Please note the final workshop with open participation will take place on Friday 4 August, 2-5pm. 

Workshops will take place throughout the exhibition In Case There’s a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes guided by co-founder Anthony Howell. No previous experience is required, they are free to attend and open to all. You can attend as many of the workshops as you wish. If you’d like to participate, kindly meet with Anthony either half-an-hour prior to the workshop starting time, or at its end if you’d like to attend a future one. 

During the early years of The Theatre of Mistakes (1974-76) such workshops were held in artist-run and studio spaces in London. They were open to all and attended by artists and students from different disciplines: writers and poets; dancers and choreographers; visual artists of all media and architects.

Participants would develop instructions and games-based exercises under a basic rubric: that if you designed an exercise then you were in agreement to perform others’. Over two years the group noted and recorded hundreds of these, which core members Anthony Howell and Fiona Templeton refined and distilled into the 1976 publication Elements of Performance Art. Arguably, this is the first manifesto/manual for performance art in the UK. It will operate as a starting point for Howell’s workshops and ‘free sessions’ at Raven Row.

Image: Richard Quarrell, workshop at Ting studio, London (1974). Photographer unknown. All images courtesy of The Theatre of Mistakes.