The Mini-Mag Making Performance Feel Fun
How two collaborators are Bringing together london’s performance scene through interviews and live events.
By Sasha Mills
5.5.2026
In London, there’s been an undeniable growth of performances, readings, and live art events in the past few years. Often advertised via flyers on Instagram, these events have increasingly become the place to be for art students and seasoned connoisseurs alike: a post-pandemic surge in the direction of liveness and interpersonal connection even as the city’s nightlife struggles to survive the rising cost of living.
OPERFORMANCEF is a London-based publication and event series set up by friends and collaborators Dani Marcel and Dávid Varhegyi. Describing itself as an attempt to “extend performance one letter each way,” the publication asks interviewees a limited set of questions and presents answers on a text-only, Tumblr-esque site. The event series has become known as the hub for up-and-coming performance artists in London, a place where friends and collaborators can get together to try out new work.
Writer Sasha Mills chatted to Dávid and Dani about performance stereotypes, DIY publishing, and the need to create their own artistic scene.
SASHA: When I talk to friends who don't work in art or are in different fields, when I talk to them about performance, I think there can sometimes be quite a defensive response. There's this impression of pretentiousness.
DÁVID: There's a meme between the performance art circle: you have the typical, UAL, CSM, first-year performance artist who just stands in the big hall of CSM. They stand in the middle and do something really annoying and pretentious and loud. It usually involves some kind of nudity, and liquid, and some kind of loud noise. It has become a stereotypical thing.
Both me and Dani are, like, no, we don't want to do that. Even though what I really appreciate about working with Dani is that I have a performance practice, so I always had this preference and style that I'm growing into, but I think he really broadened my mind about what kind of people we work with, and what can be a performance, even.
SASHA: I'm interested in why you started doing this, I guess. It's a broad, open question.
DÁVID: I think Dani should start, because he started the project and I joined later.
DANI: I felt that there was a performance scene forming in London. It had all the ingredients of a scene, but it wasn't consciously experienced. You had all these artists, they all did performance. There's more and more people working there. But there wasn't a sense of like, okay, this is a scene right now. This is a moment in performance history in London.
And so we wanted to do a series of events and a magazine. Even from the inception, it was both. That pulls together the London scene a little bit––which is obviously very ambitious––but it's a small scene still.
So you can kind of start working with a lot of people, introduce them to each other, and so on and so forth, and create a feeling of like, okay, this is a moment that's happening and performance is on the up.
The magazine being text-only and a basic interview format, those things came second. But once we set the format, it was set in stone.
It's really cool to have a magazine that doesn't have pictures in it, especially for performance: that's a super visual [medium] in many ways.
DÁVID: Actually, the story started two years ago. I think you're forgetting! We knew each other, and we're both from Budapest––but this was the first time Dani invited me to do something, two years ago in May. He did an event called the Butter Pyramid, which was the predecessor of OPERFORMANCEF, because it was just a one-off event.
It was an amazing event: a three-story gallery full of simultaneously happening [performances], with really amazing performance artists that have gotten quite big ever since. And I really liked how Dani ran it. I think we both shared this understanding that there's something really strong happening here.
It really annoyed me that there's so much amazing performance art, but there's not an outcome that focuses on it. It would be a rave and a performance, or an opening and a performance, or really expensive institutional stuff. But there weren't events––or an event––that focused on the up-and-coming and midway performance artists, where they can just experiment and share. After [the event], I was chewing Dani’s [ear], “You need to make this!” But it took a year after that, that I guess you conceptualised the format.
DANI: Maybe there's another angle on this, a personal angle for me. My performance practice is durational, super extended performances. I never perform directly for an audience.
I see OPERFORMANCEF as not my own practice, but as part of something that's audience-facing. Finally, something that's super social. So for me, personally, it's very fun to do something that's finally with other people.
SASHA: This is going a little bit away from OPERFORMANCEF and into your own practices, but I'm really interested in the idea of a durational practice that's audience-less. I wonder what you get out of doing that, because for so many performers, it's so much about a relationship with the audience.
DANI: I think durational performance always has issues with this. It's really hard to document. It's really hard to experience properly. Long performances always have problems with the audience.
And I somehow landed in durational performance. I never performed in a theatrical way or in normal ways. I kind of came to performance through durational performance from the get-go.
So that just seemed very normal to me. And then I tried to play with all of the elements that are there. You play with how it starts, how it ends, what you do, and so on and so forth. The audience is just one of the elements that you can play with in this way too. Like sometimes for durational performances, it's only documentation, but then you can also try to radicalize that further and be like, okay, it's going to be no audience-facing stuff whatsoever.
There's no privileged view. You can't go to a specific event to see it, you can't buy it. There’s no front row.
SASHA: I feel like you've been circling around this, but what is the value in there being a scene for you? Of people that are doing similar things, or people that are working in the same medium?
DANI: Well, for starters, it's a takedown of painting––not just painting, but the face of that. At least since I moved to London, it's been very object- and market-oriented. It was super commercial.
I even went to painting school. So I got a close look at that. I think, since COVID-19, maybe something started changing, and maybe it's ripened in the last two years. It really feels like there's something new starting. Readings are booming, performance is up.
I think it just got more fun. And having a performance scene, people being conscious of a performance scene––that's how performance can occupy more space in people's minds who don't do performance.
It has to feel like there's a scene that's happening at the moment. It’s a little bit make-believe, but then it's also not. And right now, performance is the thing to do.
DÁVID: To me, performance and the importance of a scene is the antithesis to what we saw in 2020: this hyper-isolation.
A big part of this, with what Dani is talking about with not having documentation, it's because you will never get the same experience as when you are there. You have to be in that room, you have to smell the smells, you have to see the performer staring at you.
SASHA: I was quite curious as to how you're choosing people for each issue. But now I'm getting the sense that it's to do with this scene and interconnectedness. I was also interested in how it’s a text-only site, and the pros and cons of that.
DÁVID: Dani’s mostly doing the interviews, the website, the magazine, the production. Personally, I was never really into publishing and printing. I love it, and I work with people who do it, but it was never me. So when I jumped on board, I was like, “Listen, I'm happy to do the live events, finding people, sourcing sound systems and plugging it all together.” That's more me.
To go back to the question of how you find people, it becomes harder and harder. Because, as Dani said, there are only so many people doing this. We have multiple limitations. Firstly, it's all DIY, no budget. To us, it's really important to keep these events free. We both experienced that we couldn't see stuff because even £10 or £5 can be a limit, you know. So it's a big limit that we simply cannot afford some artists who are not willing to perform for free.
And we always communicate this: we don't want to exploit anyone, we offer them this opportunity, and we say everybody's working for free if you want to try out anything. We're not limiting. And within their work, we give freedom—obviously, with the limitations of galleries. Like, don't burn the house down! But we try to accommodate everything.
DANI: There’s a difference between the magazine and the live events in terms of reach. They’re just very different. We can obviously get bigger names and more international names for the magazine because it's quite simple, and people like the format. Live events are for the locals. The magazine is more of a connection––we have more and more friends in Europe, so it's quite a nice way to extend the scene and put it in context with other stuff.
SASHA: Dani, you do the interviews. Are you doing them in person? Are you calling? Are you doing them as written emails?
DANI: The actual interview is a questionnaire. And I really, really love that. Because you get such wildly different artists. Different ages, different practices, different everything. Because they respond to the same questions, it further emphasises that. It’s like, “Oh my God, how many different answers can people give to this simple question?”
That’s also a way to pull different works together. Because performance can be very different. It’s a very broad medium. By way of doing a text-only magazine, we already flattened that in a practical way.
I think it's a trend for interviewers to research everything about the subject and be super specific. This is the opposite. The most famous artists and the beginner performers, they all get the same questions. It's a jumping deck. I’ve seen people give one-word answers, versus writing a poem or going off on rants about whatever they want to talk about.
You can read the issue 10 of OPERFORMANCEF on their site, and follow them on Instagram for details about upcoming events.