If you think live visual performance doesn’t attract the kind of passion that indie music production does, you might need to think again. I’m writing from Rome and the latest installment of the Live Performers Meeting (LPM), a massively-epic international gathering of artists now in its eleventh year. Over 500 individual artists are here just to play – not to watch or passive attend, but play. They’re largely self-funded, with LPM providing only accommodation and a venue in which they can show their work. Plug in your DVI and go – that’s it. It’s clearly taken some significant sacrifices for many of the attendees – these are not always privileged artists, and often they work for their art rather than attracting plumb commercial gigs, traveling from as far away as Colombia and Brazil, crashing in a hostel outside of town provided by the festival.
As you can imagine with hundreds of performances, atop simultaneous workshops, VJ competitions and battles, installations, and the like, the atmosphere is one of complete sensory saturation. The performers often are here primarily to meet one another, to get to gather in common interests.
We’ll have more coverage – including videos being shot by a number of outlets – after the festival concludes, to try to bring some of this gathered energy to the rest of the world.
LPM will head to the Americas with a Mexico City installment in October.
http://2012.liveperformersmeeting.net/
Teaser above is the (quite nice) work of http://www.studioaira.com/