Where To See Performance Art In Central London

Performance art has a reputation for being weird, and some of it is. I once watched a man sit in a glass box for forty minutes while a woman read out train timetables beside him. I don’t know what it meant. I stayed to the end anyway, which says something. Central London has loads of places to see this stuff though, and most of them are easier to walk into than you’d think.

The Big Galleries First

Tate Modern is the obvious one. The Turbine Hall gets taken over by live pieces every so often and it’s free to wander in, so you can drift through for twenty minutes without committing to an afternoon. Check what’s on before you go, because the programme changes and some live work only runs on certain days. I turned up once expecting a performance and got an empty hall. Annoying. Cost me nothing though.

The Barbican is a maze. Concrete everywhere, signs that point you in a circle, and I still get lost in it after all these years. But the programme is good, theatre and dance and live art all under one roof, which most places don’t manage. Leave yourself ten minutes spare to find the right door.

Smaller Spaces Where It Gets Interesting

The ICA on The Mall is small and a bit scrappy in a good way. Experimental stuff, odd little events, people standing around with drinks trying to look like they understand it. Cheap tickets, usually. Soho Theatre does comedy next to the stranger live stuff, and you can often get something the same week, sometimes the same day, so there’s no need to plan around it.

Then there’s The Place near Euston, which leans heavily on contemporary dance. If you’ve only ever seen ballet it’s a bit of a shock, but a good one.

Soho When You Want A Louder Night

Not all performance art is silent and serious. Plenty of it in Soho is glamorous, theatrical and proper entertaining, the kind of thing you’d take friends to if they’d roll their eyes at anything labelled “installation”. The Box London sits in that world, with live acts, insane shows and a crowd dressed for the evening. It suits people who want performance with some energy behind it, rather than standing in a quiet room trying to look thoughtful. Keep in mind, what’s on varies a lot week to week, and so does the atmosphere.

Eat nearby first. Soho is packed with decent places, so you don’t need to plan much, just pick a spot ten minutes from where you’re going and leave a bit of slack.

A Few Things I Wish I’d Known

Arrive early to the free stuff. Live pieces at galleries start when they start. Turn up late and you might not get in at all, so don’t count on slipping in halfway through.

Don’t heckle. Don’t film unless they say you can. And try not to laugh in the wrong place, which I have done, and it was a long ten seconds. I’ve done the last one. Nobody forgave me.

Go in with no expectations and give anything strange at least ten minutes before deciding you hate it. Half the time you’re won over. The other half you’ve got a story for dinner.

That’s more or less it. Pick one big gallery, one small space, and one Soho evening, and you’ve covered most of what central London does well.