Skip to main content

New Territories 2011

One thing the annual New Territories festival has never done is stand
still. This year, the longstanding National Review of Live Art may have
vanished, but the newly branded This Is Performance Art strand has
risen from its ashes with an ambitious programme of performances,
workshops, residencies and a Winter School, all designed to break the
frame of what constitutes art with a set of ever-changing radical
strategies.

Central to all this activity is Black Market International, the
long-standing troupe of individual artists who combine resources to
present a series of durational performances that can last anything
between two and ten hours. A lynch-pin of BMI, and indeed New
Territories, is Perthshire-born Alastair MacLennan, who for the best
part of half a century has pushed both himself and his work to the
limits of endurance. This year, the BMI epic will take place at the
SWG3 artspace, where anything and nothing may or may not happen.

“It has to do with a German word, Begegnung,” MacLennan explains,
“which means the art of meeting. What this means has something to do
with the phrase, ‘being in the moment.’ That’s about going into the
performance without any prefixed object or plan in mind, but being
prepared to be adaptable moment by moment and to be ready to embrace
anything and everything as it happens. So in actual fact we don’t know
what will happen.”

This willingness to fly without a safety net has become a hallmark of a
genre that has remained on the margins, but which in the current
climate has captured a new generation of visual artists exploring
performative forms who could learn much from MacLennan, who originally
trained as a painter at Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College.

“All the artists in Black Market International have their own
individual practices,” MacLennan points out, “and we only meet maybe
six or seven times a year, so we have to think on our feet and be
adaptable enough to negotiate the unexpected. You could rehearse it,
but you might find that something happens which doesn’t allow you to do
what you’ve rehearsed, so you have to remain open to possibilities. I
enjoy it, being in the moment.”

New Territories, February 14th-march 2011, various venues

The List, February 2011

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h