Live Art is pretentious, boring and elitist, says DAVID LEDDY. So why does he still do it for a living?

Most people's memories of student days involve boozy nights and lazy days of drinking tea, but not mine. In the first week of my course I was in a performance where someone dressed up as a Judy Garland lookalike and sicked up on stage (for real!) while a Peggy-Lee-a-like sang an off-key rendition of Fever. I was terribly excited at all of this. I had chosen a Theatre Studies course where we could focus on lots of modern, experimental work. The Glorious Avant Garde. I was taught how drama was dead and that it had been replaced by live art, or performance art, or contemporary performance. Nobody could quite agree what to call it, but they were sure that it was dancing on theatre's grave. This was all backed up by some theoretical buzzwords (semiotics, postmodernism, simulacra, performativity) and titles with as many slashes and brackets as you dared to use. (En)Gender/ing Spac(e) and Spac/ing Gend-d/er. You get the picture.

We performed in studios that we'd filled with tonnes of wet sand. People rolled around naked wrapped in plastic while asking the audience about their favourite flavour of jam. Three years of unadulterated student avant-gardery. Then came the kicker. I left university and set up my own company, dutifully calling up venues and asking for a slot. They had no idea what I was on about. They wanted plays with stories and wigs and sofas. It turned out that theatre was alive and well behind our backs. Bugger. I plugged away bravely, moving to London and seeing as much experimental live art as I could. The small audiences comprised entirely of other live artists, students of live art and academics who write about live art. I didn't mind, though, because I was seeing the cutting edge, the veritable bleeding edge. I got an interview to become Sam Mendes' assistant at the Donmar Warehouse. When I described my ideas for a show he told me 'it just sounds like lots of people shouting and stamping their feet.' I was gutted.

And so I started to move back towards theatre. I wanted to have all the theoretical and experimental underpinnings of live art and combine them with more traditional pleasures like stories, characters and, er, smiling. Theatre people tend to find this an interesting idea, but live art people turn their backs in horror. I have abandoned the cause and am no longer fighting the good fight. Usually, though, these people aren't artists. They are nearly always academics, usually earning a good salary while slagging off the artists who need to earn enough money for food.

In many ways live art is an illusion that has been kept alive by these academics. Funders rarely fund it. Audiences are miniscule. Artists can barely scrape an existence. Yet, academics continue to teach their students that this work is the way ahead, training them for a career that doesn't really exist. Live Art is treated like a religion. One is either a believer or one is not. If you express dissent you are accused of being 'mainstream' and immediately escorted from the building to be tarred and feathered. This is all filmed and shown as a live feed on a website somewhere. Similarly, to be interested in work other than the live art canon is also to be a heretic. God forbid that you should be seen darkening the doorway of an Odeon cinema or buying an Aretha Franklin CD. You must love all live art unreservedly and reject all else - a born-again avant-gardista.

But there must be good things too, otherwise I would have left it all behind and become a marketing manager like so many others. The work of previous generations of live artists has been enormously influential on everything from contemporary drama to Madonna videos. If you make your way down to the National Review of Live Art then you are bound to find the most provocative and unusual work you've seen all year. They key, of course, is not to be intimidated. You don't have to like everything and you don't have to know exactly why you like the things that you like. It was Picasso who said 'people try to understand art, but why not try to understand the song of a bird?' If you go enter into the spirit of things you are bound to find something to fascinate you at NRLA. But then again, that Judy Garland vomiter now works as a producer on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. There's a culture clash for you.

David Leddy's Tympanic is at National Review of Live Art. 11-12 February 2005.