New Territories begin where the old maps leave off... 

Time was, you could cast an eye over the creative landscape and see boundaries: specific territories that could be clearly tagged as 'dance' or 'theatre' or even 'installation work' - with maybe a small, rocky realm called 'performance' struggling to break away from being annexed to any one discipline. But times change. Nineteenth century definitions of art and cultural genres are no longer a reliable guide to the kind of work that 21st century practitioners make - not least because new technologies have helped those practitioners evolve fascinating and provocative hybrid forms. It's in response to these shifts - and possibilities - that this New Territories festival has come into being. 

For several years now Nikki Milican (founder and artistic director of New Moves International) has curated the National Review of Live Art, the original - and longest serving - platform for radical work of all temperaments and constituencies. NRLA thrived on the assumption that where there was a mainstream, there would surely be an alternative channel... that someone, somewhere would always be looking beyond the established horizons, curious to see not just the uncharted pathways and where they might lead, but also willing to look back, from time to time - because part of how we define our lives, our times, is rooted in past context. 

By the end of the 1980's, Milican had initiated a second Glasgow-based festival - New Moves. As the name suggests, the primary focus of the programme was dance. But dance that shrugged aside labels - and conventional techniques - in order to free up both the performer's body and the audience's mind. Here, as with the NRLA, there was a constant process of introducing new and emerging talent - from Europe, America, Canada and Australia, as well as the UK - while keeping closely in touch with the work of experienced and mature artists. For if there was a keen sense within these festivals that there should be no phoney barriers between styles, disciplines and media, there was also a rare awareness of the need to nurture a linkage, a creative continuum, between different generations whose shared milieu was transience. 

In truth, it's not too fanciful to see these festivals as outposts - some might say oases - in a time when the whole culture of live performance is increasingly beset by commercial imperatives. For between them, the NRLA and New Moves provided an unrivalled 'free state' for nomad talents. The only problem was - which festival best represented those artists who had, as it were, a foot in both camps? It was, in fact, a question that went straight to the heart of what shapes our perceptions of live art and new dance - and all the other performance-based/time-based/installation and video work that clusters together under the auspices of Milican's programming. The best answer was quite simply, remove any unnecessary signposts and dismantle the cordons - both festivals are now running cheek-by-jowl, flying the joint flag of New Territories. 

Come February 2002, the doors will open on a programme that celebrates cross-currents and open-mindedness as keystones of cultural evolution. The specially commissioned work that inaugurates New Territories reflects this, for Avalanche Thoughts - a collaboration between composer Andrew Poppy and theatre director Julia Bardsley - is a cunningly maverick mix of live and recorded music, video projection, text and artefacts. Moreover - and again, this is the essence of New Territories - this is a piece that consciously chooses to exist at the cusp of the familiar and the untasted/untested... So - is it your habit to play safe, or act on impulse? Avalanche Thoughts could give you your answer! 

Elsewhere in New Territories, strange new perspectives come at us through mirrors, magnifying glasses, video footage... Companies like Station House Opera (England) and O Vertigo (Québec) tease us in and out of different realities: time slips, loops, repeats... Bodies translate into virtual landscapes, 'new territories' that require us to pause and take stock of what we're seeing. Is it a trick? or, just a different frame of reference that shifts our thought patterns out of automatic-pilot mode...Across the entire five weeks of this exhilarating, energising - and, inevitably, controversial - festival, artists from all parts of the globe will employ all manner of mixed media, personal witness, interaction and intervention, to take members of the public into New Territories. There will be laughter and occasional mayhem, dark corners and genuinely harrowing encounters - often with aspects of oneself. For whoever buys a ticket into New Territories will find themselves journeying into the heart, soul and imagination of a shared humanity that transcends any land-maps and partitions. 

New Territories begin where the old prejudices leave off...  Mary Brennan