Long Table on Fragility, Festivals, Funding and other F-words...

Please join us on Friday 7 June 2024 at 7pm for the event A Long Table on Fragility, Festivals, Funding and other F-words... One Year On, presented by LADA and Peopling the Palace(s) Festival.

Amidst arts funding cuts, venue closures and a cost-of-living crisis, it has rarely felt more daunting or less sustainable to make and present work. In response to this new era of precarity, Peopling the Palace(s) Festival invited one year ago the Live Art community – academics, producers, programmers and artists, both emerging and established – to come together for a day of discussion, care and performance.

This June we meet again, to continue this conversation and reflect on where this moment finds us.

This event is part of a series of Long Table events, running at LADA from February to July. Exactly ten years after the Long Table on Live Art and Feminism held at the White Building in Hackney Wick, Lois Weaver returns with an invitation to think collectively about what it means to gather again after some extraordinary years of distance and separation, to explore some of our griefs and possible grievances, and to imagine new directions and possibilities.

A Long Table on Fragility, Festivals, Funding and other F-words... One Year On is co-produced by LADA, the Department of Drama of Queen Mary University of London, and the Air Supply Collective.

The Long Table

The Long Table, developed by artist and academic Lois Weaver, experiments with the private form of a dinner party as a structure for public debate where anyone has a seat at the table.

The components are simple: a long table, chairs, a paper tablecloth, pens. Participants are welcome to scribble ideas or comments. There is an Etiquette to be observed. There can be silence. There might be awkwardness. There can always be laughter.

Dozens of Long Tables have been held around the world, on topics as diverse as human rights, arts and mental health, housing crises, technology design, as well as other hot topics like equality, democracy, gender and sex!

The Long Table is open-source. Guidelines and a printable ‘Etiquette’ can be downloaded here.

Access information

We kindly ask the attendees of the event to wear masks to protect those who are disproportionately affected by the ongoing pandemic.

Should you have any particular requirements please email info@thisisliveart.co.uk and we will be happy to offer further support.

Biography

Lois Weaver is an artist, activist, and Professor of contemporary performance practice at Queen Mary University of London. She is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016-2018 Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow. Lois was co-founder of Spiderwoman Theater and WOW Theatre in NYC. She has collaborated with Peggy Shaw and Split Britches since 1980; their radical vision of what theatre can be was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Obie in 2024. Recent performances include Unexploded Ordnances (2016-18) and Last Gasp; A Recalibration (2021-23). Her experiments in performance as public engagement include Long Tables, Porch Sittings, and Care Cafes, and public facilitator, Tammy WhyNot. Lois’s performance practice is documented in The Only Way Home Is Through the Show: Performance Works of Lois Weaver, edited by Lois Weaver and Jen Harvie (2015). Lois Weaver is a Patron of the Live Art Development Agency since 2017.