Hons) Sculpture from Gray’s School of Art and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice (Performance) from the Royal College of Art. They are currently Associate Director of ]performance s p a c e[, co-founder of SITE, and producer and curator of QUEERCALL Festival. They are a nominated artist for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2026) and have been recently invited to become a GeoAmbassador for the Cross-Channel Geopark Transmanche.
