Anthony Howell (performance artist)

Anthony Howell (born 1945) is an English poet, novelist and performance artist. He was a founder of the performance company The Theatre of Mistakes, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Howell was born in 1945. By 1966 he was dancing with the Royal Ballet, but left the ballet in order to concentrate on writing, and his first collection of poems, Inside the Castle, was published by the Cresset Press in 1969. At that time (1968–69), he was teaching creative writing to students at the American Institute for Foreign Study at their University of Grenoble campus.

In 1970 he directed The Oz Event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and read his poems at the Poetry Society. His choric song "Essora Tessorio" was performed at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1973, and, in the same year, he was invited to join the International Writers' program at the University of Iowa.

He founded performance company The Theatre of Mistakes in 1974. Under his direction, this company made notable appearances at The Cambridge Poetry Festival (1975), at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1976), at the Hayward Gallery, at the Biennale de Paris, in the Musée d'Art Moderne and at FIAC in the Grand Palais (1977). Between 1978 and 1981 there were further performances in Vancouver, Berlin, Rotterdam, Belgrade, Brussels, Innsbruck, Brescia and Ferrara as well as at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, at the Theatre for the New City (NY), at Pittsburgh University and at Pittsburgh State Penitentiary. During these years he was also employed as a lecturer at Maidstone, Goldsmiths, Central and Middlesex colleges of Art.

His solo performances, The Table Moves, were then shown at the Sydney Biennale in 1982, with further workshop performances in Hobart, Melbourne, Newcastle and elsewhere, and Active Circles was performed on Lake Goongarrie in Western Australia. He then taught in the sculpture department of Sydney College of the Arts, followed by a residency at the same college and a performance, The Tower, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1984. A film was made of this performance, directed by James Bogle. In 1985 he performed at the Tate Gallery, in the British Art Show, and Birmingham Art Gallery, a performance described by comedian Stewart Lee in The Guardian as "the best performance I've ever seen".

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