About the archive
The festival
The National Review of Live Art is produced annually in Glasgow by New Moves International. It originated from a one-day event in 1979 called the Performance Platform, organised by Steve Rogers at Nottingham's Midland Group arts centre, which has since closed. Growing into a large annual festival of live art, it has been directed by Nikki Milican since 1984. As well as performance, the festival includes installation and video art, and a platform for new performers to show their work alongside more experienced and well-known artists. It has been peripatetic since the mid-1980s, taking place at the Riverside Studios, London (1987); Glasgow's Third Eye Centre (1988 to 1990); the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (1993); The Arches in Glasgow (1994 to 2005); and Tramway, Glasgow (2006 to 2008).
Documenting the festival
The festival was first documented in 1986 by a team led by Stephen Littman of Maidstone College and Tony Judge of Projects UK. The team used U-Matic videotape, an analogue format used in the broadcast industry, and experimented with live video mixing while beginning the practice of using multiple cameras to capture different angles on a performance. The following year, Littman was joined by Stephen Partridge and Doug Aubrey with students from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Arts, and this team continued until 1990.
When the festival returned in 1993, documentation was resumed on VHS, and the following year the work was carried out by teams of students from Glasgow University, directed by Patrick Brennan and Greg Giesekam (1994), and by Greg Giesekam and Lalitha Rajan (1996).
In 1998 the documentation was taken over by a Scottish video production company, Left & Right, who were the first to use digital Mini DV tape for recording the 2001 festival. Left & Right also presented work at the festival in these years.
Since 2003 the work has been carried out on Mini DV by a team from Nottingham Trent University, under the direction of Paul Hough, and responsibility has latterly been taken on by the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
The archive
The video collection has gradually grown into an archive containing over 1,200 hours of footage, which has been held at various times by New Moves International, the University of Glasgow and Nottingham Trent University. Custodianship has now passed to the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, who are committed to the archive's long-term preservation and accessibility.
Digitising the archive
Analogue video is a fragile medium, with a limited lifespan. In order to preserve it for the future, the entire collection up to the 2006 festival has now been digitised by a project entitled Capturing the Past, Preserving the Future, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project was begun by Professor Barry Smith and led by Dr Barry Parsons. The analogue videos and Mini DV tapes were first captured in uncompressed digital video format for future preservation, before being transcoded for access in the Theatre Collection by researchers, students and the public.