Jeff Nuttall's performance `Scripts' are produced
simultaneously with his `Memoirs', in which this controversial but
life-enhancing fighter for the arts tells the story of his life as
sculptor, novelist, poet and all-round artist. In `Performance Art:
Memoirs' he explains the methods by which he has successfully brought
performance art, however unconventionally, into the lives of thousands who
never go neat a theatre or gallery. This second book presents the actual
scripts, plays, experiments and happenings. Both volumes are fully
illustrated.
They show a brilliant, erudite, unconventional mind at work able to combine
the ideas of expressionists and surrealists and graft them onto everyday
situations, `trying to punch holes in reality by weaving fiction and
absurdity into the patterns of lives of unsuspecting citizens,' as the
author puts it. Comedy, farce, the ideas of Strindberg and Artaud, Tzara
and the Absurdists, are all present, but the poetry, the humour, the sex
and outrage, the sense of unreality and fright - these are pure Nuttall
characteristics. Nobody will ever see things in quite the same way after
reading the two volumes of his `Performance Art'.
Jeff Nuttall, who lived in the North of England was an artist and art
teacher, a successful novelist and poet, who had also edited his own
magazine. His many other books include biographies and the controversial
`Bomb Culture', one of the key books of the sixties. For years he ran his
own travelling performance group, acting and directing his own work. He was
also an exuberant and compulsive lecturer who passionately believed in
breaking down barriers between people, and between people and art.
Jeff Nuttall's career has been that of a modern Renaissance Man.
Born in 1933 in Lancashire, he grew up and was educated on the Welsh
borders in Hereford and at Bath. He has written novels, many books of
poetry and scripts for the theatre, including 'Performance Art', two
volumes of memoirs and scripts for the The People Show which brought street
and experimental drama to audiences, often not knowing they were one, all
over Britain and Europe. He was an established painter who had taught at
art school in Bradford, Leeds and Liverpool. In addition he was also an
actor with much stage and screen experience. His book 'Bomb Culture'
defined the atmosphere of the sixties politically and sociologically and
was quoted in parliamentary debates. Jeff Nuttall was active in many fields
and in particular as a thinker and activist with a compulsion to educate
the public towards a greater appreciation of the arts and a higher
awareness of the dangerous world we inhabit. He died in 2004.
