Tue 10 Nov, 5.30pm
The Bluecoat is more than an arts centre in an iconic building. It is the story of itself, a story woven from encounters and events, people and practices.
In Live Acts: Performance, Practice and Archives, Annabel Little, one of the many artists who have been based at the Bluecoat over the years, tells the story of how her creative practice has evolved over time, and how she now uses performance both as a means to draw together its assorted strands and as a research approach. She will also present a new short video artwork which follows on from Archive Material(ity), made for Liverpool Hope University’s Special Collections, this time responding to the Bluecoat archive.
Conceived in a spirit of conviviality, the evening will mix short talks and videos, live improvised music, archival material, a panel discussion and Q+A session. The bar will be open throughout.
Annabel is joined by Ben Egerton, a Bluecoat studio artist for over 25 years; musician and composer Gavin Brick aka The Metamorph; Kate Wilson, project archivist at the Bluecoat; and the arts centre’s Director of Cultural Legacies, Bryan Biggs, with guest appearances by performers Rebecca Clarke and Piotr Marchewka.
As an art form, performance is an important part of the Bluecoat’s history; adopting it as a research approach allows us to think of material in both space and time. Through this lens, the Bluecoat becomes a repository of experiences and its archive the material traces of the many ways in which people have come together, from concerts and music exams to avant-garde happenings, parties, dinners, fairs and exhibitions.
For the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, writing in the 1920s, just as the Bluecoat was being constituted as the UK’s first arts centre, the world is made not of fixed things but of events. Even what seems most solid, a stone or a building, is an ongoing happening. And for geographer Doreen Massey, place is not a static backdrop but an event, a coming together of many trajectories, people, objects and histories.
So, as the Bluecoat’s recently refurbished upstairs space enters a new chapter, it turns out that its new name, The Event Space, could, as Annabel explores during this evening, be surprisingly apt.
Free, booking required
Artist Bios
Annabel Little is an interdisciplinary artist who explores performance as a means to develop and document a practice that spans art, craft, design and architecture, opening up questions about how and where we encounter art, and how space is produced through such encounters.
Her career formally began as an architect, working in London and then Milan where she established her own design practice. This was followed by a period of time spent in the rural hills of northern Italy when her work began to expand into visual art and textiles. On returning to the UK in 2012 she established her creative practice at the Bluecoat, and following an installation there in 2014 entitled Penthouse, that combined dining and domesticity with an exhibition of work, she founded an experimental arts and dining venue in Liverpool’s north docks. Working with theatre-makers and creating settings to facilitate performances and events led to a return to academia to study for an MA in Performance at Liverpool Hope University, graduating with distinction in 2022. She has since continued her research, working towards a practice-based doctorate in Creative and Performing Arts that proposes performance as a way of understanding and inhabiting the entangled spaces of artistic practice generated through acts of making, dwelling and display.
