‘Making Mischief in Public’ (2016) Performative and participatory lecture: Market Town Lecture Programme

Antoinette has performed at street arts festivals across the UK. From Derby Festé, to Bath’s Bedlam Fair, to Kendal Mintfest, to a Banquet Tour of Cumbria. There is a delight in performing to a street audience who is expectant – waiting around for you to do something interesting. But Antoinette’s finds there is more mischief to be made by guerrilla street performances. By seeking out, and then surprising an unsuspecting audience. In her lecture Antoinette will talk about how she developed The Wizard of Oz as a walkabout street performance, and the tactics she uses to create a theatre on the street where none really exists. About the Market Town Lecture Programme Market Town is a year-long Radar project, comprising six commissions, and it set up to explore and examine the future of Loughborough. Radar aims to bring together artists and academics to identify areas of shared research and develop contemporary art commissions alongside different forms of critical debate. Following a significant period of research, Something & Son have developed a project which playfully tests out ways of both physically and mentally bringing the town and university closer together. Their unique structure is designed for use both within the university campus and in the town centre market place. The design takes its form from traditional market stall and retractable lecture bleachers – the structure can operate both as a small lecture theatre and a covered market stall. By organising a market on campus the designers hope to demonstrate how empty spaces on campus can accommodate the town market and that lectures, taking place in the town square, can be both appropriated to blur the boundary between university and town and to open up the university campus to independent traders. By disrupting the traditional patterns of trade on campus they hope to provide a blueprint for future engagement between the town, its suppliers and the university.’