Genre-Bending Performance

The National Review of Live Art festival in Glasgow, Scotland, February 9–13, 2005.

This past February, I attended the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) for the first time. The NRLA, which is the longest running live art festival in the UK (about 30 years) is produced by Artistic Director Nikki Milican's company New Moves International as part of the annual new genre art festival, entitled New Territories. Based in Glasgow, Scotland, New Territories also includes Winter School, a series of intensive, week-long workshops led by established artists and collectives, and a calendar of innovative dance performances. Initially called New Moves, the name of the festival was changed to New Territories to reflect the inclusion of the NRLA. The NRLA has not always been based in Glasgow, nor has it always been called the NRLA. Initially founded in 1979 by Steve Rogers as Four Days of Performance Art, it first took place in Nottingham, England, which today continues to host the NOW festival as well as being the home for the Live Art Archive and Digital Art Archive. Under Milican's direction, the festival was transformed into the National Review of Live Art, the name change a reflection of Milican's belief that "live" was a more accurate term for the significant work that was being presented at the festival. In Nottingham, Milican had been the full-time performance organizer for the Midland group. When that organization went bankrupt, Milican took the NRLA with her to Glasgow, where she continues to produce it with help from the Scotland Arts Council and the British Arts Council.

Although there are alternative performance spaces and performance art festivals in the United States, there is nothing quite like the NRLA. Taking place in The Arches, an underground performing arts space located next to the train station, the setting of the NRLA has a dingy, urban feel that is quite at odds with the pleasant orderliness of downtown Glasgow and the super efficient train station overhead. To descend into The Arches is to enter a liminal space of Rabelaisian possibilities and excesses, a strange subterranean world that is badly illuminated by too few overhead lights. Dirty, dark and smoky, with a lot of available alcohol (handed out for free at many of the talks and workshops), The Arches has the feel of grittier urban spaces that exist on the margins of urban civilization, such as the Bahnhof Zoo in Berlin or Penn Station and 42nd street (pre-renovation) in New York City. These are spaces where people come and go, often paying very little attention to those who actually dwell there—whether they are human or animal. In the process of decaying into archaeology but still in use, these spaces are heterotopias, described by Foucault as spaces able to juxtapose in a single real space several incompatible sites, which through a process of opening and closing set them apart from other spaces and allows it to be temporarily occupied. Time is the third crucial component, as the heterotopia only begins to function at full capacity when "men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time." ¹ The Arches seem to resist geography and time—in spite of a very good map of the space provided on the back of the daily program, it was really difficult to figure out where you were going and not end up in the wrong performance, as I did when I unintentionally found myself watching Prairie Oyster rather than Lone Twin. Time, in The Arches, is at its most fleeting and transitory: be in the wrong place and you will have missed something. This is very different from the experience of live art in the U.S., where a live event is clearly demarcated spatially and temporally, so that it remains within the realm of theatrical, and therefore acceptable, alternative space.

The descent into The Arches is not just spatially and temporally disorienting, it is socially...