A Letter

Dear Performance Community & Symposium Attendee,

The Out of Site artists and myself, wish to invite you to the upcoming Public Performance Symposium: Flow, embody • in site, to discuss ways we can positively contribute to future healing and re-grounding as we re-enter public space and exit out of a year of pandemic times. We see public performance as one of the tools available to governments and municipalities to invest in as part of well-being initiatives for our local communities.

After a year of immense loss, mourning on a mass scale, violence leading to yet more trauma in our countries and communities - it is time for us to create the world we want to live in. It is time for us to re-imagine what does civil society truly mean? How can we live in peace with our neighbors? Performance artists are engaged in a deep knowledge of movement practices learning from diverse forms. These wide ranging tools can contribute to healing and have a positive impact on our communities. By bringing joy, surprise, and wonder we can be the antithesis of harm. By bringing laughter to our city streets we can provide warmth and much needed soul-food at a time when we have all endured different types of loss, mourning, and severe hardship.

I have witnessed over decades how public performance can impact the body physiologically in the moment of surprise. It can open up possibilities to view the world through a different lens. And what if that lens is one of joy, one of care, and one of love? What if we can bring laughter to our city streets - as an antedote to the extreme forms of violence we have witnessed this year and even more recently with the horrific death of Sarah Everard and eight asian women in Atlanta, Georgia just over the last two weeks.

As a community of artists, Out of Site hopes that this symposium will be a convening of minds, a convening of performance artists from around the globe commited to a practice in public space. In inviting our community members that stretche across the globe we hope to provide a space for re-imagining what a caring society might look like. How can we facilitate a re-entry out of lockdown fear, pandemic fear, fear of being together, and provide healing techniques in the process?

I worked on Bradford Festival, U.K. from 1985 to 1993 and have a long history of witnessing how public performance can bring back peace into our communities. We hope you will join in the community of this Public Performance Symposium: Flow, embody • in site, to discuss and engage in this important conversation that impacts us all now.

In open conversation and dialogue with workshop facilitators, Marilyn Arsem, Dimple B Shah, Kirsten Hershusius, Calum Eccelston, Martine Viale and myself, we will have the opportunity to learn from each other, to create and experiment, to be in dialogue about these very concepts. In the week 3 we invite you to share what you have created over the two weeks in a live stream broadcast on our organizational partners live streaming platform.

Yours truly, Carron Little & Out of Site family
Blog Image: If my body were you by Carron Little, photo by Doug Fogelson