Between Performance and Language: a conversation with Nia Davies, Heike Roms and Tess Wood

Join Heike Roms, Nia Davies and Tess Wood, for a conversation exploring the relationship between performance and language, and reflecting on Rom’s seminal research project, What's Welsh for Performance - An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales 1968 – 2008.

Heike Roms is Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Exeter. Her research into the history and historiography of early performance art in Wales ("What's Welsh for Performance? Locating the early history of performance art in Wales 1965-1979") won the David Bradby TaPRA Award for Outstanding Research in 2011. Heike's current projects include: sound documents of performance art; the participation of children in performance work of the 1960s and 1970s; and the development of performance art in British art schools. Heike's edited books include: Silent Explosion (2015) and, co-edited with Jon McKenzie and C.J.W.-L. Wee, Contesting Performance – Global Sites of Research (2010).

Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with embodied practice and performance. Her publications include All fours (Bloodaxe, 2017), editorship of the journal Poetry Wales (2014 – 2019) as well as several pamphlet and performance projects. All fours was shortlisted for the Roland Matthias Prize for Poetry in the Wales Book of the Year poetry category in 2018 and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for First Collections in 2019. She completed practice-based doctorate research into ritual poetry in 2021, co-curated Poetry Emergency festivals in 2018 and 2019 and has worked on intercultural collaborative literary projects around the world. She is based in Abertawe/Swansea, Cymru. Her second collection of poems,Votive Mess, will be out with Bloodaxe in 2024.

Multidisciplinary artist, Tess Wood, is currently immersed in research focusing on the production and delivery of live art within an installation setting. Their research has led to developing ways in which language exists within the performance art context, unpicking the complexities of dyslexic ways of speaking and writing with help from AI transcription tools. Wood is currently undergoing an R&D grant with Arts Council Wales, developing group performance works with collective SCORE and working within archives and library services at Cardiff Metropolitan University.