On Sunday 4th October the artist collective CONVERGE are hosting their first major performance art event at the Norwich Arts Centre, featuring site-specific performances from seven East-Anglia-based artists. This is a rare opportunity to see a broad range of live works, and the team are particularly keen to reach people who have yet to experience live art.
Images by CONVERGE. Used with permission
CONVERGE was formed in 2024 when Norfolk-born Poppy Jackson and new arrival Laurie Green met and decided that East Anglia needed a community where performance artists could come together and exchange ideas. They were later joined by Ruth Biene, and together the trio organise the meet-ups. “After two decades of travelling between major cities for my performance work,” Poppy says, “I was missing a sense of community after moving back to the rural area I grew up in. I found that other local performance artists were also craving a space of shared acceptance.”
Building an artists’ network across East Anglia
The group meets every month to give members a space to “talk about their work, to cross-pollinate ideas, and work through knots in their threads” as Laurie puts it. Meetings take place all over Suffolk and Norfolk – in Ipswich (DanceEast), Great Yarmouth (PrimeYarc), Lowestoft (303 Projects) and Cromer Art Space, as well as Norwich.
Norwich Arts Centre functions as the collective’s central hub, and the artists are grateful for the team’s support. The venue has been a favourite of Poppy’s since frequenting it as a teenager, and Laurie highly values the opportunity to work in a site steeped in “decades of artist lore and legend”.
By providing artists with this regular opportunity to collaborate, the trio hope to nurture art that puts the body at the centre of creative exploration. Ruth says she hopes the network can contribute to more local performance art “that develops outside or beyond the theatrical realm or choreographed, scripted movement and text pieces”.
Who is taking part?
While CONVERGE invited submissions that responded to specific locations in the building, each participating artist will be bringing their own language and artistic interests to their performance.
Chrissy Ralph is an artist living in Norwich who has previously explored themes of the home, domesticity and women’s precarity, but has recently become interested in the “more than human” languages that emerge from this location and structure our shared environment. A mother of four, some of her previous performances have lasted from 9 am until 3 pm – the part of her day not typically occupied by caregiving. She is currently completing a PhD in performance art, and has been exhibiting since 2010.
Her performance is taking place in the women’s toilets – a site that she notes functions for many women as a “sacred space”, particularly in live arts venues like the Norwich Arts Centre. “I liked this idea in terms of the Norwich Arts Centre having historically been a church, and looking back through its site history,” Chrissy says.
She’ll be transforming the women’s toilets into a kind of confessional booth, but an inclusive one: “it’s going to be a space for anybody who wants to enter it, not just for women”. The work will be influenced by the venue’s more recent storied past, when grunge acts like Nirvana played there. Nirvana “also had their own kinds of connections with church and state, and LGBTQ+ responsibilities,” she observes, and she’ll be exploring these in her work, too.
Chrissy has been a part of the CONVERGE collective since its early days, and is glad to have found it. “In predominantly rural areas like East Anglia there is usually very little representation of performance art,” she says, and so working with CONVERGE has been “brilliant”.
The other artists taking part are Phill V Williams, Danny Darling, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, Bonnie Bakeneko, Marco Yuen & Robert McLean. Thanks to funding from the Norwich Arts Centre, CONVERGE has been able to make this a paid opportunity to exhibit work, something that has been important to the team.
Why go?
Those who are already familiar with performance art will know how rarely opportunities to see so much performance art on one occasion come up (without making the journey down to London). But the trio are also keen to attract people who are less familiar with this artistic form. Asked why people should give performance art a go, Laurie Green replies that “it’s perhaps the most liberating and affecting form of art that I’ve ever encountered. You can shed shame and expectation, and temporarily inhabit a parallel universe in which social rules can be rewritten and new selves inhabited.”
Doors at the Norwich Arts Centre in St Benedict’s Street (NR2 4PG) open at 6.30pm. The performances will run simultaneously from 7.30pm until 9.30pm. Tickets are available in advance here (18+ only).
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The event will conclude with a live audience Q&A.
