MIKE BROOKES is an award winning artist, director and designer. Working internationally.
Although initially trained as a painter, Brookes' practice has always bridged media. Known primarily for the production of interventional and context-specific live art and performance pieces - his work has involved elements as diverse as photography, sampling, large scale and multiple projection, short-range and satellite radio broadcast technology, mobile telephones, helicopters, cars, trains, surveillance cameras, ice sculpture and drawing - and has proposed and developed innovative practices and strategies within the form and functioning of performance and live art.
He co-founded the performance collective Pearson/Brookes with theatre-maker and academic Mike Pearson in 1997, their co-created work together over the subsequent twenty years being generally perceived to have pioneered located, intermedial and multi-site performance practices - producing a range of notable and influential works including: 'The first five miles' [1998], 'Body of evidence' [1998], 'Carrying Lyn' [2001], 'Polis' [2001], 'Rain dogs' [2002] and 'Who are you looking at' [2004]. Their latter large-scale works including the award winning theatre work 'The Persians' [2010], located within the landscape of a Ministry of Defence training range in the Brecon Beacons, commissioned for the inaugural season of National Theatre Wales; 'Coriolan/us' [2012], commissioned jointly by the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre Wales, for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad; and 'ILIAD' [2015] - their acclaimed marathon eleven-hour verbatim staging of the entirety of Christopher Logue's epic poem 'War Music', derived from Homer's account of the last weeks of the Trojan War.
Since 2005 his work has been increasingly focused within the ongoing development of his creative practice and research with artist and performer Rosa Casado, producing context specific actions and gallery works, initially under the umbrella title 'Some things happen all at once, some things happen more slowly' - their work together having been widely commissioned and presented across Europe, Asia, Australasia, South America, and USA. Their recent and ongoing projects include: 'Paradise 2' [2005-10], 'Some things happen all at once' [2008-10], the 'Something happening' series [2008-], the 'Just a little bit of history repeating' series [2010-18], and 'What if everything we know is wrong?' [2011-]. Most recently embarking on a new long-term series of performance and intervention works under the umbrella title 'On a clear day you see for ever', which they initiating with the interventional radio work 'Grey Line' [2016], their durational action and five-episode performance work 'The sky was clearer in those day' [2019], and the gallery work 'Divine matter' [2021]
Other ongoing collaborations include his work with theatre company Quarantine, whose work he has contributed to since 2003; and with Tony Award winning designer and director Stewart Laing, and his company Untitled Projects, with whom Brookes has collaborated on six productions to date. He has continued his long-term relationship with National Theatre Wales, as Associate Artist to the company while developing his exploratory 'Storm Cycle' performance series between 2017 and 2020; and as part of the 'Ever After' research and consultation group – exploring approaches and possibilities for performance practices within lockdown and emergence from the pandemic of 2020-2022. In 2007 he was appointed Research Fellow within Aberystwyth University, where he continues to periodically work and teach; and received a doctorate for his contributions to intermedial and located performance in 2015.
