Instability Workshop

A Last Minute Live Art Workshop with Bill Aitchison

For: Students, postgraduate students and younger artists studying and working in visual and performing arts.

What: You will be lead through the process of creating your own solo live-art performance from the point of having an initial idea to researching it, focussing it, preparing and performing it. You’ll then get feedback on both this process and your performance.  

Objective: This workshop will help you turn a good idea into a good performance within the form of live art. The focus is therefore not on technical skills but rather upon developing your own artistic process so it is both intuitive and consequent.

Theme: Instability. We will take inspiration from how people and situations are inherently unstable and changing. This is something that we can see in people’s moods, in group dynamics, in money markets, weather and global events. Performance with its emphasis on time and live presence is well-suited to exploring this theme. We’ll look at how performances evolve and how they can not only represent instability but also embody it themselves and be unstable. 

How: We will be approach this through a number of methods: body work that explores instability through physical expression. We’ll look at psychological instability and so deal with the connection between the body and mind. We’ll look at how performances create social situations which may also be unstable and we’ll experiment with site-specific performance to see how we can use he space of the gallery to maximum effect. In this way we’ll look at instability in both the individual and wider society and make connections between the two. We will do this through a mixture of group exercises and one to one mentoring on your performance. You’ll be  encouraged to be daring, to use this space to try new approaches, take chances and discover something new.

Result: You will give a performance in the museum at the end of the workshop which will be documented. You’ll also get feedback on this performance and your artistic practice. You’ll also enter into a community of emerging artists some of whom will hopefully see again in the future! 

Report from G Museum with interviews of participants

Indicative Timetable

Day 1: PM Welcoming dinner.

Day 2: AM Group exercises in physical instability / PM Group exercises in situational performance

Day 3: AM Group exercises in the use of space / PM Group exercises in the use of objects / sharing of initial ideas

Day 4: AM Group exercises in psychological instability / PM One-to-one mentoring of participant performances

Day 5: AM Group exercises in the use of time, rhythm and tempo / PM One-to-one mentoring of participant performances

Day 6: AM Preparation of performances / PM Participant performances

Day 7: AM Feedback on workshop and performances