Live Art in Scotland is a research project exploring the history of Live Art and experimental performance in Scotland, led by Prof. Steve Greer at the University of Glasgow.
Through a combination of oral history interviews and archival research, the project aims to contribute a missing chapter of Scotland’s cultural history while exploring the forms of curation, support and development that might foster experimental practices in the future.
It was originally supported by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2021-2) and now continues as research centre exploring the conditions and possible futures of interdisciplinary and experimental performance.
Forthcoming publications include the monograph project Live Art, Scotland and the Curation of Culture.
A special issue of the journal Contemporary Theatre Review co-edited by project lead Prof. Steve Greer with Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson – Live Art – Radicalism and Complicity in a Scene of Constraint – was shortlisted for the 2025 TaPRA Editing Award.
The project’s major outcome is the Live Art in Scotland Interview Collection, a collection of 50 original interviews with artists and practitioners involved with Live Art and experimental performance in Scotland over the past thirty years.
You can hear the voices of some of the project’s interviewees in the limited podcast series Live And Now, and read more about live artist’s engagement with questions of memory and archival practice in our micro-publication Now / Not Now.
The project’s other free resources include Live Art Scotland: Research Resources, a guide to archives, collections and other materials that might support research into live art, performance art and interdisciplinary performance in Scotland and a regularly updated Practitioner Directory of residencies, funding opportunities and artist development schemes open to artists based in Scotland.
Documentation of the project’s public forum and discussion events can be found linked below.