Louise Westerhout

Ongoing Project

Body Politic is a live performance event, founded, directed and curated by Louise Westerhout, which has at its heart a desire to cite corporeal artistic experiment in time and space. We invite independent artists to bring their investigations, AS THEY ARE, to be authentically witnessed, to open discourse, to refuse crystallisation. Body Politic is an informal, inclusive, queer-normative space which illuminates ways performing artists address their bodies’ complicity with, or resistance to, dominant social ideologies and structures. We acknowledge the body as a never-neutral site for conveying meaning; an always necessarily politicised site onto which meaning is inscribed.   

From 2018-2021 we have had 8 iterations of Body Politic, 63 local and international performance artists have been showcased.

Body Politic has become a family, a community a safe queer space for artists to extend themselves and to work with live audiences as they interrogate and explore their work. They are free to fail, transgress, regress, digress.  It is also a space for the audience to develop witnessing tools, to encourage those who are present to develop listening, watching and empathy skills. A large part of the audience is often fellow artists and this means that the form of live art and community making thrives and progresses in our popular ongoing events in which no hierarchies exist.

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