Joanne Zerdy: "Performing from the Ground Up: NVA’s Challenge to Theatrical Praxis in Britain"

Invited by the Scottish Government, in partnership with Creative Scotland and the British Council, NVA (“nacionale vitae active”), a Glasgow-based environmental arts organization, represented Scotland at the 12^th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2010 Venice Biennale. Their presentation included conservation plans for St. Peter’s seminary, a marvel of UK modernist architecture, which currently stands in ruins in Cardross, Scotland. In this forum of nationally-identified artists, architects, conservationists, and government officials, NVA continued their cross-disciplinary artistic practice through an architectural staging of Scottish history. The ecological thinking, active community involvement, and dynamic visual and auditory installations evidenced by their Biennale submission surface again and again in their dynamic performance projects across the UK.

I contend that NVA should be considered among the current constellation of (alternative) theatre and performing arts organizations in Britain. Their dramaturgy proposes an alternative theatrical experience; they push beyond the boundaries of a theatrical venue by creating site-specific works that foreground objects found in a physical environment, innovative design interventions, and audience members as integral actors and actants within the dramatic event. NVA deserve scholarly attention because of the breadth of their provocative, inventive projects (including exploratory walking events in 2000, 2006, and 2009; a celebration of Glasgow’s urban gardening in 2010; and a public art light spectacular planned for Edinburgh in 2012) and the dearth of critical work on this twenty-year old organization. To read theatre praxis in Scotland and across Britain through NVA—and its concepts of design, conservation, and/or architecture—would, I believe, generate new questions about and thematic linkages between working artists in Britain today.