Interview: Behind the Performance Artist
Following the end of Marina Abramović's blockbuster retrospective at The Royal Academy, we sit down with one of the performers to discuss the experience...
January 18, 2024
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
Hello Francesca; before we delve in, could you give us a little background about yourself?
My artist name is Practicing Frank; I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working with Butoh, live art and poetry. I also work with people with learning disabilities in support contexts, with a specialist interest in supporting people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
What was it that first drew you to performance art?
I was lucky to be raised in London; I’ve always been surrounded by live performance, music and the arts. In terms of live performance, however, I have never been particularly interested in acting - I often found that in a theatre context, the second an actor starts speaking, I lost interest. When I was younger, I was involved with the London Youth Circus at the National Centre for Circus Arts in Hoxton. One of the teachers there described all circus as sitting on a scale of ‘dry’ to ‘wet’. A very dry circus show may involve someone building a circus rig and no performance taking place on it at all, while the wet side is hyper-theatrical and performative, with large set pieces, elaborate costumes, storylines and so on. That idea of performance existing on a spectrum of dry to wet always stuck with me, and I’ve carried that through the various performance education that I’ve had. The idea of just the technical set up being performance, and then extrapolating that to the question of what performance even is. What can performance be or not be? Does performance need to take place with an audience? Is performativity and performance part of social expression, as per Judith Butler?
I have come to see performance in the broadest of terms, and for myself making work for an audience as part of a larger context of the art form as a practice-based research method. Of course, doing a BA in Drama, which was all Live Art and experimental and applied practices exploded my idea of performance even further…
What have you gained from performing on a personal level?
A new dimension to my meditation and Buddhist practices. An opportunity to be more still and to love more.
You recently performed in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy – can you explain how you got the opportunity?
It wasn’t openly publicised as an opportunity but was sent to specific artists and university professors and they passed it on via their social media or by word-of-mouth.
I was at the Live Art Development Agency, which was hosting an activism day of Art and Feminism. One of the people in attendance was Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson who is a professor at Rose Bruford, and they had an email from someone at the Royal Academy of Art about the opportunity to perform with the upcoming show. They mentioned over our lunchtime break that if anyone would be interested in applying for the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective, they could forward the information about how to apply. I naturally said I would be interested, so got the email, sent off a written application, then was invited for an in-person interview and casting, and then got the gig!
What was the process like – for instance, the preparation, the emotions that came up whilst performing? How did you prepare for the experience?
There was quite a lot of time between when I got the job in April and when it started in September, so that was nice as I had a lot of time for my own preparations. I worked on my body with yoga, dancing Butoh and some bigger outside jaunts - I tried to wear shoes less, in fact, I climbed a mountain in Montserrat, Spain barefoot to connect again with prolonged bodily pain and the earth. I brought my focus more onto meditation of daily life.
We did not receive the details of exactly what our day at the gallery would look like until the rehearsal period in mid-September, so while I had time to prepare, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was preparing for. We knew that we would be performing Luminosity, Nude with Skeleton and Imponderabilia, but we didn’t know for how long, or how high up the Luminosity seat would be, what a day would involve etc.. It definitely felt cloaked in mystery during the lead-up.
At two points in my life, I was living as a lay person in formal meditation in Buddhist Forest monasteries in Thailand in the Theravāda tradition. That was a time of very intense practice and developing personal faith, but also having my eyes open to my own shortcomings and being humbled by those. So those experiences have a lot of cross-pollination with my interest and practice of durational live art. To sit with whatever arises inside and outside the mind and body, and to know that all these phenomena are subject to impermanence, suffering and no-self is an experience that has never left me since those times in meditation. It was a joy to really know that I would be able to go into durational practice for the 4 months of the show, to face some limits and test my equanimity. I was curious about what I could do beyond that. I was interested in how much verve I had for sitting with equanimity toward impermanence, suffering and no-self, and where the room for love would be within all of that, for myself and for others…
As a condition of accepting the job, all the artists had to agree to take part in the ‘Cleaning the House’ workshop, run by the Marina Abramović Institute. So, in the first week of September, all the artists went to the countryside and took part in the workshop. It reminded me of a meditation retreat, but less intense; we kept completely silent, and fasted without eating food for 5 days, but could drink water and chamomile tea (which I’ve always hated the taste of). This experience put us through long durational exercises as devised by Abramović herself, aiming to prepare all artists that would be reperforming her work. We didn’t have watches or phones, we were woken up but were never sure of the time, and we didn’t know how long an exercise would go on for when we started, or when the day would end.
Before each performance I would exercise, take some quiet time, and read some poetry. A lot of Baudelaire, Rilke, the line ‘for staying is nowhere’ in one of his Duino elegies has been a constant companion, and E.E. Cummings always.
What was your favourite piece to perform and why?
Luminosity. Because I like living in the danger zone of whether I’ll ever be able to feel my c*** again.
Abramovic’s work tends to trigger visceral reactions from the audience, what was challenging about encountering the many emotions experienced by your audience? Is there a particular reaction you can recall?
I can remember in one of my first Luminosity performances, I began to feel afraid of falling off the seat, there was really not much keeping you from a long fall to the wooden floor. The fear of the height, alongside the adrenalin of performing, alongside myriad other factors meant that my body began uncontrollably convulsing. My whole body was shaking and shuddering, it was really something. The shaking was such that I felt like popping off the front of the bike seat and to the floor was a real possibility. Any time I tried to control the shaking by holding my breath, tensing and relaxing my body, where I held my arms etc.; anything I tried just led to more shaking. And of course, I was sweating absolute bullets; it was stinging my eyes, dripping down my body and I felt like if I went to grip the handrails or stand on the foot rails, my hands and feet were so wet I would just slip right off of them and then fall.
The audience had shocked faces, concerned faces, hands up to their faces, wide eyes, silently gripping their friends - everything. There was an immense tension in the room and stillness, which was funny in a sense because everyone was modelling stillness for me, which at that time I did not possess.
An old adage of mine came to me, which was to just give up; for many people, this phrase is usually associated with being negative, but ever since it came to me during my time in meditation I have always found it very freeing. Give up my expectations that I have any kind of control, total surrender. Of course, I have no control and my body in this instance was reminding me of that. I suddenly felt very light of spirit, calm and at ease. My body continued to shake, but there was no concern about it. I just began to smile. The audience still seemed concerned from their expressions, but I could feel a shift in the room. There was still concern for me, and there was general horror, but also something which I can’t name. We shared an intense moment, but for me I then knew that I was calmer and that that would probably put me in better stead to finish the full performance safely.
And several times I lapsed back into fear, and then back into surrender. When the full-time did come, and my facilitator brought the ladder and I came down and put my lab coat on, there was no applause, no one even moved much as I saw it, people were just looking at me in shock, but I felt light on my feet. The applause came when I’d already left the room. Abramović describes that the word luminosity, to her, means the state beyond pain. And I enjoy that performance so much for exactly that reason. It brings you lots of pain, all kinds of pain - but in so doing, also gives you a golden invitation to go to a state beyond pain.
Abramović has described her work as having a relational aspect, with the audience completing the work. This is something I have experienced and contemplated at great length across the 43 days of performance I gave at the exhibition; I have held so many gazes with audiences and some for great lengths of time, and yet I ‘give up’ in terms of knowing what they were experiencing. I could say that sometimes people were seeking, demanding, confused, or distracted, but that would always ultimately be speculation. I cannot know and if I ever were to say that I did know, it would be simply false. I have had secret conversations in my head with audiences, I have sent them so much love, I have been sad and asked for love and in turn they have cried, they have smiled, they have stayed with me, they have left me, they have drawn me, they have written in front of me, they have clicked their fingers in my face and they have ignored me as though I was a bowl of fruit - but I surrender any semblance of a claim towards knowing what their experience was, and in that honesty is a freedom.
What is your favourite thing about performance art?
It resists any easy definition. It scares me, it changes how I feel about time when I perform work, or when I see it. It confuses me, but I think about it for a long time afterwards; it lays down a stake in a moment of time and place, it happens only then and then is gone. It cannot be collected but it can be collectively admired. It is a practice-based research method into very interesting questions often, dealing with the body and its failure, glory, silliness and danger. It’s the art of living.
