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Hello, I am Levi van Huygevoort, from Tilburg
and I do live art shows.
I call it a Live Art Performance,
it gets expressed on the streets
or in a venue, at an event or a festival.
A Live Art Performance means creating a piece of art live
on the spot, which usually happens within 20 or 30 minutes
or shorter.
I have also done a show in 3 minutes or a show in 3 hours
so that's all possible.
What do you create exactly?
During a Live Art Performance, most of the time,
I don't really know exactly what I create.
I always start with drawing out lines and
I let the music guide me, which is also there.
God knows what the result is,
sometimes it's beautiful
sometimes it's not so --
What materials do you use?
In general I work with materials like chalk, which could be crayons
but also sidewalk chalk for on the streets
or acrylic paint or charcoal
or even markers lately
preffered to be fluorescent
if it's at night.
The Live Art Performances actually arose accidentally.
In 2005 I was in a band called Zero Blindness,
in which we played these sort of rough punkrock metal-esque shows.
In the same phase that it stopped I started making paintings.
Half a year after the band quit the desire to perform came back to me
but I didn't have any music or a band and I looked at my paintings
and I thought, maybe I should bring the two together.
So to combine the paintings and the stage, that's basically
how the Live Art Performance started to exist.
It mostly generates itself on the spot.
I actually rarely know what I'm going to do.
I'm especially in a phase of my life now,
concerning performance,
where I want to let go of everything that's a familiar shape or figure.
For years I've often done things in which bird-like creatures take shape
or landscapes or human forms in some kind of fantasy world.
But I'm really in a phase right now
where I want to go into the nothing.
I want to go into the void.
Not knowing what I'm doing
and not returning back to creating a familiar shape.
So.. yeah.
Not knowing what is being created, working by chance.
Working by chance and coincidence,
those are the best ones.
Can you briefly describe a show? How do you start?
Yes.
A live show usually starts musically.
Sometimes I start on cue with the music, sometimes I don't,
then I'll let the music do it's thing and I'll roll into it.
What kind of instruments? Are there musicians?
Currently I have 3 versions of my live show.
The first version is solo, than it's simply called
Levi van Huygevoort's Live Art Performance.
I usually record a music mix at home
which I burn to a cd and I'll say
"Play this! Roll it."
or, I'll bring it with me on my orange fluorescent boombox
which I can blast on the streets.
So than it's like, psychedelic rock music or electronica or --
You mix that music yourself?
Yes, I mix it myself into some kind of bizarre live soundtrack
to what's happening.
The second version of the show is Pandemonium.
It's a show with a lady from Amsterdam, Stephanie Smit.
People also know her as Giek and she is
..she is insane.
With her I do some kind of live art / theater show
in which we play two aliens and the setting is the canvas,
so it's a mountain landscape and a floor
but everything is white so everything is available to draw upon.
That's also with a pre-recorded mix and the most recent version
of the show is Machinery and I do that with musician Arnold Kooij,
also known from Help The Piano and Bag Lady.
He's from Rotterdam but also from Nijmegen.
He's got two halves that melt together
and then we'd play in Utrecht or something like that.
But he's a guitarist and he's got some kind of set-up made out of
effects, pedals, buttons,
sensors, beats,
buttons,
he plays and he pushes a lot of stuff so the music is live.
So I think that's the coolest version of the show
because than the music is just as spontaneous as my own flow
and within that, we find each other.
That's what I currently do the most, Machinery.
Street stories vary from adults to kids, from right to wrong.
I've experienced people walking straight through my work
while I'm creating it or that some guy stands in front of me
while I'm working on the floor, asking
"What are you doing? What are you doing??"
and I'd chalk right over his shoes.
I can get people out of their apropos
but they do the same to me,
so I just give them back what I get from them.
It's the same with kids who have a big mouth,
I once spit on children during Queen's day last year.
Oh it was this year actually,
I got into a bunch of organizational hassle for that.
It happened at the Heyhoef shopping mall
during Queen's day, yeah..
but you know, *** it.
Also, on the other side, there's people who are like
"Wow, I've never seen this before",
people who get a creative boost from it
or kids that join in as it happens!
You're ok with that?
Yes, I encourage that.
I want to trigger people the right way
and if it gets treated with disrespect
I immediately bounce that back.
Some kind of punkrock attitude I guess.