I am interested in writing as play. Poetry gives me pleasure and that is why I am so often in & of it. My writing is utopian in that it imagines a better world &, ultimately, believes in it. I see writing as a joyful investigation of language, world, self: & find myself involved with all three with no confidence or certainty as to what any of them are. This, I guess, comes from being a Buddhist. If (as I believe) all things are essentially empty, then they exist only in relation to one another and through the attachments that I/we have to them. I’m interested in a language / world / self that has as much play / peace / sex / humour / love / sun / as possible. If I could imagine myself as a writer I would like to be in the asteroid belt consisting of Stein, Issa, and Bernadette Mayer. If I could imagine my writing as a food I would like it to be dahl & rice, and lemon sorbet. In all of these things I am of course MOST SERIOUS. I am interested in: archive of the now^ british electronic poetry centre^ archived reading^ I run and edit the webzine:

My relationship to writing is dominated by the fact that I am currently finishing my dissertation, which is about slapstick, but also not really about slapstick, and is part of the MA in Performance Writing I am doing at Dartington College of Arts. I can’t really think about anything else, as the physical and mental demands of building this thing, word by word, are weighing on me quite heavily. Writing does not come easily. Neither does performance. Performance Writing is bugger hard. I also make performance, in collaboration and on my own. Collaborative work as one of These Horses, a three-strong alliance of performance makers. ‘Take it Home’ was a large scale, loud performance which premiered at Sophiensaele in Berlin. ‘Speakers’ is a book that attempts to funnel our performance concerns onto the page, a process we found quite chaotic, and difficult. It might be said that we often allow that chaos and difficulty to be at the centre of our work. Although ‘allow’ makes it sound too much like it’s a choice; this is what the work is. Alone, I have made performances with voice, text and balls going down a staircase. I’m interested in language, the relationship between the literal and the figurative, and jokes. Timing, repetition and logic. Things, and things being funny and things being something other than that. I often find I am exploring these things without using language at all. Video, my body, unwieldy objects, a staircase. Hence slapstick. Links: these horses^ Dartington^ whippitnights^ Holly Pester^ Bill Leslie^

Caroline Bergvall’s work alternates between published poetic pieces and more performance-oriented, often sound-driven writing projects. She collaborates frequently with other artists and her books are noted for their combination of performative, visual and literary textualities. She has developed audioworks, visual textwork, net-based pieces, live and sited performances, both in Europe and in North America and has toured her work and readings extensively. Her poetics are concerned with cultural and linguistic performativity, mixed-media writings and the politics and imaginaries of writing multilingually. Her critical essays and talks address these issues through the works of a number of poets and text-based artists. Her ongoing series of perfomative and poetic texts GOAN ATOM has so far produced two volumes: Goan Atom 1 (Krupskaya, 2001) and Fig (Salt, 2005). The recent and popular cycle of pieces "Shorter Chaucer Tales" written in Middle English and contemporary vernaculars has been hosted online by PennSound and Jacket and is being translated into Norwegian and French. A limited edition of "Alyson Singes" was recently produced on the occasion of a live presentation of the Shorter Chaucer pieces as a collaboration with DIA Arts Foundation (New York, June'08). She has presented work at Tate Modern (London, April'08) and MOMA (NY, '07 & '08) as part of their Modern Poets series. Other recent collaborations include the sound and language installation Say: “Parsley” re-created at the Museum of Contemporary Arts (MuKHa) in Antwerp, May-Aug'08. Caroline Bergvall was the Director of the innovative and cross-arts writing program Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts (1995-2000), and later a Dartington Fellow (2000-2006). Visiting Professor, MA Creative Writing at Temple University (Philadelphia, 2005); co-Chair MFA Writing, Bard College (2004-2007). She has recently been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts (England, 2007-2010). Other great sites that I find relevant: artists books^ Ubuweb^ Amanda Stewart^ Xu Bing^ Coco Fusco^ Hamish Fulton^

During my first year at a Queensland art school in 1979 I and many other young impressionables attended a lunchtime performance by an out-of-towner armed with pencils, electric drills and nudity. Personally, I found it all a little repetitive and pointless and thought not much more about it as I returned to the painting studio for the afternoon session. But later that night the government’s Vice Squad conducted raids on the homes of school lecturers, seizing videotaped evidence. The next afternoon the ‘young minds corrupted’ story was all over the tabloids and by the end of the week the artists teaching in the painting department had resigned en masse for lack of institutional support. I served the rest of my three year degree in the printmaking department and on leaving art school became a performance artist. The spoken word first emerged from my performance lips in 1982, coaxed from my memory by my co-performer who silently massaged by prostrate body. Over the ten or fifteen minute narrative/somatic build, I recalled another seminal Queensland art moment from the early 1970s when the new Federal Labour government spent 1.3 million dollars on a large Jackson Pollock canvas and then toured it around the country for ritualised viewing. When it got to Queensland it was too big for the lift of the state art gallery, then housed on the fifth floor of a commercial office block, and so was hoisted into the gallery level of the neo-classical City Hall. It was a hot day when my aunt escorted me across King George Square to inspect Blue Poles. Since then, words have appeared in my performances: spoken, typed, hand-written, embroidered, interwoven, taped, translated, concealed and revealed, and just as often absent, when images and movements speak more loudly. I am interested in: Tim Etchells' Notebook^ the Bilateral Petersham blog project by Lucas Ihlein^

Research Fellow in Writing + Art, Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London Senior Lecturer, Critical Fine Art Practice, University of Brighton Writing is a key aspect of my multifarious practice as an artist. As such it has taken many forms: since 1992, art criticism (published in a range of magazines including Art Monthly and Untitled among many others), gallery talks, conference papers, and exhibition essays, not to mention much lecturing. During this period, I have also produced a number of bookworks e.g The Faust Supplement (2002) (most under pseudonyms): these develop a concern with the relationship between word and image, and writing and art. In the process of writing for a practice-based PhD (at Goldsmiths, completed 2000), it occurred to me that writing-as-an-artist might radically revise the types of writing usually associated with art-history and much art-theory. I began to explore this difference – first in reviews for Untitled (Spring and Winter 1998) and then in the written part of my thesis. See my site^ for a discussion of this. Since then, I have sporadically returned to this investigation – e.g. for a guest lecture on Mark Wallinger (text at my site^). This lecture took the form of a short-story. Recently, this concern with the role of fiction in an artist’s writing has come to the fore: publications include ‘In the Café Flaubert’ in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, (Vol. 1.2, 2008) and an intervention for Kelly Large, Open Studio at Walsall Gallery (2008). In particular, I am exploring the way in which, by placing writing within a fictional context – using fiction for art-writing – writing may be returned as art. In this way, writing is no longer eccentric to art-practice. Rather, it might be seen as ‘a dangerous supplement’; at the heart of the thing (art) it is not. After The Space Between Words, this investigation will be developed next at The Art of Research: Research Narratives – a symposium at Chelsea College of Art & Design in October. links of interest: Chelsea^ Brighton^ Affinities: Goshka Maçuga’s Picture Room at Gasworks^ Tom McCarthy – see for example ‘Navigation was Always a Difficult Art^ General Secretary’s Report to the International Necronautical Society (2002)’ Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

Maria Fusco is a writer whose research interests focus on experimental strategies for contemporary art writing, with specific reference to fiction that positions ‘anti-suspense’ as its primary creative process. Her own work crosses different modalities of production including: fictive, critical & theoretical writing; editing and independent publishing. She's interested in testing how such transdisciplinary writing practices might probe readers’ attitudes towards the accuracy of critical art writing: the independent experiences of fiction and visual art writing together potentially gaining the ability to produce non-sequential narratives which reintroduce the reader / viewer to closer looking – calling for readers’ presence in the present, rather than inviting them to wonder what will happen at the end. Projects of relevance to her work include: aleksandra mir^ factotum^ F.R. David^ Her journal, The Happy Hypocrite, can be found here:

Two men meet in a room. They bow to each other. The short man performs, and the tall man asks him a question. His reply: “First I fill an earthenware bowl with fresh water. Then I wash my hands and face. I break the bowl over a pile of books. I let the water soak through all of the pages until they become wet bricks of pulp. I position them around my head so that I am unable to see, smell or hear.” The tall man rings a bell, and after bowing, the short man leaves. Links of interest: onedit^ bpNichol^

Eirini Kartsaki's interests focus on performance practice and research. She is currently pursuing a doctoral research project at Queen Mary, University of London. Her work is concerned with the senses of repetition in Contemporary Performance and specifically the anticipation, created by repetition, of a moment which has not happened yet. Eirini is interested in the affective experience of watching performance and the pleasures this watching may generate; she is also interested in how repetition influences our sense of experience. She creates and writes on performances that use repetition as a structural and expressive means, as well as with the repetition of performance in memory. Her performance work deals with the problematics of human relationships, the memory of sexual encounters and the discomfort of being loved. She has presented performance work in the UK (291 Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, The Place, etc) and elsewhere (Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, Man-in-Fest Festival, Cluj-Napoca, Romania). Her last solo work 'Cock tales and ballads' has been presented in East End Collaborations, CPT and Arnolfini. Her influences include: Forced Entertainment^ Pina Bausch^ La Ribot^ Eirini has presented her written work in conferences (Performance Studies International 13, New York, Repeat Repeat, Chester University, Live Performance Practice as Research, Royal Holloway, London) and is currently organizing a panel/workshop entitled 'Intimacy in the Encounter' in collaboration with Rachel Zerihan in Feminist Research Methods, Center of Gender Studies at the University of Stockholm. She is also a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary University.

Alexander Kelly is Co-Artistic Director of Sheffield-based performance company Third Angel, with whom he devises, directs, writes, designs and performs. The company makes a range of work incorporating live performance, installation, film, video and photography, which tours throughout Britain and mainland Europe. The work is usually devised and written by the performers and directors, although naturally the process varies from project to project. Writing takes place during the devising process, both inside and outside of the making space. Text is produced, developed and ‘settled on’ in notebooks, on computers, through rule-based text generating exercises and through repeated improvisation: conversation, story telling and explanation. In 2001, 2005 and 2007 the company was invited to show the theatre pieces Where From Here, The Lad Lit Project and Presumption at the British Council's Edinburgh Showcase. In 2005 the company presented the 50-performer intervention Standing Alone, Standing Together at the Millennium Galleries, Sheffield, commissioned as part of the exhibition Tate Sculpture. In 2008/09 Third Angel is touring both Presumption and The Lad Lit Project internationally and the live art pieces Class of ‘76 and 9 Billion Miles From Home, in the UK. The company’s latest theatre piece, Parts For Machines That Do Things, is co-produced by Sheffield Theatres, where it premiered in February 2008. As part of the collaboration ‘Christopher Hall and Alexander Kelly’, Alex makes film, video and performance pieces of a somewhat more blokey nature than, although not entirely dissimilar to, the work he makes with Third Angel. In October 2006 Sheffield’s Site Gallery and the Off The Shelf Festival presented Alex and Chris’ video installations 23 Postcards From America and All Of The Chapter Titles From The Unwritten Book Of My Life Story. Chris and Alex’s video pieces have been screened at festivals and events across the UK and Portugal. Their latest piece, A Man Amid The Wreckage, a 48-hour graphic novel challenge, will be presented at Sheffield’s Millennium Galleries for Off The Shelf in October 2008. Alex is an experienced educator, and has taught at numerous Universities across the UK. He has also taught for Third Angel at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisboa and is currently Artist in Residence/Associate Senior Lecturer in Performance Practice at Leeds Metropolitan University. Artists of interest and relevance to his work include: Chris Goode^ Stans Café^ Bill Drummond^ His work can be found at the following blogs: thirdangel^ amanamidthewreckage^

Simon Morris is an English artist and teacher. His work appears in the form of exhibitions, publications, installations, actions and texts which all revolve around the form of the book. Morris initiated the following projects: bibliomania (1998-2001); interpretation (2002); The Royal Road to the Unconscious (2003); re-writing Freud (2005); sucking on words (2007) and making nothing happen (2009). His investigations involve working in collaboration with many other people from art, creative technology, literature and psychoanalysis. His role as an artist is to create a theoretical space that others feel comfortable working in and to erase his own ego in order to stimulate desire in others. He works to create a space of transference where linking and connecting can take place, a shared space of encounter. Morris proposes a collaborative model as the most productive way of working. His work is often inspired by the work of others – his engagement is poetic rather than logical. It may involve a purposeful misreading of the source material or even re-writing. The methodologies he utilises include destruction, rupture, erasure, nonsense, concealment and the irrational which allow him to create a fluid space of non-meaning. By working with non-meaning, the spectator is put to work in the construction of meaning. Morris is not interested in the traditional role of the artist as author/maker and intentionally leaves a gap in his work, a space for the art of the reader.

Marit Muenzberg set up her graphic design studio in 2002. Her practice takes content, research and collaboration as its foundation to develop her graphic design. She frequently works with galleries, publishers and artists such as The Drawing Room, Monika Bobinska, Contemporary Art Society, Ridinghouse, Blackdog Publishers, Caroline Bergvall, David Austin, Anya Gallaccio etc .... Graduated in 2007 from the MA Contemporary Art Theory, Goldsmiths' College, and is about to start a DPHIL in Critical and Creative Writing at Sussex University. Marit also works as an Associate Lecturer on various graphic design courses across the country.

Open Dialogues is a UK based collaboration that encourages informed, accessible critical writing and debate on contemporary art. We explore critical writing as discourse and practice in order to meet the challenges of art that is live, transformative and participatory. Mary Paterson and Rachel Lois Clapham are the Directors of Open Dialogues. They were both writers with Live Art UK’s Writing From Live Art, 2006-2008, and have been published extensively in the UK and abroad. Together, they have developed blogs, education programmes, critical writing workshops, peer critiques, flash publications and open forums with The National Review of Live Art (Scotland 07 and 08), SPILL (London 07), Artsadmin (London 07), Vital (Manchester 07), New Life Berlin (Berlin 08). In 2007 they were awarded an Arts Council England grant to become Writing Live Fellows for the Performa 07 International Biennial of Performance Art in New York. Artists of interest and relevance to their work include: Wooloo^ Performance Saga^ the Hut Project^

Space - linguistic, imaginary, geographical- is the site of original inscription. Landscapes, written, heard, seen, and experienced, perform around and inscribe the individual just as the individual performs in (and inscribes) the landscape. In the compartmentalized theatrical universe, performance equalizes the senses and binds the performers to the space (set) as an organic whole with single purpose. Body, space, language and gesture move towards a live state of interconnectivity. At this point artistic discourse necessarily shifts towards multiplicities, and towards the hybrid and interdisciplinary. In my writing and performance I move away from the singular and towards the hybrid aesthetic of theatrical remix. The remix manifests at the intersection of the text, the body, and the space. The script, in this scenario, acts as potential literature. Thus I create a collage style of writing performance; mimetic and non-mimetic styles, found texts, beat poetry, and rock music are adjacent to one another on the page/stage to create a reflection of a contemporary media obsessed culture. I move from the word to the experience. If you can hear my voice, I’m turning from sound to materiality. In my work I employ styles such as realism, symbolism, cinema theory, radiophonic and fictocritical structures; and I am interested in artists who push towards the edges of their own disciplines - people such as Antonin Artaud, John Cage, DJ Spooky, Stan Brakhage, Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard, Robert Smithson, and every ‘heavy metal’ band (ever.) Mashing up various styles, audio samples, and cinematic elements in different combinations allows for an unlimited number of emotional and aesthetic possibilities. I don’t believe everything happening now has already happened before. Relevant Artists: Goat Island^ DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller)^ People Like Us^

Nick Thurston is based in West Yorkshire, England. He is author of Reading the Remove of Literature (2006) and Historia Abscondita (An Index of Joy) (2007); has exhibited or performed in New York, old York and Haarlem (Holland) in the last year; and since 2006 has been Co-Editor of the independent artists’ book imprint information as material. Conceptualist reading performances are the crux of Nick’s poetical and editorial work – an optic onto art-making which also underpins his approach to pedagogy at Sheffield Hallam University. Artists of interest or relevance: I’m currently re-thinking my historical debt to Rene Magritte I’m currently admiring the new work of Pavel Büchler^. I’m currently enjoying the poster projects published by the Slavs & Tartars^ imprint, which I happened upon recently.

Cathy Turner is a performance maker and academic. Her work is concerned with performance writing and new dramaturgies, as well as site-specific performance. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and a member of the Centre for Research into Expanded Dramaturgies at Winchester University. She is joint author, with Synne Behrndt, of Dramaturgy and Performance, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. Cathy is also a core member of Wrights & Sites, a group of artists whose work is concerned with our relationship to place and space. Key artists' publications are A Mis-Guide to Anywhere (2006) and An Exeter Mis-Guide (2003). Recent work includes Mis-Guide: Elsewhere in Fribourg for the Belluard Bollwerk International Festival in Fribourg, Switzerland (2008); Mis-Guide: Stadverführungen in Wien for the Vienna Festival and Tanzquartier Wien (2007); Possible Forests for the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (2007) and the 4 Screens series, shown at various conferences and exhibitions (2005-7). Alongside her site-specific practice, her theatre-based work includes an Arts Council funded project in 2003, comprising three pieces made in collaboration with Dorinda Hulton and Peter Hulton (Air), Jane Munro (I Am Just Going Outside And May Be Some Time) and Julia Barclay (An Alliance). Each of these looked at a different approach to integrating writing and performing. In 2002, she took part in a durational performance of And On The Thousandth Night... with Forced Entertainment at the KunstenFestivaldesArts, Brussels. In the past, she has also written extensively for rural touring theatre and other theatre contexts. Between 2000-2003 she held an AHRB funded Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Exeter's Department of Drama, researching writing processes within contemporary performance.

Vincent Dance Theatre has been making and touring devised dance theatre work since 1994. Artistic Director Charlotte Vincent is ‘one of the most challengingly theatrical of the UK's choreographer-directors’ (The Observer). Charlotte is currently collaborating with Liz Aggiss on RADIO PLAY, a dance for the radio, to be seen and heard. RADIO PLAY finds two movement heads competing for aural choreographic virtuosity, acknowledging the desire by a couple of old dogs to share some new tricks in a modified performance kennel. She is also currently working with Wendy Houstoun and Claire Macdonald to explore walking, writing and talking in THE EURYDICE PROJECT, initiated through an investigation of Charlotte stepping into Claire’s role in a restaging of Impact Theatre’s seminal work CARRIER FREQUENCY. In 2009 Charlotte Vincent will collaborate with an ensemble of mature dance practitioners to create IF WE GO ON, a new middle scale work. IF WE GO ON questions the premise of dance (and the dancer) as (a) subject always moving, apparently without effort, always energized and never stumbling. IF WE GO ON investigates the urge to move beyond dance as a form driven by movement or the kinaesthetic form. IF WE GO ON offers a glimpse into the constant striving that takes place within a performance and investigates the relationship between text and movement, between moving and not moving. ‘Why this obsessive concern with the display of moving bodies, this demand that dance be in a constant state of agitation?’ (Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance). Artists relevant and of interest to her work include – Liz Lerman

Hal Hartley

Cornelia Parker

Peter Brook

Pina Bausch

I am a homotextual artist working with performance and post-photographic installation. Committed to the personal, the uncomfortable and the intimate: negotiating a place between what we might call nostalgia and what we might call trauma. I have a sculptural approach to writing and photography, negotiating the materiality of text and performance through autobiographic actions, collecting/collections/the collected and careful arrangements. My current research is centered around the word 'care'. I am currently completing an MA in Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts. Artists of Relevance: JACK PIERSON^ JAMIE MCMURRY^ JENNIFER BOLANDE^ My work can also be seen at FLAGAZINE^

I'm interested in perception--in how the world looks different depending on where you stand to see, and on what you're looking for. I'm interested in representation--how the aesthetic portrayal of individuals and groups conveys their "value" in society. I'm interested in language (words, images, movement) as a means to play with and affect perception and representation. With my intricate stories and metaphors, I aim to move audiences both intellectually and emotionally--to challenge them to think and feel about the complex ways in which we are implicated in each other's stories, and in the larger society. My work is often about women and how they deal with power or the lack of it, and how sexuality and subversive thinking play into power. My background (I’m from Cajun Louisiana) continues to be a rich source of imagery and ideas for me, as are my travels to other parts of the world. Coming from an old part of the country, where more than one language is spoken, where peculiar social codes are still passed on, where racial justice is an ongoing concern, I address issues of relationships and power, responsibility and desire from a perspective that reflects my own difference. I am interested in: Franklin Furnace^ My work can be found at:

I don't know what I am doing. This is called exploration and if I'm not exploring my work is dead. I always have ideas about what I'd like to do, but most often, when I begin to write, my work takes on its own momentum and ignores me. I may be able to talk about what I've done in hindsight however, so I'll try to do that here. I've been playing music and writing for the same length of time, which is practically my whole life. My grandmother always encouraged me to 'sound it out' when I read, so that's perhaps why I've enjoyed literature's orality, its music; why I became a playwright rather than a novelist. I love hearing people speak at a ceremonial level (legal arguments, political speeches, academic talks) and I love unusual slang, community languages, and unselfconscious speaking as well. I love speech in verse. Moments when people are so eloquent or so quotidian you have to stop and listen--I'm interested in that. I am interested in: passing strange on broadway^ Young Jean Lee^ new dramatists^ My work can be found at: phobos^

My work is an integration of the visual, verbal and spatial. I usually design them all in context to each other. I have explored the idea of "points of view”—physical, verbal, spatial, emotional and intangible—as integral pieces in the perception of a reality. The human struggle to get from the inside to the outside and bring the outside to the inside is an ongoing process of detours, pitfalls and discoveries in interpretation and perception. In my work these "translations" are always shifting in relationship to each other. The audience, performers and content are part of this shifting. Early on this interest led me to the use of the camera as a tool. The camera became not only an extension of myself and the actors but also a participant and "character" in itself. Inherent in a camera’s particular charisma is a fascinating reflection of human characteristics, a dispassionate omnipresence, an ability to perceive multiple points of view, an apparent inability to lie and a reluctance to get emotionally involved or reveal anything about itself. In my work I consider the internet as mutated form of camera, with a very wide angle lens that can absorb written language as well as images. Another main concern for me is the use of spoken language(the original mediator) and its structure. The many levels and layers through which a thought struggles to become words and language constantly reinvigorate communication. For me, the urge to use medias comes from an area found deep in a pre-language state. I also find that my tendency towards words comes from this same area. In all, it is a process which begins somewhere before writing, continues through writing and ends as something which is neither film, video, literature or theater because it has elements of all these languages. I am interested in: Fiona Templeton^ Neil Greenberg^