What's the Welsh for "Performance"?

© Heike Roms, October 2005

(An earlier version of this article was published as 'Quel est le mot gallois pour "performance"? Trente ans d'art au pays de Galles.' ['What's the Welsh for Performance?: 30 years of Action Art in Wales'], Inter Magazine (Canada) 88: 4-14, 22-25. ISSN 0825-8708. Reprinted in: André Stitt (ed.) trace installaction artspace 00-05, Bridgend: Seren 2006. ISBN 1-85411-408-5)

The history of performance art in Wales has yet to be written. Over a period of nearly 40 years artists have been creating performance, action or time-based art in this country, yet their work remains largely confined to oral history, to half-remembered anecdotes, rumours and hearsay. Yoko Ono allegedly once presented an action at the National Museum in Cardiff (1), the small seaside town of Aberystwyth is said to have hosted a Fluxus Festival (2) … One searches in vain for traces of these events anywhere. (3) Surprising for a discipline so committed to documentation and theoretical reflection, there are no archives dedicated to performance art in Wales, no books, no journals.

Rather than constructing a history from such fragmentary evidence therefore (a project which I am intending to undertake in the future), for the purpose of this article I will attempt to provide a kind of geography instead, a map of Welsh performance's many manifestations in the past and present. This map features a series of sites, locations at which performance actions have actually taken place but which, more importantly, have also served as conceptual locales around which performance in Wales has been created. These sites may be called, after Foucault, 'heterotopias': 'real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted' (Foucault 1986: 24).

In Wales, such heterotopias include Y Maes (The Field), Y Tir (The Land), Y Ddinas (The City) and Y Ty (The House).

Phil Babot, The Long Road to the North, 2003. Photo: Phil Babot

Mapping performance in Wales

The distinctiveness of much Welsh performance work derives from a fusion of global artistic developments with local cultural and political desires. The earliest art actions that appeared in this country in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inspired in equal measure by the movement of the international avant-garde toward a dematerialization of art practice and by the local reaffirmation of a distinct cultural identity that manifests itself primarily as performance (above all as the celebration of the Welsh language). This was accompanied by a political activism that too gathered pace in the sixties through harnessing performance's radical potential for direct political action in the struggle for the survival of the language. Wales has often been called 'England's first colony' - a marginalized culture turned to a marginal art practice as a means for its cultural and political expression.

As a consequence the division between different artistic disciplines has been of lesser importance than the question of where these disciplines situate themselves in the cultural and political landscape of Wales. In its quest to develop a distinctive form that could provide an alternative to the dominant English mainstream, for example, Welsh experimental theatre from early on embraced artistic strategies that we have come to know from performance art, such as site-specificity, duration and active audience involvement. As a result, the term 'performance' in Wales today describes a fluid field of innovative practices originating in a variety of disciplines, including performance art, sonic art, experimental theatre, movement work, and performance poetry. It is this interdisciplinary quality and the 'sited' nature of Welsh performance in an international field of highly nomadic practices that distinguish the performance scene in Wales.

Notes:
(1) Yoko Ono, 'Fly', Reardon Smith Theatre, Cardiff, 14.06.1968.

"For half an hour last night 200 people sat waiting for the ‘happening’ promised at Cardiff’s Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre by the Japanese avant garde artist, Yoko Ono.
Then they realised that it had ‘happened’. A huge photograph of Miss Ono staring limply from the stage of the lecture theatre was the evening’s entertainment for which the organisers - the 56 Group of Welsh Artists - had paid 50 guineas.
Earlier in the evening a chauffeur-driven car had delivered two photographs and a one word message, ‘Fly’, to Mr. Keith Richardson Jones, lecturer at Newport College of Art, who was waiting outside the lecture theatre for Miss Ono to arrive.
As the audience, mainly art students, waited for the Japanese artist - who has been involved in ‘happenings’ all over the world - to arrive, Mr. Richardson Jones carried the 2ft. square portrait on to the stage and popped it up on a piano.
It was 40 minutes before the audience realised that the happening had happened and it was time to go home. As they left they were refunded their 5s. entrance fees."
(Mario Basini, Western Mail, 15 June 1968)

(2) Miss Rainbow Day, Brian Lane and the First Dream Machine: Day One: Electronic Music and Light Concert; Day Two: Experimental Films; Day Three: Total Theatre. Included works by: Ken Friedman, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, George Brecht, Chieko Shiomi, Tomas Schmit, Herman de Vries, Ay O, Maurene Sandoe and others; also included FLUXCLINIC; Parish Hall, Aberystwyth, 27. - 29.11.1968

(3) Since writing the article, I have found evidence for both of these events - see notes 1 and 2.

Literature cited:
Foucault, Michel (1986) 'Of Other Spaces', Diacritics 16, 1: 22-7.

[Introduction] [Y Maes/The Field] [Y Tir/The Land] [Y Ddinas / The City] [Y Ty / The House] [Postscript]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License.