NRLA
Many happy returns
The National Review of Live Art has been doing its subversive thing for 30 years but, despite a line-up of old favourites, nostalgia is not on the menu, finds Mark Fisher L-R: Forced Entertainment’s Void Story; Ron Athey; Francesca Steele.
I t all seems wrong. The National Review of Live Art has built its reputation on change. It never looks back and never stays still. The annual bonanza of what used to be called the avant garde has doggedly embraced the disconcerting, the deviant and the dumbfounding. Even in format it has been restless; switching cities from Nottingham to London to Glasgow; switching venues from the CCA to the Arches to Tramway (and this year all three); and switching time of year from autumn to spring.
For this festival to have reached its 30th birthday feels like a betrayal. You want the NRLA to be forever young, mocking the passage of time like a performance art Peter Pan, ushering in the shock of the new, not the complacency of the middle-aged. That it is commemorating the occasion with something perilously like a retrospective is more alarming
24 THE LIST 4–18 Mar 2010