Performance Literature
Playing with the potential of a live literature - with space, voice, interaction, physicality - being in the room, with an audience. Often improvised, but resolutely poetic, first into performance through the literary reading, then playing with the various traditions of live art, theatre, music. Part of a 21st European scene of live literature, performance, being made actively across the continent.
On separate pages are my
An article on my way into Live Literature commissioned by the International Literature Showcase, National Centre for Writing and a video archive of my performances is available at the National Poetry Library, London.
Material Destruction
From a series of works exploring the perceived preciousness of the book and the giving of gifts to an audience, via multiple book destructions, to a commission for the Free Riga festival about abandoned spaces. An attempt to deconstruct objects around the literary reading or performance space, to suggest to the audience an attentiveness to proximity, to my presence and its potential threat, and to shine a light on that which appears solid and constant but is not. Commissions from London Book Fair, Cafe Oto, Stanza Festival, Berlin Poetry Festival and others.
Pugilistica
A concern about appearing foolish led me to seek what felt like an authentic way into performance, without the tether of reading / literature, for the first time. Having practised martial arts from childhood and it having been my profession at one point, these performances are a reflective of this comfort, recontextualised to the gallery or exhibited space. By and large they are about physical limitation, about how rapidly aggression display ebbs away in the face of exhaustion. www.stevenjfowler.com/fights/
Water performances
Responding to a commission at Somerset House about the purchase of water cannon's by the London mayor's office and a performance at the Library of Water in Iceland two years later, these works are about the fragility of body, its voice under respiratory distress and the potential menace of an element that is often considered benign in its ubiquity. You can drown in a inch of water.
Dancing Performances
Cautiously exploring the possibilities of dance, while hooded and holding a blackbox music player, alongside poetry.
Electronic Voice Phenomena
EVP was a commission from Mercy and Penned in the Margins for a unique touring show of avant garde performance, music and poetry that was followed up with individual performance commissions, spanning May 2013 to November 2015. A formative experience for my more theatrical performance work, the tour visited The Sage in Gateshead, St Georges Hall in Liverpool amongst other amazing venues. For the show I performed a near hour long descend into auditory madness, beginning as a compare of sorts, ending up a furious mess. Much much more here www.stevenjfowler.com/evp
ReIllumination performances
A series of performances responding to, or utilising, or celebrating other authors and their life / work. From a theatrical rewriting of Cesar Vallejo commissioned for Hay Festival in Arequipa, Peru (his home nation), to a rendition of Aleksandr Wat's My Century for the Milosz Festival in Krakow, Poland. These are the live versions of the rewriting, reinterpreting, stealing and homaging which so litter my written poetry.
Fourth Wall performances
Documentation of my live work is a key facet of my practise. While I understand those who stake their performances on ephemerality, I do not. It was inevitable that when worrying about context, really being active in context over content, or alongside, that the camera's eye itself would become part of my performance. Not only does it create a unique communication to the viewer on youtube, addressing them in a way they rarely are in the performance context, but it releases the audience through relegation. They are props to be moved for the film.
Mechanical Hamster performances
A means by which to speak to myself, the mechanical hamster is a friend indeed when I am bored of my own voice.
Poem Brut performances
Close to my talking performances but exploring the principles of the www.poembrut.com project, live - that is the hand-made, inarticulate, neurologically engaged, material based and aberrant.
Liverpool Biennial performances
Thanks to curator Nathan Jones and via his Mercy organisation and the Syndrome series, I've presented three newly commissioned performances pieces at Liverpool Biennial 2012 and 2014, with the third in the series at Liverpool Music Week 2011.
All three explored anger and amplification, though ranging from piece to piece, technology and physicality were constituent elements of all three.
Action Painting
The visual mark has always been secondary to the auditory mark in my instinctual creative gestures, so while the notion of a live painting or action painting is undoubtedly well trodden ground, its use in the literary context remains an interesting gesture. Do we attend writing? Have we ever paid to see a writer write? And even the painter at work is still cloaked in myth and fear.