Field Studies : Present Tense is a five-day teaching residency led by a group of international artists and practitioners that approaches performance not as the culmination of solitary practice, but as a form of group research and collective practice.

How does performance stay alive to its own enquiry? What happens when text becomes embodied, when images are experienced rather than viewed, and when an artist’s output becomes an extension, transformation, or obliteration of self? What does a performance risk, withhold, or reveal? Performance makes the body count in the act of knowing, bringing forward the voice, strange gestures, and the ways we stand, read, move and look. We look to improvisation and ritual as forms that remain responsive to the present. Attention is considered as a material to be shaped: as clay, as heat, as an alchemical ingredient with conductive properties.

Every performance is an act of making public, an act of publication. But not all bodies enter the public register under the same conditions. The programme asks how social roles are imposed and which bodies are held inside or outside the sphere of recognition. It questions the fixed, diagrammatic relationship between performer and audience, and how the retention of subjecthood by the performer might offer subjecthood to the public, affecting and transforming the collective constitution.

Programme

Present Tense opens on Wednesday 7 October 2026, 10am and closes on Sunday 11 October 2026 in the afternoon. Download the timetable.

Tutors and Contributors

Lin Chiwei, Lalu Delbracio, Maite de Orbe, JJJJJerome Ellis, Cedrik Fermont, Edka Jarząb, Bhanu Kapil, Carolyn Roy, Agat Sharma, Martin Sigler + Damsel Elyisum, Marf Summers

Programme Curators

Joseph Kohlmaier & Bianca Pina

Admission and Fees

Present Tense is open to anyone who wants to join. Participants send us an expression of interest by email, and admission is based on an informal and personal exchange.

The fee for the full five-day workshop and evening programme is £415.

The number of students admitted to the full programme is limited to 25.

A limited number of day tickets are available for £90.

Both five-day and day tickets include shared lunch and access to the public evening programme.

Five fully subsidised scholarship places are available to those who could not otherwise take part, offered on application. Separate £20 tickets for the evening programme Thursday–Saturday are available on DICE.

To apply, send an email to info@field-studies.org and include information about your work, practice, and what motivates you to join Present Tense.

Venues

Present Tense
4 Ferntower Road
Newington Green
London N5 2JG

Raleigh Chapel
138 Church Walk
London N16 8QQ