Goat Island performance work is a series of responses:
to the exercises we give ourselves, to our surroundings,
to the events of the world, but mostly, to each other. We
perform responses for each other back and forth. The conversation
goes further than were we just talking. At the end of the
conversation we have a piece in front of us and it's ready
to show. These conversations take place over a long period
of time. As in a chess match, each response is carefully
considered. Time, and therefore, dreams and reverie are
part of the conversation. These conversations can be two
years long. This gives time for a history to grow and for
us to interpret it, for distortions to take on their own
meaning, their own demands.
The idea of response has become very important to the culture
of Goat Island’s workshops and the Goat Island Summer
School. The following text refers to the three week Goat
Island Summer School, but is also applicable to the company’s
shorter workshops.
As each project is performed creative energy is encouraged
to gather strength through the process of creative response.
Each presentation of work is met with some kind of artistic
response: a work of art that could not have existed without
the work it is responding to. These responses are individual
contributions to a conversation that stretches throughout
the weeks of the workshop. In this way work begets more
work and all of the work is inextricably linked. This practice
destabilizes the boundaries between critical and creative
modes in order to enrich them both.
The Goat Island Summer School, directed by the members
of Goat Island, aims to provide an opportunity for artists
to work and study together in a structured, creative environment.
Applications are invited from visual artists (including
video, architecture, and other forms of visual/spatial/durational
expression), live and performance artists, and music, dance,
and theatre practitioners. Disciplines of performance, installation,
writing, movement, music, research, publication and documentation
are examined in various forms and combinations dictated
by the interests of the participants as well as those of
the instructors. Sessions combine theory and practice, investigating
forms of thought and presentation, styles of collaboration,
historical and philosophical perspectives and methods of
individual and collective expression and creativity. The
emphasis of the Summer School is on the development and
encouragement of new theory and practice in art/performance.
Each Summer School takes on a life of its own and this
is driven by the specific people involved. The real work
goes on between live people who come together to construct
a series of agreements to work and communicate with each
other in order to make art. The Goat Island Summer School
involves moving into action, finding inspiration, and negotiating
community.
In the spirit of the Summer School, visiting creative
scholars destabilize distinctions between academic paper
and personal response, between discourse and dialogue, between
reason and art – delivering lecture/performative presentations,
creatively responding to participants’ work, and occasionally
functioning as artists in residence at the Summer School.
These guests have included: Stephen J. Bottoms, Adrian Heathfield,
Carol Becker, Peggy Phelan, Charles Garoian, Simon Jones,
AL Kennedy, Francis McKee, Carolyne Rye, Lucy Cash (formerly Lucy Baldwyn), Joe
Steiff, and Alan Read. In each case, we encouraged the participants
to interpret freely the relevance of the guests’ presentations
to their own performance work. That relevance may have been
direct or indirect, immediate or delayed, but in each case
the mode of presentation as well as the material presented,
provided ample opportunity for inspiration. In each case
we were immensely honored by the participation of these
guests. Goat Island has developed an on going relationship
with many of these guests who continue to bring their insight
to the Summer Schools year after year. We hope their words
and actions will continue to ring the bells of possibility
in widening circles.
Since 1996, Goat Island has led three Summer Schools in
Glasgow (Scotland), three in Bristol (England) and four
in Chicago (USA). Other workshops have taken place in Dartington,
Lancaster, Brighton, Alsager, Zagreb, Hamburg, New York
City and other locations. While every group is special we
owe particular thanks to the participants and supporters
of the first Goat Island Summer School - this was the dream
of Mark Waddell who made it come true in July 1996 with
the help of the staff of the Centre for Contemporary Arts
in Glasgow, Scotland, and funders including the Arts Council
of England International Initiatives Fund, the Glasgow City
Council Arts Development Fund, the Scottish Arts Council,
and the Glasgow City Council. That first Summer School ensured
the ones that followed, and we are now able to offer the
School in the United States as well as in Britain, its first
home. It has taken on, as most creative enterprises do,
a life of its own.
Note
The above text appears in a different form as the introduction
to Goat Island’s Schoolbook
2, published in 2002. The book reflects and documents
the Summer School process, and its contents fall into two
main categories: a workbook section, which includes the
projects that instigate the making of work, and the lecture
section, which includes texts delivered by visiting artists
as well as the members of Goat Island during the course
of the workshop. These two sections reflect two aspects
of the summer school structure: the practical and the theoretical.
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