What is Playing Up?

What is Playing Up?

Live Art and Childhood

PLAYING UP is a project not just about art that kids watch, enjoy and learn from, but about art that kids do. It is about what art can do for kids, as well as about what kids do to art.

As a cultural strategy Live Art offers rich possibilities in cross generational work for and with children. Live Art is more a way of thinking and doing than a rigid artistic discipline. Much of its cultural value lies in its experiential and exploratory nature – in its approaches to, and negotiation of, ideas, experiences, and things. This resonates clearly with the characteristics of childhood. This does not only predestine Live Art for children. It also makes children perfect accomplices for practicing Live Art.

Nevertheless, it’s only relatively recently that the potential for children to engage with Live Art has been explored, especially compared to the opportunities offered within art, theatre, music and dance. But there has been a proliferation of new ways of thinking and making that understand the connections between how children explore the world and what Live Art does.

New Dialogue

To acknowledge this new dialogue between children and Live Art the Live Art Development Agency, Theatre of Research and Tate Family and Early Years Programme have joined forces to initiate the PLAYING UP project. We wish to create spaces for this dialogue to flourish through

• A game, that references 36 pieces from Live Art history and enables teams of kids and adults to practice Live Art on the spot,
• A public play in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and
• A symposium in Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium bringing together artists in Live Art and pioneers in the field

We recognise that the challenge in creating art for children is that in devising the frameworks that support their engagement, unchallenged preconceptions about children and their capacities often inform the design of the work, and ironically, limit the very engagement it aspires to open up.

Therefore, we would like to share Live Art approaches, which construct accessible, and carefully considered frameworks for kids, whilst remaining open to all kinds of possibilities, no matter how difficult or challenging.

Recent Shifts

We want to discuss what Live Art offers to debates and practices on what it is possible, and permissible, to do with kids, and on what that doing can do. Especially at a time when art is increasingly devalued in UK schools, there seems all the more reason for artists, educators and curators to look at what is possible when work that is made for, with or about children considers Live Art as a strategy.

The PLAYING UP project reflects and advances many of the recent shifts in Live Art and kids, and asks:

• What are the different relationships and possibilities between art that is for, with, or about kids?
• What can Live Art offer as a tool for promoting cultural agency, as a means to critique power relationships, and as an approach to explore characteristics of childhood as material?
• How Live Art can be employed as a strategy for collaboration, risk and agency?
• What we can learn from children’s relationship to Live Art?

Credits

PLAYING UP has been conceived and created by Sibylle Peters of Theatre of Research (Germany) and designed by David Caines. PLAYING UP is produced and published in a collaboration between the Live Art Development Agency (LADA, UK), FUNDUS THEATER / Theatre of Research (Germany), Tate Early Years and Family Programme (UK), Best Biennial (Sweden) and Live Art UK, with the generous support of the Goethe-Institut London. PLAYING UP forms part of LADA’s contribution to the Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP) supported by Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. PLAYING UP, the game, has been designed by David Caines (with additional designs by Maja Bechert). Website by Alex Eisenberg. 

For more information contact Live Art Development Agency