Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019)
Q&A with Leah Capaldi

Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019) is a year-long programme of interviews, podcasts and contributions from some of the artists who participated in the twelve editions of the celebrated Evening of Performances. Highlighting the evenings’ extraordinary legacies, we will be exploring what the next wave of contemporary performance can become with the artists who have shaped it so far.

What is the first memory that springs to mind when thinking back to your performance, Give, at Evening of Performance 2011?

I remember thinking how important it was to work with people I trust. I worked with two brilliant performers, Mayra [Stergiou] and Natasha [Rees]. Elements of performative work are collaborative so trusting your team creates space for critique and better artwork. At that time there was a lot of conversation around performativity but many other galleries hadn’t got to grips with it, DRAF (as RIA were known then) had a strong reputation for taking performance seriously and didn’t see it as entertainment for private views, so I felt a lot of pride and confidence working with them.

Why is performance important to your practice?

I perform my work in my studio before handing it over so I can get to know the piece one to one. At art school I performed all my work, I thought I needed to do this for it to be authentic. Re-thinking authorship in relation to performance helped me take a step back. Working with performers to exhibit my work gives me greater control, being able to curate bodies and encounters in a way that I couldn’t if I was performing. I‘m enjoying working with men at the moment, exploring the idea of the ‘default’ body as that of a white male. Though I am white, I am not a man so it makes more sense to work with performers for this.

What are you working on  at the moment? 

I’ve had a busy 18 months, I was at the British School Rome last November for the New Contemporaries residency and got an Arts Council England Develop Your Creative Practice grant to build a studio, this has been a game changer for me — it’s been 2 years since I’ve had a studio so I’m working furiously at the moment. I had a solo show at Matt’s Gallery in London last year which made me rethink working with performance IRL and online. I’ve done a couple of podcast/seminars/blogs since and worked on a performance sculpture for Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2022.

What are some things we can do to make performance more sustainable and accessible?

Zoom opened up new realms of accessibility for alternative liveness, a temporary shared online reality. There is scope to develop this now the infrastructure is in place. Online liveness is different to IRL, it opens up a new space and time that doesn’t rely on the certainties of shared audienceship. Performance is a liminal practice and is well positioned to explore this inbetween-ness.

Working with good people costs money and sadly some galleries still think performers and artists should give their time for free. To make a practice sustainable you have to pay artists and performers fairly. To make performance accessible there should be greater flexibility (time and locations) for all audiences to attend. Things like RIA’s Evening of Performances were more open because they happened outside the context of the white cube.

Your performance was concerned with collapsing the boundaries between performance and sculpture. Do you think performance can be collected like sculpture?

The prospect of collecting performance has opened up a lot over the past 10 years, with Catherine Wood at Tate leading by example and organisations such as RIA and Block Universe developing the conversation. Performance can be expensive to make and show, I’ve seen exciting work commissioned by galleries/foundations/institutions then sold to major London based museums/galleries because they have the infrastructure to support future exhibitions of the work, sadly this puts it out of the reach of regional public collections.

Why shouldn’t artists working with performance be paid for their work like painters or sculptors? Perhaps it is the awkwardness of live bodies — sticky, hard to pin down and tough to monetise — but that’s no excuse for not supporting important work. Other ways to present presence, like NFT’s and VR, are developing all the time. Artists will be the ones to reshape what this could be.