The University of Bristol Department of Theatre and the Society for Theatre Research are delighted to welcome Professor Heike Roms to deliver the 2025 Glynne Wickham Lecture entitled, 'The Playground Avant-garde: On the Role of Children in the History of Performance Art'. 

Without children there might be no performance art – this statement may surprise, as the radical and challenging quality of much performance work seems by its very nature to exclude children. However, not only was child’s play a major inspiration for artists taking up a performative practice in the 1960s and 1970s, children were also frequently participants and collaborators in the work. Artists canonical to the history of performance, including the Gutai, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Jonas, Ana Mendieta, Günter Brus, Dennis Oppenheim and Ulrike Rosenbach, created works with or for children, some repeatedly so. This illustrated lecture will focus on the appearance of children in the work of Happenings pioneer Allan Kaprow. It will map connections in the 1960s between the involvement of children in Kaprow’s Happenings and in political activism in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. The presentation will ask: How was and is the agency of children performed in the contexts of art and activism? Why is their contribution so frequently overlooked? And who gets to be a performance artist, and why? 

The lecture will last from 17:30 - 18:30 and will be followed by a drinks reception. 

Heike Roms is Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Exeter. She has published on contemporary performance practice, the history of performance art in a British context, performance historiography and archiving, performance and ecology and performance as a mode of knowledge formation and dissemination. She is currently working on a book on the participation of children in the history of performance art.

Generously supported by the University of Bristol Department of Theatre and the Society for Theatre Research. 

To book a free ticket, please visit: https://buytickets.at/universityofbristoldepartmentoftheatre/1640567