Wunderbar and the Live Art Development Agency have co-published a new book of Live Art case studies highlighting projects and initiatives that are re-politicising and re-energising our arts spaces.

It’s Time: How Live Art is taking on the world from the front line to the bottom line includes 13 case studies, sharing radical works and ideas with a public who are themselves being forced to do more with less.

It’s Time is a collaboration of the 30 organisations and initiatives that make up Live Art UK – the network which both champions and aims to be a representative voice for Live Art practices and initiatives in the UK.

The book is a sequel to 2009’s In Time and demonstrates that through creative resistance – of patriarchy, of white supremacy, of ableism, of corporate interest and austerity – Live Art can determine its own future, and that of the world around it.

Wunderbar produced projects, Joshua Sofaer’s Opera Helps and Monica Ross’s An Act of Memory, are unpicked in one of the case studies, written by our artistic director Ilana Mitchell.

She says: “As Artistic Director of Wunderbar since its inception in 2009, I’ve been working with people – variously artists, audiences, participants – to pull at the seams of what participation can mean.”

“What [Opera Helps and An Act of Memory] have in common is simple: the artwork comes to life through the injection of breath from those who come into contact with it. Without a participant, the work is not complete…”

Mitchell’s study goes on to insightfully explore the depths, integrity and effects of participation in these artworks both on the direct participants and ‘audiences’.

Other articles included in It’s Time are:

  • Contextualising essays by Lyn Gardner and Cecilia Wee
  • Joon Lynn Goh on Live Art and Solidarity
  • Mel Evans and Hayley Newman on Live Art and Activism
  • Abby Butcher & David Sheppeard on Live Art Spaces and Places
  • Salome Wagaine on Live Art and Representation
  • Aaron Wright on Live Art and Artist Development
  • Karl Taylor on Live Art and Access
  • Helen Cole and Salette Gressett on Live Art in a Global Context
  • Mary Paterson on Live Art and Thinking
  • Andy Field on Live Art and Money.

To read more about It’s Time and buy at the special introductory price of £10, visit the Wunderbar or Unbound shops.

BOOK COVER IMAGE: Cassils, Inextinguishable Fire, SPILL Festival of Performance 2015, produced by Pacitti Company. Photo by Guido Mencari