Watch the whole concert by clicking HERE

This short clip is a taster of the longer film recording the whole event that is available here for members of Culture Colony - Y Wladfa Newydd.

EVENT: Aberystwyth in Flux 1968-2008
... restaging the Fluxconcert by and for Fluxus organised by Brian Lane, Rainbow Day and the First Dream Machine on 28 November 1968, Parish Hall, Aberystwyth.

"...if you don't know what a Fluxconcert is you must come and see for yourself..." [Brian Lane, 1968]

The restaged event took place with support from the SIR DAVID HUGHES PARRY AWARDS 2008.

“The Fluxus Concert was a real success… Slides of cowboy drawings. We pull crackers, burst bags, howl. Somebody chases his mate around the parish hall to hit him. Flux-Pin-Up No. 1 showers down. It is a picture of Brian. […] People howl and throw streamers, and stick coloured papers on their faces, and somehow behind the light Brian throws us another set of instructions. Caution, Art Corrupts."
(John Hall, ‘A State of Flux – John Hall at the Aberystwyth Festival’, The Guardian 30 November 1968)

From the 27th to the 29th November 1968, artist Brian Lane came to Aberystwyth with his collaborators, the First Dream Machine, to organize a 3-day Fluxus event. He had been invited by the annual Aberystwyth Arts Festival, a committee that was made up of students from University College Aberystwyth (including Bob Marsland, John Osborne and Steve Mills). The participatory and imaginative nature of Fluxus appealed to the organisers who, as they stated in their invitation to Lane, were looking to "reach a wide enough audience" and were "attempting to revitalize the Festival by pushing the idea of Art as Fun, Art as something to be enjoyed".

In response, Brian Lane devised an ambitious programme for Aberystwyth: a 12 hour concert of electronic music (which featured pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Henry and Adrian Nutbeem), one of the first Fluxusclinics in the country, an international graphics exhibition and a session of Total Theatre. At the heart of the festival was a Flux Concert, featuring performances of now classic Fluxus scores by artists such as George Maciunas, Ben Vautier, George Brecht and Chieko Shiomi. Adrian Glew, curator at the Tate in charge of the Brian Lane Archive, calls the event "seminal", as it "entered the contemporaneous Fluxus canon and the subsequent history of Fluxus in the UK". (Glew 2007).

In a year in which the revolutionary impetus of 1968 and its legacy is being widely reassessed, 'What's Welsh for Performance?' pays tribute to this seminal example of experimental art practice exactly 40 years after it first occurred. Aberystwyth-based artists performed their interpretation of the original Fluxus scores used in 1968.

Watch the full length version featuring the concert in full - click HERE

External Links -

www.performance-wales.org

1. by Erin Rickard on September 20th, 2009

   Looks like a very fun evening!