Station House Opera have experimented in Glasgow in previous years. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Lyn Gardner recently wrote in praise of experimental theatre and commented on the increasing number of opportunities to see such work. One reader took issue with her post on the basis that this kind of theatre had been going on "for the last 20 years". This struck me as a misplaced reaction: first, because Lyn wasn't claiming there was anything new about the genre and second, because the history of experimental theatre goes a long way further back than 20 years.
Let's put aside early 20th century innovators such as Meyerhold, Piscator and Grotowski, and consider the National Review of Live Art. Running in Glasgow this weekend, the annual festival of leftfield performance has been on the go since the late 70s. It's had stints in Nottingham and London, and is now a fixture in Glasgow, enjoying a second year at the Tramway after a decade at the Arches. In its time, the NRLA has given floor space to Forkbeard Fantasy, Station House Opera, Ivor Cutler, Forced Entertainment, Annie Griffin, Neil Bartlett, DV8, Bobby Baker, Derek Jarman, Wim Vandekeybus and many more.
Spending time at the NRLA, which runs all afternoon and into the night in every gallery, performance space and cubby hole of the building, you have your prejudices confirmed and upturned in equal measure. This year, a whole room is given over to a screen displaying a video of two legs standing on a chair. Sometimes the toes twitch, but I didn't have the patience to see if anything more exciting happened. Neither was it an effort to wrest myself away from the man slowly circling a room before pinning pieces of rope to the wall.
And if I say that the most memorable sequence of Anne Seagrave's Jamais Vu features the naked dancer spinning to a soundtrack of backwards music while balancing a fresh egg on her eye, I'll have a hard job persuading the sceptic that it¹s not all weirdness for weirdness' sake.
But it's not. Yes, you have to look hard for a conventional narrative; yes, a lot of stuff is more interesting than satisfying; and yes, the performers tend to talk about their "practice" rather than their shows. But at best, such as the oddball film-music-dance crossover of Sonia Baptista or the quirky German movie shorts, there's a tremendous sense of discovery, humour and adventure.
Best of all is a style of presentation that's somewhere between theme park and multiplex cinema. Once you've paid your entrance fee you're free to wander from exhibition to installation to performance, breaking off for an arty chat in the café en route. The only equivalent I know is Holland's De Parade, which takes a fun-fair approach to theatre and in so doing, allows the audience to encounter the performances in a manner that is both casual and curious, like flicking through the channels on an unusually interesting night on TV. If you don¹t like something, you move on. When a show is good, it sets off a tremendous buzz of energy in the audience.
Even if only in terms of presentation, isn't it time other festivals started emulating the NRLA?
