Performances with Michelle Browne, Alex Conway, Pauline Cummins, Frances Mezzetti and Dominic Thorpe at multiple locations
The Performance Collective was a group of five leading artists in Irish performance art: Michelle Browne, Alex Conway, Pauline Cummins, Frances Mezzetti and Dominic Thorpe. They made work for numerous contexts and worked alongside many performance artists, including members of Belfast based Bbeyond. Central to their process of working was a focus on improvisation. They addressed key questions central to much contemporary visual art; collaboration, co-authorship, improvisation, context, display, the live and temporary. They developed new methodologies for simultaneously creating and presenting live, improvised visual art, responding to and evolving each performance at the time of its presentation. They explored collective authorship and the development of collective voice. The artists looked at how improvisation and collective expression are used in other art forms and applied this to the development and understanding of visual art. Some performances include; (i) in 2012, The Performance Collective presented 14 days of live performance as part of the Galway Arts festival in Galway Arts Centre and ; (ii) In 2015, they performed Excuse me, I’m not finished at the NCAD Gallery for a 2 week duration.
