SELECTED LIVE POETRY PERFORMANCES (SELECTED 2022 - NOW)
A collection of live solo performances across London using a range of picturebooks that I have made which include imagery that recycles my archive of artworks as an artist of over 25 years.
SEE ME - LIVE DIGITAL SOLO PERFORMANCE AT STAR AND SHADOW CINEMA, NEWCASTLE SUNDAY 13 NOV 730PM
POETRY PERFORMANCE SET AT QUEER DIARY, CROYDONITES FESTIVAL,
MATTHEWS YARD (15/10/22)
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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'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
LEE CAMPBELL: SEE ME: BOLD 2022
BOLD QUEER POETRY SOIREE PERFORMANCE, ABOVE THE STAG THEATRE, LONDON, MAY 202
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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Performed at Theatre Deli, London, September 2021
LET RIP: TEENAGE SCRAPBOOK is a poetry performance excavating personal memories of what it was like for me to realise I am gay when I was surrounded by mainstream heteronormative pop culture in 1990s homophobic Britain. It is couched in innuendo and camp history - seeing and not seeing is a protection mechanism within camp and innuendo, one is verbal, and the other is very material and physical.
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 at a time when I felt too uncomfortable to come out as gay.
It is a self-reflection of my desire as a gay man when I was a teenager to be seen but not wanting to be seen at the same time. It presents an intimate history of sight (mine), of not seeing yourself (represented in mainstream pop culture) and discovering a part of yourself through seeing. The film taps on a lot of personal and political issues but important is internalised homophobia – can I say that? can I do that? For example, talking about my boy crushes…
The idea of building a queer identity was so different pre-Internet in the years I was making my scrapbook. In the manner of bricolage – building /constructing what is at hand/available, as a teenager I could be said to be the queer bricoleur making my collage constructions in my teenage scrapbook. At the end of the day I had to experience the same cultural elements (as heterosexual folk around me) and make something entirely different with it. I was seeing things in things (in the imagery in the scrapbook) that were not (necessarily) meant for queer people. I was making things queer, these little building blocks in my identity and it was not meant to be there at all. A lot of the imagery in the scrapbook refers to pop music – pictures of pop music stars and their lyrics. Music that you listen to does inform you (particularly so when you are a teenager). For me it was really difficult growing up at that time in the Nineties listening to music about teenage heterosexuals.
This work was first performed as a work in progress at Theatre Delicatessen in 2021. It included live performance with me in the space as the performer, a soundtrack playing in the background including recorded piece of me speaking and moving imagery projection. Creating an internal psychological space for the audience members to witness, two sets of cameras/projectors were set up, one directly opposite me and one placed upside down meaning that the audience could see me constantly circling back on myself, making loops. The effect creates a projection that is difficult to work out; I go one way but on screen I go the other. From previous iterations of this work on Zoom and now into reality, into the physical space, reversing the screen created a disruption that emphasises the disconnection between physical and screen life. Having all that backwards of what was going on, the movement made that disconnection really clear, underlining that somehow we have become so used to understanding everything through a screen.
The performance began by me putting down pieces of paper onto the floor. These were photocopies of the scrapbook. The audience start to question why I am putting photocopies with images printed on them on the floor so they can’t see them. I put them down so precisely but every time I move they keep moving, I tread on them etc. There is a real delicacy in the way I tread and place them. This preciseness creates a weird discombobulating tension - I am creating a mess of paper on the floor but I do so really precisely.
I make the audience wait; they can see that there are pictures underneath as I was put the photocopies down white side (back) up. I place the photocopy image face down so the audience may catch a glimpse of the image as I placed it down but all they could see as I build up layers of the paper on the floor, was a sea of white paper sheets. One audience member later remarked she loved that moment when the audience realise ‘oh you’ve got to cover the floor to see the projection’
The audience could literally see me in the teenage scrapbook, me physically in the space, engaging with the material that the words/the language sits above that, me crawling around looking under those pieces of paper, turning them over and then not, looking for something and then not, hiding under the covers/under the photocopies, evoking some many metaphors. So physical, visceral, non-rational, material.
Whilst the audience think that the performance ends with a quick nasty rip (there are some moments of this I’d rather forget … rip/skip) and I throw two photocopies down and walk off the stage, I come back into the space and then go back and look at other pages to rediscover.
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