Author Dominic Johnson introduces us to the work of one of the worlds leading figures in one-to-one performance practice - Adrian Howells, who in 2014 took his own life after struggling with depression. Dominic and fellow writer Dee Heddon’s book All Allowed is the first publication devoted to Howells’ remarkable achievements and legacy.

Adrian Howells (1962-2014) was an artist whose central imperative, across a range of performance strategies and forms, was to create intimate, immersive, and transformative encounters with others. He privileged the possibility of direct, immediate, authentic experiences, though he was aware of the seemingly insurmountable impediments that representation, theatricality, and mediation impose for such ambitions. To undertake a performance with Howells as an ‘audience-participant’ (his preferred term) was to be inducted into an experiment regarding the nature of the encounter. Encounters with Howells in performance took place in a thoroughly mediated form, complete with elaborate sets and detailed settings where – even when an appropriated venue was used, such as a hair salon, hotel room, or laundry room – every item that featured in the performance had been carefully chosen for its aesthetic and affective appeal. In spite of this mediation, Howells succeeded in giving an impression of immediacy (or non-mediation) through his concentrated focus and attention on the individual moment of encounter. Whether spooning an ‘audience-participant’ on a bed, or bathing, feeding, or holding one, washing one’s hair or feet, Howells’ encounters were rigorously planned and simultaneously, forcefully open to negotiation, challenge, and change.

Frequently choosing to distil the experience of the theatre to a one-to-one encounter, or other pressingly responsive forms, Howells would devise performance situations of ‘accelerated friendship’ that were often powerfully affecting and responsive to contemporary conditions of living. Howells’ one-to-one performances – for which he is perhaps best celebrated – were directed towards the singular experiences of others. Yet these one-to-one performances, like the performances for larger audiences that he continued to make throughout his life (like An Audience with Adrienne, 2006-10), were also conspicuously provoked by his own personal questions – about love, intimacy, wellbeing, and learning, and the impediments life poses to these goals. His performances were therefore concerned fundamentally with care, safety, generosity, affirmation, and pleasure. Such affirmative aspirations were nevertheless tempered, in performance, with discomfort, embarrassment, risk, and grief, as sometimes-unwelcome effects of the practice of personal and intimate exposure. Howells’ finely tuned calibration of the pre-set and the improvised left space precisely for the appearance or eruption of unanticipated effects, delivering a form that bore the potential to admit sophisticated insights into what it means to be together with another person in a social relation, to be connected, and, outside that provisional relation, what it means to be thrown back upon oneself once again, alone.

On the 15th or 16th March 2014, having suffered from recurring bouts of chronic depression throughout adulthood, Adrian Howells took his own life. As shock and grief gave way to more studied reflections on what we had lost, and public tributes and remembrances flooded forth from friends and admirers, we were confronted by the urgent reality of a ‘body of work’ – and the need for a comprehensive, sympathetic, and lasting record of or tribute to Howells and his work. The result of this confrontation is the book It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells, which will be published this month by the Live Art Development Agency and Intellect. Writing about – or for, or to – the dead seems to carry a greater weight of responsibility than writing about the living; the dead will not offer a rejoinder or revision. We hope the book takes up the promise of this responsibility in an adequate, honest, and loving fashion.

It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells is edited by Deirdre Heddon and Dominic Johnson and published by the Live Art Development Agency and Intellect. It is available for pre-order from Unbound, the Live Art Development Agency’s online bookshop: www.thisisunbound.co.uk

The editors and the Live Art Development Agency are hosting three launch events: two book launches (in Glasgow and London); and a curated screening event:

Book launch at University of Glasgow, 18 June 2016

Book launch at Battersea Arts Centre in London, 4 July 2016

...and the book at...

LADA Screens: Adrian Howells, Live Art Development Agency, London, 18 July 2016, and online from 18 July to 1 August 2016

Dominic Johnson is Senior lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. He is editor of the journal Contemporary Theatre Review, and author of Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture and Theatre and the Visual, also having edited Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey.