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INTRODUCTION

tHANKS & cREDITS (click here)

The National Review of Live Art brings together established and emerging artists across all art disciplines to celebrate a rich and influential area of cultural practice.   The Festival attempts to define where contemporary art is right here - right now. Emerging artists are drawn from a wide-ranging survey across Britain and programmed alongside a curated programme of established British and international artists. The NRLA also commissions artists to make new work especially for the Festival.   Traditionally, of five days duration, the NRLA encompasses performance, film & video, installation and art works that combine one or more of these media.

The Festival encourages a new generation of audiences, who are hungry for risk and innovation, to engage with the exciting possibilities of an area of art that continues to have a huge influence on mainstream popular culture.   The NRLA's impact on all aspects of the Live Art arena has been, and continues to be, enormous. From its inception in the early 80s, the NRLA has not only recognised and 'named' new fields of practice but has also found original and appropriate ways to respond to the shifts in artistic disciplines that have taken place over the last decade or more.  

The NRLA has successfully nurtured, on a strategic national basis; several new generations of artists, many of whom have gone on to achieve international recognition. In parallel to this, it has consistently supported many of Britain's more established and influential interdisciplinary artists in developing new works and taking risks.  

The National Review of Live Art is curated by Artistic Director Nikki Milican and produced by New Moves International Limited.

Rooted in the Real

an introduction to The National Review of Live Art 2000 by Robert Ayers

This is, remarkably, the fifteenth occasion in the last twenty years when those of us with a passionate interest in the edges of the arts (and in how those edges might provide ambitious artists with an arena for their work) have come together to celebrate what Nikki Milican first called The National Review of Live Art in 1984.

The first Four Days of Performance Art took place in the early winter of 1979, and - exciting though that event was - I do not suppose that any of us who were present at the time really recognised what we were witnessing: the birth pangs of what would become the single most important institution in the support of British live art activity, through to its current state of rude health at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Indeed it is difficult to imagine nowadays what a peculiarly insignificant activity 'performance art' (as many of us still called it then) was in the late nineteen seventies. True, it was not by that time such a young practice, and there had been a whole range of artists and companies who made special and unforgettable work in its name. But things are very different now: not only is live art a routinely pilfered resource for all of the other performing arts and media, and thus ubiquitous in its influence, but the working practices that characterise it (which were regarded as being somewhat unusual twenty years ago) have become the norm in post-modern art making.

I am thinking of such things as a concern for process over product; a tendency towards the collaborative; an assumption that an artist must as often as not be their own administrator, and technician, and roadie; the willingness to allow artistic endeavour to blur its edges with all sorts of other activity; and thus a willingness for artists to allow the real events of their lives to drive the content of their work

What these working practices derive from, I believe, is a basic assumption that sits at the heart of live art, and which it can with justice claim as its own: that art might present things as themselves, rather than veiled in a whole set of pre-digested conventions of representation. Of course this does not mean that the live artist is incapable of making art of entrancing allusion, as the best of the work at this year's National Review will once again demonstrate, but I do believe that Live Art's poetry is rendered that much more effective by this rootedness in the real that is characteristic of the practice.

Many of us cherish our own particular memories of artists whom we first saw at the National Review, and in what follows, a number of my friends and colleagues recall those first encounters and pay tribute to artists to whom they were introduced here. For my part, I want to salute the National Review itself, and of course its leading light Nikki Milican, for the very special contribution that it has made to shaping the world in which we, as artists, work.