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"The stage as we experience it nowadays is here and now - it’s in the iPhone."
- Chris Haring, choreographer
"As the body disappears, so does our ability to empathise."
- Jenny Odell, How to do Nothing
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On 26 August, in partnership with Project Arts Centre, Dublin-based performance journal DRAFF publishes THIS IS NOT A DRAMATISATION _ THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING, an edited collection of conversations between artists exploring the place of live performance in a digital world.
How does contemporary performance, an art form based in presence and bodily realities, respond to our increasingly digital and disembodied world? Drawn from DRAFF’s six-year print and digital archive, this series of twelve conversations explores experimental contemporary performance that centres on the body.
Topics in the book include: the ambient nature of contemporary warfare; the trial of millennial American whistleblower Reality Winner; the embodied language of autism rights advocate Mel Baggs; UFO origin stories; cultural boycotts in Russia; the practice of self-institutionalisation as a response to hyper-bureaucracy; and the plant world as a viable model for human politics.
THIS IS NOT A DRAMATISATION _ THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING features contributions from artists working in a range of performance disciplines based in Europe, Russia and the USA.
Recorded at different times and in different countries, what unfolds through these twelve exchanges is a vision of performance as an antidote to our informationally-saturated contemporary landscape, and a note of urgency about recovering a sense of our bodies in the physical world.
Featured artists include Russian activists Pussy Riot, Northern Irish choreographer and 2021 winner of the Venice Biennale’s Silver Lion award Oona Doherty, and associate theatre director at the Volksbühne Berlin Susanne Kennedy.
This limited-edition edited collection marks the conclusion of DRAFF, a six-year-long project that has explored experimental contemporary performance across disciplines through print, podcasts and film.
Alongside the launch of the book, DRAFF will release short film portraits of three of the artists featured in its pages, shot by award-winning filmmaker José Miguel Jiménez.
Cian O’Brien, Artistic Director of Project Arts Centre, says:
"Over the last 6 years, DRAFF has made an immeasurable contribution to the discourse, documentation and joy of the contemporary performing arts. This extraordinary book is a fabulous celebration of artists, art and the processes they have created to bring their work to audiences right across the globe. I am thrilled Project Arts Centre can play a part in bringing this book to life."
THIS IS NOT A DRAMATISATION _ THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING can be ordered through Project Arts Centre’s imprint Project Press.
For more information on DRAFF, visit draff.net, or follow on Instagram @draff_magazine.
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DRAFF was founded in Dublin in 2015 by three friends, writer Rachel Donnelly, choreographer and actor Liv O’Donoghue, and theatre/film maker José Miguel Jiménez. DRAFF has collaborated with the Abbey Theatre, Project Arts Centre, Dublin Dance Festival, Live Collision (Dublin), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Salmon Festival (Barcelona), CODA (Oslo), Meteor Festival (Bergen), American Realness (New York), AEROWAVES (Europe-wide), DOCUMENTA 14 (Athens), Dublin Fringe Festival, FIND Festival (Berlin), Heroines of Sound (Berlin), PERFORMATIK 17 (Brussels) and Quarter Block Party (Cork). In 2018, DRAFF was funded by the Arts Council to expand their work in exploring form in contemporary performance. The DRAFF project has taken many forms over the last six years, including a print magazine, workshops, public conferences, festival-specific publications, artist-authored reviews, artist to artist conversations, podcasts and short films. The DRAFF team has travelled around Ireland, across Europe and to the US, speaking to artists in their home contexts and recording their work in the studio. To explore our living archive of contemporary performance, visit draff.net.
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