For decades, Nottingham has had a thriving experimental arts scene. It was here that the National Review of Live Art was born in the early eighties, emerging from the Midland Group of Artists, who were founded in the 1930s. When the Midland Group was declared bankrupt in 1987, the founder of the National Review of Live Art, Nikki Millican, revived the event at London’s Riverside Studios and then in Glasgow, where it still hails today as one of the most important events on the live art calendar in the UK.
But the art scene in Nottingham continues to flourish in its wake. The NOW Festival, inaugurated in 1989, has progressed from presenting live art, to a interdisciplinary event showcasing performance and dance as well as live art.
The festival’s current Director, Mark Dey, took over from Andrew Chetty in 2001.
Dey points not only to the history of live art in the city as a contributor to the ever-expanding NOW Festival agenda, but the broad creative environment in the city, which makes it a perfect place to hold an interdisciplinary arts festival like NOW.
‘The really interesting thing about Nottingham is, it’s quite a small and compact city in terms of population but with a really strong creative community – and not just in the arts,’ he notes.
‘We have a lot of people working with technology in the business sector, a lot of people setting up small businesses, designing websites, product design…[there is] a whole kind of crossover between all of that.’
Dey also points to the large number of new works the festival has commissioned this year as an integral part of the NOW festival programme – and, its overall philosophy.
‘I think it [commissioning new work] is an important thing for us,’ Dey says. ‘When the festival started in 1989 it was the only live art festival in the UK, but now there’s a lot more.’
As a result, a lot of the same works and artists tend to crop up at all the different festivals, Dey notes.
‘We want to kind of reclaim our own identity, and the way to do that is to commission new work. And, have much closer relationships with the artists we are working with,’ Dey explains.
Although Dey doesn’t believe in ‘theming’ festivals, this year’s event is loosely based around ideas of location, geography and place. The idea came about through Dey’s own observations about the changes in how people feel about their surroundings over the past few years – an idea which he also saw reflected in many artists’ works.
‘In the last couple of years, especially after 9/11 and things like that, we all, I think, have been looking for comfort and security,’ Dey says. ‘And the places you usually turn to for that is home or a familiar environment. But,’ he adds, ‘our cities seem to be places that are the most anxious spaces as well.’
Dey says as programme director of the festival, a lot of the works he was seeing and artists he was interested in working with, were dealing with these issues.
Especially, how people travel through cities, and how cities can come to define communities, Dey says.
‘That [idea] seemed relevant to Nottingham at the moment, which is a city going through a lot of environmental change,’ he explains. The centre of the city has been a chaotic construction site for the past year or so with work underway to install a new tram line – a project which has inspired one of this year’s commission.
Commissioned artist Jo Roberts has been travelling the new NET line, which runs from Nottingham city centre to Hucknall, for the past year, gathering and recording ‘life enhancing thoughts’ from communities at different stops along the line.
The multi-layered impetus behind it, Dey explains, is a metaphor for how people can end up travelling on a ‘tramline’ for their whole lives, moving only in one direction.
Although the NOW Festival officially begins on October 17, Roberts is keeping visitors to the festival website up-to-date with her progress via an online blog. She will also present a video during the festival using the 45-second clips of people she interviewed.
Another major commission is a video installation by artist Simon Faithfull, who created his work by installing a video camera into a weather balloon – a project which has been described as a world first. The piece begins with a close-up of Faithfull’s face, launching the balloon, and then captures the rapidly changing landscape as it moves through the upper atmosphere and into space.
Since he took up the directorship two years ago, Dey has also presided over changes in staffing structure as well as tackling new marketing initiatives to garner a younger audience for the festival.
According to Dey, he observed marketing publicity ‘straplines’ which indicated a ‘young, culturally inquisitive’ audience. However, after a closer look at the demographics, Dey discovered most people attending the festival were in the 35 to 55 year-old age bracket. Research and development over the past year, in the form of a number of focus groups, Dey says, has been undertaken to attract a larger youth and young professional audience as well. An example of the festival’s Audience Development Plan is a Privilege Card, which will be inserted into this year’s festival brochures. The idea is that participants attending the events – most of which are now free – will get their cards stamped and then be entitled to deals at about six local bars in the city.
The NOW Festival runs from October 17-November 2 at various venues around Nottingham. For full programme details visit the website at www.beherenow.org.uk
