LIVE ART AND PERFORMANCE ARCHIVE
Showcased new poems for the first time live last night at the brilliant @TheWordZooUK 'Tackle', 'Apple of My Eye', 'Cruise' and 'Devil's Hole'
#performancepoetry #spokenword #performanceart #liveart #queerwriting #poetry
Oh do me a favour mr rainbow flag waver!’‘love what you’re doing here with colour intruding on the b&w’‘oooh, a crap ally is the absolute worst “Pink washing is not clever, no matter how clever the pun” - HECK YES’‘that was incredible, love the visuals’‘Fear is still here when two worlds collide. They call themselves allies but really they’ve lied’
I loved performing 'Camp' and ' Juicy Lucy' at last night’s @incitecabaret
#performancepoetry #liveart #performanceart #poetryfilm #videopoetry #newmedia #spokenword #poetrycommunity
Repetition is such a propulsive force here to emphasize significant themes and experiences!'
Thank you National Poetry Library @nationalpoetrylibrary for inviting me to perform as part of last night's The Poetry Showcase. Watch here:
https://youtu.be/YF7L5W-mAuE
#performancepoetry #liveart #performanceart #poetryfilm #videopoetry #newmedia #spokenword #poetrycommunity
'SATISFACTION (YOU'RE MATCHED, SAY HELLO)' PERFORMED LIVESTREAM VIA ZOOM AT INCITE! FORUM+ NOVEMBER 2022
POETRY PICTUREBOOK PERFORMANCE AT LIVE ART CLUB, VSSL @liveartclubldn
NOVEMBER 2022
Performances of 'Scrapbook', 'Satisfaction', 'Devil's Hole' and ‘Bears and Cubs'
#performancepoetry #spokenword #poet #wordsmith #queerwriting #queer performance
SEE ME - LIVE DIGITAL SOLO PERFORMANCE AT STAR AND SHADOW CINEMA, NEWCASTLE SUNDAY 13 NOV 730PM
FREE RUFUS! FREE RUFUS! 'Rufus: A Doggy Whodunnit' performed at That Goddamn Poetry Jam (October 2022)
POETRY PERFORMANCE SET AT QUEER DIARY, CROYDONITES FESTIVAL, MATTHEWS YARD (15/10/22)
FULL SET
My livestream Zoom poetry performance for VIDEOAKTION #3 in Berlin performed via Zoom from London streamed at Raum für drastische Maßnahmen, Berlin
#performancepoetry #spokenword #videoart #videopoetry #poetryfilm #newmedia #liveart #performanceart #digitalstorytelling
LIVE ZOOM POETRY PERFORMANCE FOR PRAGUE BIENNALE 2022
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'COVERT OPERATIONS' LIVE ZOOM POETRY PERFORMANCE,
HEADLINE SET (05/09/22)
‘Burgers in the freezer! Classic. I love this, Lee - so powerful’
‘I love the Ronald McDonald outfit’
‘I love the pixelated people flashing in the background’
‘I love the automated voices!’
‘I love the combination of drawings and old school computer graphics also the humour’
‘The whole piece is wonderful on every level. Techie me wants to know how you do this, Lee!’
#performancepoetry #spokenword #liveart #performanceart #newmedia #multimedia #poetryfilm #videopoetry #videoart
Really enjoyed performing more poems from my sketchbooks at The Word Zoo in Stoke Newington (01/09./22)
#performancepoetry #spokenword #performanceart #liveart
Live Zoom performance of 'Apple of My Eye' (10/09/22) for Write Out Loud open mic #performancepoetry #poetry #spokenword #poetrycommunity #poetrylondon
'I loved the drawings! They looked like photographs! I think anything like that makes an act far more layered and interesting: twists of costume, props, visual things etc.’
First live performance of ‘Camp’ (+ 'Cottage’ at start) with drawings dating back to my teen years at Paper Tiger Poetry, London July 2022
To watch the poetry version of Camp, click below:
'RUFUS' written and performed by Lee Campbell, Poetry Shack, London (26/07/22). The one poem I will never tire of performing.
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CLICK ABOUT FOR RECORDING OF Q&A DISCUSSION POST PERFORMANCE
'An intriguing piece of performance art: neither theatre nor film, it tries to find something a little different to play with’
Louise Penn, LouReviews 18/07/22
“What you choose to see is up to you”. Powerful.'
‘Beautiful combination of painting and film’
This is a recording of a live Zoom performance called Peer by British artist and poet Lee Campbell for Brazil’s Festival ECRÃ on Sunday 17 July 2022. The imagery you will see is drawn from my personal archive of artworks (drawings, moving image work, performance art documentation etc) as an artist of over 25 years.
Read review of the performance by Louise Penn here: https://loureviews.blog/2022/07/18/review-peer-by-lee-campbell-online-zoom/
Innovating the possibilities of media re-use, feeding-back and looping round of text, and the layering of the voices, this multi-layered multimedia sociocreative performance live Zoom performance is a colourful, immersive, textured, organic and disorienting montage of my memories of the seaside.
PEER is rooted in the Kent/Sussex coast and features footage, images, and drawings on seashells and postcards of places/people/objects made along the coast since a child – my own version of scrimshaw. The imagery is juxtaposed poetry I have written which explains the significance of the seaside to me, featuring my family and friends. It captures the strangeness of the British seaside using a telescope that operates like a blinking voyeuristic eye. It reuses performance documentation and footage from my archive as an artist including performances and drawings. The locations of the moving image footage and the drawings on the seashells and postcards were shot/drawn along the Kent coast including Herne Bay, Margate, Whitstable, Sheerness-on-Sea and Dover - all the seaside towns I loved going to as a child growing up in Kent in the 1980s.Black and white drawings reminiscent of the work of artists William Kentridge and Tacita Dean speak of a dark narrative through their nostalgia intercut with snapshots of human activity that pick up the vibes of the seaside. PEER follows on from my prior work that is very observant of English leisure rituals, in places offering snapshots of a less cosmopolitan England, Englishness and a nostalgia for an England that may or may not have existed. A Britain making do with the beaches that we have. The sentimentality and nostalgia within my drawings of Butlins are ripped apart by poetry that discusses how queer people have been silenced in the past ‘This holiday camp where the camp was for straights as campy redcoats were instructed by their bosses not to come out’. This sets up the context for me to discuss my concerns with LGBT allyship in poetry that is humorous in tone but vehemently angry ‘You reduced me to a sandwich, who the hell are you trying to kid? Switching BLT with LBT just to make a few more quid’.
At surface level, the film is made up of just three simple elements: 1) mechanical viewfinder eye 2) the word ‘peer’) 3) footage behind. It may be easy to watch but there is so much to take from it. Putting together disparate images then allowing viewers to draw their own story, what is ‘seen through' a telescope combines nostalgia, British cheekiness, slapstick and a play on words (peer, pier etc.) The telescope eye used as a mask throughout the whole performance is constantly trying to focus.
To read about my long history of creating Zoom immersive performance experiences in the vein of PEER, please read:
Interview with Jane Glennie, Moving Poems Magazine July 2022
See Me: Windows to the Self of the Performer-Autoethnographer, The Autoethnographer
RECLAIMING MY VOICE, SEX ED, NICE CUP OF TEA PERFORMED AT GOBJAW, LONDON, JULY 2022
RELCLAIMING MY VOICE PERFORMED AT POETRYLGBT, LONDON, JUNE 2022
BOLD QUEER POETRY SOIREE PERFORMANCE, ABOVE THE STAG THEATRE, LONDON, MAY 2022
SPINACH AND EGGS PERFORMED ALONGSIDE STEWART HOME AND WILL SELF AT NEW POETRY SHACK, LONDON MAY 2022
LEE CAMPBELL: SEE ME: BRIGHTON FRINGE 2022
Combining humour, performance poetry and visual moving imagery made up of my personal archive as an artist of nearly 25 years, SEE ME is a multi-media, immersive, (almost) autobiographic solo performance sharing my personal history of seeing and not seeing to confront the politics of seeing and underline how validating seeing can be but also the difficulty of not being seen. It presents a journey through different relationships (to my dad, teachers, school peers, work colleagues, to the gay community, alter ego, my partner, and spaces of queer imagination) I have experienced as a working-class gay British man interspersed with various references to the cultural context that (any)one can relate to George Michael, late-night TV, bad porn, fancying schoolteachers etc. As I perform, physical props in the space bring to life certain parts of the poetry, including cassette tape recorders, photocopies of a large scrapbook I made as a teenager and hand-drawn pencil drawings of a dog called Rufus
A collection of poems that I have written and sounds and imagery made up of my personal archive as an artist of nearly 25 years performed at Runt of the Litter, Hackney Wick, London in May 2022. Click play to watch video below.
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THE TALE OF BENNY HARRIS' PERFORMED AT THE WORD ZOO, LONDON (03/02/22)
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'CLEVER AT SEEING ...' IRL PERFORMANCE - CLICK ABOVE TO PLAY
'RUFUS' COMEDY POETRY PERFORMANCE AT MONKEY BUSINESS COMEDY CLUB IN CAMDEN NOVEMBER 2021
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GOB JAW, LONDON (05/10/21)
THE WORD ZOO, THE OTHERS, Stoke Newington, LONDON (07/10/21)
PLAY ON WORDS, THE BRIDGE HOUSE THEATRE, LONDON (03/10/21)
RECENT + FUTURE + SELECTED ARCHIVE PERFORMANCES
2022 Bold Queer Poetry Soirée, Above the Stag Theatre, London
2022 SEE ME: Lee Campbell, one-man show at The Brunswick, Brighton Fringe
2021 FACETS 2021: THE IMMERSIVE STORYTELLING SYMPOSIUM, Lakeside Arts Centre, University of Nottingham
2021 Incite Online - feat Lee Campbell (Headliner set)
021 Mother Wolf Club, Stoke Newington, London
2021 Serbest International Film Festival 2021
2021 Lee Campbell Work-in-Progress, Theatre Deli, London
2021 Miami Performance International Festival, EdgeZones, Miami
2021 Word Zoo, The Others, London
2021 Gob Jaw, London
2021 Poetry Shack, Clerkenwell Close, London
2021 Homography/Homografia, Brussels
2021 TRANSITSTATION: VOICE #3: MANOEUVRE
2021 Film Vault Presents, Manchester, UK
2021 Sometimes, The Revolution is Small, 'Disarm Hate x Poetry' project, Nymphs & Thugs Recording Co.UK
2021 Write Out Loud Poetry’s Spoken Sessions #1
2021 Here and There, ParkHaus 15, Orlando, USA
2021 Festival ECRÃ Edition 5, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2021 Disturbance, Ugly Duck, London
2021 Pick n Mix – Mixed Bill Cabaret Online
2020 Miami International Performance Festival, Miami
2020 OPAF Online Performance Art Festival) No,16 (Online)
2020 Performance Køkkenet, Denmark (online performance screening)
2016-2017 Light as Violence, various venues including Metal Southend-on-Sea and Open Lab Residency
2015 Bodies that Resist, Athens School of Fine Art, Athens, Greece
2012 The Comedy of Curatorial Performance, Lionel Dobie Project, Manchester
2012 Experimental Comedy Training Camp Public Performances, The Banff Centre, Canada
2011 Testing Grounds, South Hill Park, Bracknell
2011 On Your Marks (with Lucy O’Donnell), Parfitt Gallery, Croydon
2011 Archipelago, Cafe Gallery Projects, London
2010 Tongue Tied, The Agency, London
2009 Noisy Image, Cafe Oto, London
2008 Gary Stevens Performance Lab, 2008, Artsadmin, London
2008 Whitstable Biennale, Whitstable
2007 FRESH, Reading
2007 Sounds Verbal, Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, London
2007 Testing Grounds, Permanent Gallery, Brighton
PERFORMANCE ARCHIVE
'CLEVER AT SEEING WITHOUT BEING SEEN' LIVE ZOOM PERFORMANCE
AUGUST 2021
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‘You have the ability to verbalise all those layers that I feel but have yet to find a voice for! Angry and authentic, Avant-garde like Derek Jarman’
‘Evokes sharply and poignantly a lot of the feelings which are so common to discovering one's sexuality in adolescence ('I got very clever/Very clever at seeing/Without being seen' was both brilliantly simple and touching), and the double meanings littered were rich and effective’
‘Love the live element alongside the constant peeling and reworking layers of time and perception’
'Can so relate to George Michael!'
‘All this stuff that has been marshalled into this form- that’s an act of strength ‘
“Dad watched the match; I watched the players.” Love the idea of football as erotica and the ‘soundfield’!’
‘I also smuggled Gay Times!’
‘It nails a specific talent, queer people need to acquire, the title’
‘So very powerful, bloody raw. The sound effects and delay work very well. All the recordings and soundscape very intriguing and almost remind me of The Wall. Love the honesty.’
‘a whole journey through identity - astounding, absorbing’
‘GENIUS meld of powerful messaging, word play and sense of history’
LET RIP: TEENAGE SCRAPBOOK
WORK-IN-PROGRESS PERFORMANCE AT THEATRE DELI, LONDON
SEPTEMBER 2021
Work in progress showing of a new solo performance involving a teenage scrapbook that I kept in the mid-late Nineties as a teenager. The work was produced as part of a mini-residency at Theatre Deli, London. More info on the project here:
'SEE ME' TWO POEMS PERFORMANCE FOR INCITE! FORUM+ AUGUST 2021
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PERFORMANCE OF 'SPINACH AND EGGS'
at PAPER TIGER POETRY, TEA HOUSE THEATRE, VAUXHALL JULY 2021
PERFORMANCE OF 'CLEVER AT SEEING WITHOUT BEING SEEN'
at PAPER TIGER POETRY, TEA HOUSE THEATRE, VAUXHALL JUNE 2021
Recent Live Zoom Performances Using Green Screen
In 2019, I began recycling whole bodies of past fine artwork to explore the question: What may it mean to remediate, excavate and bring back to life a personal archive of paintings and drawings and mobile phone recording made over the span of 25 years through the medium of moving image? Rediscovering my love of performing live and performing queer poetry that I had written (including excavating text from my films as live spoken word pieces i.e., performing live the humorous text from my film Let Rip: A Personal History of Seeing and Not Seeing (2019) as performance poetry), by the end of 2020, my work took a major turn when (by sheer happy accident) I started using films I had made as green-screen video backdrops on Zoom as part of a new body of live performance work. For example, Let Rip (2019) and Tackle (2020) provide the visual backdrop for my live Zoom performance Clever at Seeing without being Seen (2021). Innovating the possibilities of media re-use, feeding-back and looping round of text, and the layering of voices, these multi-layered multimedia live Zoom performances are colourful, immersive, textured, organic and disorienting montages of young queer experience told through my own personal autobiography, with me performing these regularly on the online LGBT-centred poetry scene. This performance work which could also be classed as a form of expanded live cinema really pushes Zoom’s visual aesthetics as a means to frame, act as a visual container and play with different levels of order and chaos through the visual confinement achieved. Turning my back to the audience/camera, my back operates like a screen/projection surface. Green screen effect employed with a constant repetitive video being played ‘projected’ onto my back gives the impression of text and imagery superimposed over my body - that I am wearing text/imagery like a garment, that of a body that has been layered with fragments of text/images/history. My back turned to the camera/to the audience constantly comes in and out of the green screen; my body that keeps getting subsumed and emerging again. Whilst the green screen background acts a base, each live iteration containing so many levels of improvisation means that a performance/film screening can never be repeated twice. Emerging as a positive of using Zoom under Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, me using my films as performative backdrops opened up a wealth of possibilities to now explore how I can use Zoom to enhance my creativity and further remediate that remediation (my fine artwork into film) through the medium of live performance/live cinema via Zoom.
LET RIP:DYMAXION HOMOFILE
‘My art teacher suggested I go to the Southampton Film Society, where they were playing A Bigger Splash, with David Hockney and his bathing beauties. There was so much tanned male flesh on show. I was 14, had Miss Chuter sussed me out? I identify with this poem Lee, wonderful.'
'How it really brought me back to the 90s - even we had these posters in Carlow in my Gaelic speaking school!'
‘Loved the visuals Lee. As a late 90s/early 00s teenager I had many the scrapbook. Also brilliant depiction of the awful awkward sex education of so many secondary schools’
LET RIP: DYMAXION HOMOFILE is a performance poem about what it was like for me to realise I am gay when I was surrounded by mainstream heteronormative pop culture in 1990s homophobic Britain. The words of the poem directly reference images within a scrapbook that I kept when I was a teenager in the 1990s for 5+ years – my personal private archive of images that in many ways helped to shape my understanding of (gay) male desire. These scrapbook images form the basis for the moving imagery that I use as part of my Zoom performance work and also for then the poem is presented in video poem form.
The title Dymaxion Homofile is a play on words of Dymaxion Chronofile, architect Buckminster Fuller's very large scrapbook which he documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983
ONLINEPERFORMANCEART.COM 20/06/21
THE PERFECT CRIME
ONLINEPERFORMANCEART.COM 25/05/21
Recent audience comments:
‘I love how this builds, surprises you. I think the rhyming works really well in this way, part of the game. I like imagining Rufus with a gun, wearing a balaclava, parking, etc. And the mixture of humour, darkness, and tension’
‘This is brilliant to listen to, I chuckled my way through it and really related to the tension in the 3-way marriage’
‘Darkness and comic light touch – that space in between the light and the shade in the piece was wonderful’
‘So gruesome!”
‘Brilliantly creepy!
‘Mesmer-eyes-ing!’
‘Well and truly horrific!
‘Glad my dog isn’t in the room to overhear any ideas!
. ‘So sickly nice but really horrible!!’
‘The lo fi makes it more disturbing to me’
‘This has everything written into it; A dog, a bit of Hitchcock's Psycho, a lot of blood, some witnesses, traces of hair and the print of a paw.
‘Obsessive, funny, and wacky’
'That was just magical. Dark, and magical.''
'This experience of almost sharing your partner with this dog whenever he’s around - Rufus dominating! Battling this creature.'
FOR FURTHER DETAILS, GO TO 'POETRY' PAGE
PRESS PLAY: A DAY OUT WITH RUFUS
‘It’s just so funny, using your jumper to dry the dog!’
‘Love the mixed media & humour’
‘Such an amazing use of visuals and multimedia!’
'Lee, don’t share the bonds like he and Alex together’’ A rhymical piece with a sweet lyrical feel. You’re a master at rhyme. Lovely flow and delivery’
This live Zoom performance poem is an exploration into gay male coupledom and the quotidian, PRESS PLAY: A DAY OUT WITH RUFUS relates to what me and my partner Alex remember about a shared experience: a day out with Rufus the dog, the dog we often dog-sit. As individual memories aren’t always shared, the conversation might reveal some startling yet humorous differences in terms of each person’s recollection. Creating a bridge between video and performance, drawings of Rufus that I have made over the course of a few years appear projected onto my body, giving the impression of text and imagery superimposed over my body as a screen/projection space; that I am wearing text/imagery like a garment and of a body that has been layered with fragments of images/history. This effect is achieved through the green-screen effect on Zoom to really push Zoom’s visual aesthetics as a means to frame, act as a visual container and play with different levels of order and chaos through the visual confinement achieved. My body constantly comes in and out of the green screen; my body keeps getting subsumed and emerging again. A tape recorder acts as an extension of my body and offers another set of voices ( those of Alex’s) to that of mine performing and other voices heard elsewhere. An ongoing tension between me and Rufus unfolds throughout the performance as if he’s taking over my body and taking over my relationship with Alex.
BODIES OF DESIRE: STICK YOUR STEREOTYPES!
This live Zoom performance contains imagery from my personal archive as an artist from the last 25 years. Inspired by my experience of being amongst ‘cubs’ and ‘bears’ in the Kings Arms pub in London, this performance is in actual fact a ‘two fingers up’ to body shaming and labels and saying clearly: 'accept me'. What function does stereotyping or strict boundaries to certain kinds of labels serve?. It employs protest art, of modes of representation, chanting within ACT UP and queer movements, of political campaign. Reminiscent of early guerrilla protest video art from the 1980s, the performance combines fine art and moving image by including my own drawings of my body.
Recent audience comments
'if you want to get sold' oof heavy, love it’
‘Intercreative with history ... love the resistance too- the energy of the 90s ‘
‘Wow Lee. Vulnerablitliy exported there. Fatphobia is insidious’
‘Feeling the gut punch. Sharp audio/images/language’
CLEVER AT SEEING WITHOUT BEING SEEN (2021)
Recent audience comments:
‘Evokes sharply and poignantly a lot of the feelings which are so common to discovering one's sexuality in adolescence ('I got very clever/Very clever at seeing/Without being seen' was both brilliantly simple and touching), and the double meanings littered were rich and
effective’
‘Gay subculture creates such stereotypes. This performance is a reflective critique of gay subcultural milieu through contemporary gay poetry.’
‘Love the live element alongside the constant peeling and reworking layers of time and perception’
'Can so relate to George Michael!'
‘All this stuff that has been marshalled into this form- that’s an act of strength ‘
“Dad watched the match; I watched the players.” Love the idea of football as erotica and the ‘soundfield’!’
‘I also smuggled Gay Times!’
‘It nails a specific talent, queer people need to acquire, the title’
‘Never seen anything THAT immersive on Zoom!'’
‘ At the end where the hand starts pulling the layers away was like pulling away skins/the body being skinned.’
Innovating the possibilities of media re-use, feeding-back and looping round of text, and the layering of the voices, this multi-layered multimedia live Zoom performance is a colourful, immersive, textured, organic and disorienting montage of young queer experience told through my own personal autobiography. THIS is what it was like for me to grow up gay in 1990s working class homophobic Britain and then to come to London in early 2000s and be confronted with the implicit power relations attached to gay male queer social spaces of conviviality. There are so many different references to decades of British history though different registers of image making, language and bodies through a complex repetitive system of layering making the viewer continually question how many layers there are. With a parallel to our unconscious, with its many layers, many of which we do not have full access to.
Containing so many visual and audio clashes and dizzying sound levels for texture and difference, the layering subsides in places and towards the end and the taunts are heard more clearly. Whilst there are moments throughout the performance where I make everything super clear and then I go back out, this is a performance where the importance and clarity of hearing an understanding is deliberately obscured/ intentionally difficult to decipher; an intentional confusion to suggest that the audience many not understand what's going on. Whilst audiences may or may not pick up on all the many references here, it is intended that they will, at base level, have a sensory/elusive view of the work, as one viewer recently described ‘a block of amazing visual and auditory input.
The performance charts teenage-hood; discovering one’s sexuality in private, away from one’s parents. As a teenager, you do not really know who you are. This film is a self-reflection - a ‘this is what it was like’ to come to terms with my homosexuality; of me finding somebody attractive (men) but not really knowing what I am. I speak my personal truth, my personal history of seeing and not seeing to confront the politics of seeing and underline how validating seeing can be but also the difficulty of not being seen. Whilst it can be understood as one person’s (my) narrative so too can it easily be read as lots of different voices layered to talk about wider levels of experience with various references to cultural context that (any)one can relate to: George Michael, late night tv, bad porn. Intimate and personal in a really powerful way, part of the performance includes reference to a dad and son (me and my dad) conversation exploring what one is seeing and what the other is seeing about the same action of men in football with one person viewing it one way and the other a different way. Here we travel back in time to 1996, to a football match between Chelsea and Aston Villa courtesy of a cassette recording played through a tape recorder made at the time of the match. The double of the term ‘tackle’ is one of many humorous double-entendres/double meanings employed throughout including: tackle, cruise, hole, and fag.
Similar to POLARI PUPPET, a live performative delivered via Zoom that really pushes Zoom’s visual aesthetics as a means to frame, act as a visual container and play with different levels of order and chaos through the visual confinement achieved. With my back turned to audience and operates like a screen/projection surface. A tape recorder acts as an extension of my body and offers another set of voices to that of mine performing and other voices heard elsewhere. Green screen effect employed with a constant repetitive video being played ‘projected’ onto my back gives the impression of text and imagery superimposed over my body, that I am wearing text/imagery like a garment, that of a body that has been layered with fragments of text/images/ history. Sounds that can be heard throughout the performance are textured, glitchy and uncomfortable deliberately to give a sense of layers which in turn gives the painful impression of things (the many bodies that feature) being skinned.
The images comprising the green screen are drawings and paintings I made between 2005-2007 and 2018-2019, movie and audio recordings on mobile phones circa. 2005 and photographic stills and moving image recordings that I took between 2011-2019 on various iPhones. The green screen video recycles/repurposes/remediates this media but also in their collection when they were recently bought together in several examples of my moving image work e.g., the green screen contains visual snippets and language from recent films I made in 2020 including Let Rip: The Beautiful Game, Tackle, Let Rip: A Personal History of Seeing and Not Seeing, and Satisfaction, (You’re Matched, Say Hello).
My back turned to the camera/to the audience constantly comes in and out of the green screen; my body that keeps getting subsumed and emerging again. Whilst some viewers have comment that they thought I was really controlling the green screen but I have no control; as the green screen progresses, the body seems to disappear more and more as more and more layers on the surface.
Reading me as well as hearing me. A recent viewer suggested that my turned back appears almost demonic. Whilst it could be said to turn one’s back on an audience is a deliberate act to conceal oneself or block the audience, that’s not what is happening here either. Like in both the POLARI PUPPET and FINGER PUPPET TAPE RECORDER performances, the audience is never sure what is live, what is pre-recorded and what is playback of what has been recorded during the live performance. Pre-recorded sounds playing in the background on iTunes shuffle which I react to there and then in the moment of liveness. Some viewers of documentation of the performance have mentioned that they are completely unaware that they were watching documentation of a live performance. Some have suggested that the writing on my back is happening live too. Whilst the green screen background acts a base, each live iteration containing so many levels of improvisation means that the performance can never be repeated twice. Its duration is important (beyond the initial early iterations of this work at approx.. 5 minutes); through a length(ier) the viewer is shown the complexity of the layers, what’s in them and how they interact and they are being show that again and again and again and it’s never the same.
PRIOR VERSIONS
ONLINEPERFORMANCEART.COM (01/21)
TURF PROJECTS (01/21)
Earlier iterations as SEEING/NOT SEEING (2020)
POLARI PUPPET (2020)
CONDITIONS (08/12/20)
A live performative reading of a text about ventriloquism delivered via Zoom that really pushes Zoom’s visual aesthetics as a means to frame, act as a visual container and play with different levels of order and chaos through the visual confinement achieved. With my back turned to audience and operates like a screen/projection surface. A tape recorder acts as an extension of my body and offers another set of voices to that of mine performing and other voices heard elsewhere. Green screen effect employed with a constant repetitive video being played ‘projected’ onto my back gives the impression of text superimposed over my body, that I am wearing text like a garment, that of a body that has been layered with fragments of text/fragments of history. Reading me as well as hearing me. A recent viewer suggested that my turned back appears almost demonic. Whilst it could be said to turn one’s back on an audience is a deliberate act to conceal oneself or block the audience, that’s not what is happening here either.
The text was written by me to accompany the exhibition Radical Ventriloquism which I curated earlier this year at Kelder Projects, London. The reading operates as a self-portrait of all different levels of me; on the tape recorder, me speaking with back turned and me reading that disintegrates and gets mashed up by the end. A collision between me reading a lecture and reacting to the sounds of (my voice but distorted) gay slang Polari on shuffle there and then. But more than a self-portrait - a triptych of multiple ‘I’s: me ‘speaking through’ the finger, me speaking with my back turned and me on the tape recorder. Only some people can understand the Polari slang and therefore makes you think about who the audience is in terms of levels of understanding. The finger that appears just above my shoulder reveals a split personality – saying things through the language of Polari that maybe I dare not say directly.
The audience is never sure what is live, what is pre-recorded and what is playback of what has been recorded during the live performance. Pre-recorded sounds playing in the background on iTunes shuffle which I react to there and then in the moment of liveness. Some viewers of documentation of the performance have mentioned that they are completely unaware that they were watching documentation of a live performance. Some have suggested that the writing on my back is happening live too. Whilst the green screen background acts a base, each live iteration containing so many levels of improvisation means that the performance can never be repeated twice.
Further iteration: ONLINEPERFORMANCEART.COM (20/12/20)
FINGER PUPPET TAPE RECORDER 4:
MORE ADVENTURES WITH RUFUS (2020)
“More adventures with Rufus” by Lee Campbell (London, UK) dur 20min
This performance relates to what Lee and his partner Alex remembers about a shared experience: a day out with Rufus the dog, the dog they dog-sit. As individual memories arenʼt always shared, the conversation might reveal some startling yet humorous differences in terms of each personʼs recollection. Like the previous performance, A DAY OUT WITH RUFUS, Lee will continue to make a series of drawings about their recollections but a major shift will be that Lee will no longer speak to Alex as a finger, this time Lee will speak directly to the laptop screen as if the audience are Alex. Essentially Lee will have an argument with the audience!
#TEST3 10 words/10 days/100 artists
Just finished 9 days of drawings. Thank you for inviting me to take part in #TEST3 10 words/10 days/ 100artists An experiment in drawing and networking 27.10.2020 - 05.11.2020 #100drawingsnetwork @q_plus_i #drawing #performativedrawing
FINGER PUPPET TAPE RECORDER 3:
A DAY OUT WITH RUFUS (2020)
(NAME OUR DOG!) (2020)
FINGER PUPPET TAPE RECORDER 1:
HOW CAN I GET MY PARTNER TO BE MY FINGER? (2019-2020)
Performance at Conditions, photograph by Matthew Noel-Tod (2019)
** AWARDED Special Mention at London-Worldwide Comedy Short Film Festival Autumn 2019 **
‘There is something so unnerving about it … a fantastic battlefield of the quotidien’
‘Your frustrations are bubbling to the surface that are in response to these contingent tape recordings - the whole thing has a really uncertain, strangely haunting, ultimately utterly mundane quality’
‘A conversation with the other through the self as a means of othering oneself – bringing the (speaking) body, a bodily intimacy back into the realm of speech and discourse in a very light way’
SUMMARY: Nobody ever really knows what’s going on in relationships. That terrible existential dread, that we know no one, and furthermore, we do not even know ourselves. This performance combines comedy, movement and visual performance and takes the form of a conversation where two speakers (my fiancée, Alex and I) don’t quite meet.
How Can I Get My Partner to Be My Finger is a performance of tensions between the active and the passive of who is in control and who is being a puppet. Between the live and the mediated. Dialogues that oscillate between persuasion and control. Between the found and the spontaneous, the controlled and the supposedly uncontrolled. Between the supposedly intimate and the constructed. Between the demotic and the personal.
The finger is the most primitive version of a puppet. In a pitch-black space, a spotlight is shone on my finger in a similar stage set-up to how the mouth appearing disembodied was illuminated in Samuel Beckett’s stage direction for Not I. What follows is a conversation between a couple -one present, one technologically distant - my partner Alex and I. Alex ‘speaks through’ my finger via a tape-recording. Sometimes I ‘speak for’ Alex. The big question is: is it Alex speaking or is it me speaking? How can I get my partner to be my finger? The most proximate, the most intimate, the most utterly strange is the stranger within me. And the same for Alex.
The performance builds up tensions and then releases those tensions in much the same as the mechanisms of comedy. These tensions are built up using sets of unknown questions/set of words and phrases from somebody else (my fiancée, Alex) and how I improvise around these - the improvisation of someone else who is not actually there but ‘speaks through’ my finger. What is really speaking through the finger ... what body/psychical part ... what social relation ... whose stranger is being ventriloquised?
The performance serves up multi-layers, multi-voices: mine, me speaking in place of Alex (the voice of the finger) and Alex’s (actual) voice being played through a dictaphone recording which creates a bizarre displaced refigured sense of intimacy. Yet, throughout the entire performance the viewer is unsure where the voices are coming from and it appears there is no distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’.
Something deeply intimate but radically outside of me. Being simultaneously performer/writer and performer/director/actor, I use my finger in a similar manner to the ventriloquism performed by Danny in the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining (speaking through one’s finger), a ‘voice’ from the finger comes from my partner Alex who pre-records (sometimes awkward, difficult, intimate, personal, humorous) phrases/questions into a Dictaphone in different voices I hear them coming from the finger every time I press play. I have had to train myself to put myself in a frame of mind to occupy a space of candidness in front of people with the finger without limiting myself. The performance becomes a potential site of conflict or revelation! and just using finger feels much more like am confronting myself. Alex works with what he knows to be my triggers. As the conversation unfolds, I try to control a narrative between me and Alex which I can't control. The conversation is ripe with absurdist dialogue and humour produced in my effort to try and control the (collective) narrative through the conversation. The question of marriage and getting a dog acts as an umbrella, a comedy frustration which through the course of the performance breaks down into these smaller dissonances which are humorous. A slideshow of pencil drawings by Lee that makes reference to ideality – Alex, Lee and Rufus the dog. Weird inversions taken place - the more controlling I become, the more feminine I become- then I am also the dominant one. I am effectively having a relationship with a voice box that won't do what I want it to do - this is reminiscent of those kinds of slippages that happen in relationships. Whilst the recording allows me to replay things which I wouldn't be able to do in real life , it creates an interesting distance that reveals something; in relationships we hear what we want to hear and sometimes that might be hearing confrontational things that we don’t like.
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Performance at Turf Projects, Croydon (Lunchtime Feedback session with Alice Channer, July 2019)
In this iteration of the performance, there were four stages. In the first stage, I presented an ‘official briefing’ – a PowerPoint presentation borrowed from the corporate/pedagogic world of presenting the PowerPoint and then subverting that with nonsensical replacements of the word ‘intimacy’ spoken through a machinic voice. The PPT suggested that there is route to intimacy but there is dissonance.
In the second stage, audiences watched video documentation of a previous live performance of the finger ventriloquism described above. In the third stage, I performed the finger ventriloquism live in front of the same audience.
Adding a final layer, a fourth stage extended the constant rolling tension in the modes of presentation that I used by showing the audience documentation of the performance just enacted in stage three. This created something very different for the audience than being in the room and then seeing it on the screen (documentation); so odd to see something which they thought was live, raw and improvised and then immediately saw it played back to them.
TACKLE (2020)
Live performance at RADICAL VENTRILOQUISM:ACTS OF SPEAKING FOR & SPEAKING THROUGH Guest Curator: Lee Campbell
Thursday 12 March, KELDER, London
Lee’s recent film TACKLE confronts some of the issues and problems that men are under at the moment in society in terms of male identity. Like a balloon about to pop. TACKLE was made with vintage footage of a 1996/1997 football match between Coventry City and Aston Villa from YouTube, sound and moving image recordings made on a Sony Ericsson Cybershoot K800i mobile phone between 2005-2006, drawings and paintings made between 2005-2007 and 2018-2020 and photographic stills and moving image recordings made between 2011-2020 on various iPhones. Lee will perform a live version of this film on the opening night of Radical Ventriloquism combining the film recording and live performance involving a disembodied finger.
LIGHT AS VIOLENCE (2017)
The Brady Arts Centre, London
Light as Violence was a performative lecture delivered as part of my week-lab Open Lab residency about inclusion for students with visual impairment at The Brady Arts Centre, London in 2017.
During the lecture, blindfolds were given to audience members, lights were turned-off and coloured finger torches were used. Simultaneously, instructions to put on a blindfold or close one eye were bellowed through a megaphone. Throughout these changes, I turned on a flashlight and continued to read my paper without faltering. The obstruction and distraction of these changes altered the flow, particularly as changing the lighting led to a more and more direct attempt at disruption. And, of course the audience continued to listen and try to assimilate the information. I attempted to deliver my lecture whilst an assistant provided light so that I could read the paper as the space that I was reading in was in complete darkness. A parasitical relationship was produced - on the one hand, I needed light to read, on the other hand it could blind me. My assistant used light to antagonise rather than support me, and the situation became extremely uncomfortable for both me as speaker and audience. The resulting documentation of the lecture (recording purposely with no sound) resembles a silent horror movie predicated upon photophobia (fear of light).
For more on this work, have a read of:
Campbell, L., 2019. Deprivation Strategies: Increasing Public Understanding of Vision Impairment Using Performative Pedagogy. Body, Space & Technology, 18(1), pp. 126–144. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/bst.308
Campbell, L. and McCall, C. and Lee, A. (2017) ‘Sight (un)specific: performance as research predicated upon
deploying acts of visual negation’, Body, Space, Technology. ISSN: 1470-9120
CONTRACT WITH A HECKLER (2013)
with Claire Makhlouf Carter,
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London
Images courtesy of Katrina Palmer
An artwork that trials a performance about heckling via the act of heckling.
Contract with a Heckler (2013) was a collaborative artwork with Claire Makhlouf Carter which involved disruption by a heckler (Carter) of the delivery of a conference paper by a speaker (Campbell). Taking on these roles, we signed participation contracts between a heckler and a speaker.
For more on this work, have a read of:
Campbell, L., and Jordan, M. 2018. ‘The Heckler’s Promise’, Performance Paradigm 14, Performance, Politics and Non-Participation.
GO BANANAS (2012),
The Banff Centre, Canada
Go Bananas! produced as part of The Experimental Comedy Training Camp held at The Banff Centre, Canada (2012) Billed as comedy to be provocative, the performance in its liminality was centred upon eliciting a form of participation that began playfully but ended painfully; many participants experienced mental and physical discomfort that they did not find funny. Attempting to build upon generating participant discomfort in previous works such as Careful Whisper, my deployment of slapstick with non-fatal consequences for participants, well, at least, that was my intention, echoed Gillian Whiteley’s comments that slapstick (in terms of art) has become fairly safe. Go Bananas! deployed aspects of slapstick (balancing bananas on your head whilst being instructed by me to undertake a series of actions that were designed to force participants to be deliberately clumsy) but the usage of slapstick was not intended to kill anyone through humour. As a calculated interruption, the performance started by me surprising participants and issuing them with consent forms to sign having informed them of the potential risks involved in their participation. This process was a method to enliven proceedings and provoke a heightened sense of danger and excitement and add a further degree of uncertainty, fear and participant risk-taking. I wanted participants to ask themselves the question, ‘What the hell am I letting myself in for?’ That said, the forms could also be a sign of security for more cautious participants: “This (what is written here) is what is going to happen and I’ve got it in writing. Black and white.” Wrong. My performance finished with participants being instructed to leave the space and me giving one of the audience members a mop and bucket to clean the space. Comedy over. I asked participants after the event how they felt about being instructed to walk in a clumsy, awkward manner, being laughed at by the audience, having their participation recorded on mobile phones and video cameras etc. and leaving the performance space with the stench of banana in their hair and on their clothes. “It left a nasty after-taste”, commented one participant.
LOST FOR WORDS (2011)
Testing Grounds, South Hill
Park,
Bracknell
An audience participative work employing comedy slapstick.
For more on this work, have a read of:
Campbell, L. 2017. ‘Anticipation, Action and Analysis: A new methodology for Practice as Research’, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, Volume 1, Issue 2, Summer 2017 (Participation in/and Research: Ethics, Methodologies, Expectations), Article 7. ISSN: 2472-0860
ON YOUR MARKS (2011)
with Lucy O’Donnell, Parfitt Gallery, Croydon
On Your Marks (2011) was a collaboration between myself and fellow Loughborough University School of the Arts researcher Lucy O’Donnell, held at the Parfitt Gallery in Croydon, London, where we considered drawing as a form of marking to catalyst communication, test reciprocity between ourselves, evaluate how physical presence could be marked and begin to understand how marks become indexical of their producer. Most importantly, we wished to assess how drawing may operate as recording phenomenological relationships between two people.
For more on this work, have a read of:
Campbell, L. 2014. ‘Beyond Pollock: On visual art objects as non-traditional forms of performance document’,
edited by Toni Sant, The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. Vol. 10, Iss. 1,2014
I LIKE DUCKS/I LIKE DUCK (2011)
with Frog Morris
Archipelago, Cafe Gallery Projects, London
FALL AND RISE (2008)
Whitstable Biennale 2008
A performance inspired by the British situation comedy The rise and fall of Reginald Perrin. A line of Reggies, dressed in typical British office worker attire, chanted catchphrases, such as “I didn’t get where I am today”, taken from the programme. Following this, they recreated the moment – repeated in every episode – where Reggie strips, runs into the sea and returns emancipated from the drudgery of capitalist existence, ready for a more purposeful life. The filming/recording/ the production values are so painterly … the organisation of the figures, going out into the water and then coming back, the colour, Bonnar…The guy watching in the bowler hat looks like somebody from an 18th century Painting on the beach.
‘I feel like an organised pervert’- said one, interesting that he is reflecting upon the craziness, why he was motivated to participate, some perversity in his nature.
BBC Radio 4 Midweek interview with Libby Purves June 2008
BBC South East News Feature
DOWN! (2007)
Testing Grounds, Brighton
In DOWN! (2007), I assemble an audience in an art gallery in Brighton and begin performing a set of protest-style actions. The audience follows me down to the seafront where I make use of the fact that it is almost pitch black and the audience can barely see me. Not only is their vision disrupted, so too are the auditory elements of the performance. Being able to hear what I am saying clearly is interrupted by the constant sound of crashing waves along the seashore. Both performances described above were recorded using a mobile phone camera.
DRILL! (2007)
Tottenham Court Road, London
In Drill (2007), I assembled an audience to stand on a pavement and watch me walk up and down a busy road in London undertaking a series of performative actions where what I said contradicted what I did in terms of bodily gesture whilst a member in the audience recorded me doing these actions on my mobile phone. There was a lot of audience laughter but I wonder whether that was out of amusement, curiosity, exasperation; Jo Volley, one of my tutors (possibly present in the audience) remarked to me in a recent conversation about the live performance the following: ‘I think I was there or is that down to the mythology of the event? I remember it being chaotic, not really focused and were you a tad embarrassed? But fun nevertheless. I still think you should have done a performance before a game at the Arsenal. I remember now it was frustrating going to that venue as people straggled in different groups/routes - so difficult to keep attention’. Another bystander commented ‘My impression was what a halting hoot and breath of fresh air you were and the nervous energy was infectious, people were electrified by being with you in a 'dangerous' safe situation’. As I march up and down Tottenham Court Road, I use the passing objects (passersby and modes of transport passing me) to appear in and out of their (the audience’s) vision. I do not engage with passersby. I do not acknowledge their presence; I use them only as props to help in the process of (at times) obliterating the assembled audience’s vision of me. Noticing a person standing in the assembled audience is recording my actions, some passersby directly try to interact with me or become part of the performance but I take no notice of them and carry on. At one moment I can be seen (by the assembled audience and the passersby) and the next I cannot. At one moment, I can be heard and the next I am a fading echo walking into the distance.
OPPOSITES (2007)
Battersea Arts Centre, London
Opposites is so bodily, the heads, the laughter, you just see the movement. Extremely comic but painful and exhausting.
SELECTION OF PERFORMANCES 2007-2010
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