DURATIONAL LATTES
Durational Lattes turned a week of coffee meetings into a live performance, mapping Sydney’s arts conversations. (2011)
Durational Lattes was a week-long performance, research project and administrative exercise developed with Performance Space in Sydney.
The work emerged through the Australia Council’s Cultural Leadership Program, which at the time was attempting to identify and support new forms of leadership within the arts sector. Rather than proposing a conventional outcome, Field Theory used the opportunity to test whether conversation, networking and advocacy could be treated as both method and material.
Over the course of one week, the collective scheduled approximately forty meetings with a deliberately broad range of “cultural leaders” across Sydney. These included institutional figures, independent artists, venue directors, educators, students and people with only a loose connection to the arts. Each meeting followed a simple structure: two members of Field Theory would arrive at the participant’s workplace, drink coffee, ask questions about the state of live and experimental practice, and measure the dimensions of the room.
The field teams were Jason Maling and Lara Thoms, and Sarah Rodigari and Martyn Coutts, with Jess Olivieri driving and supporting one of the teams. At Performance Space, Willoh S. Weiland and producer Jane Smith operated as a central hub, receiving notes and measurements in real time.
As each meeting was completed, its dimensions were taped out on the floor of a large theatre space at Carriageworks, creating a growing, overlapping diagram of offices, studios, classrooms and meeting rooms across the city. Written accounts of the conversations were also published through LALA (Live Art List Australia), extending the project into a distributed, semi-public archive.
At the end of the week, the accumulated material was activated as a live event. Audiences were guided through the mapped spaces while members of the collective attempted to recount, reconstruct and perform the conversations that had taken place. By this point, they were significantly over-caffeinated and working from partial notes and memory.
The project operated somewhere between networking, endurance, fieldwork and theatre. It reframed administrative activity—meetings, note-taking, relationship-building—as a performative system, while also producing a fragmented but expansive portrait of a particular moment in Australian live art.
Durational Lattes marked a key shift for Field Theory. It was the first time the group made a work together, and it established a methodology that would continue in later projects: extended research embedded in real contexts, translated into live, spatial and often unstable forms.
Performance Space, Sydney.
