The Path, NVA 2000

The Path makes Top 20 Scottish Theatre Events

Apr 5, 2007

In March this year The Scotsman Magazine published its definitive Top 20 Scottish Theatre Events of all time and NVA’s millennium event The Path made Number 18:

“THE JOY OF THE PATH LESS TRAVELLED

You can questions whether Angus Farquhar’s remarkable midnight ramble counts as theatre at all – “environmental intervention” is the term the Glasgow Director prefers – but The Path stands as a crystallisation of the work of NVA, a company that grew out of the industrial drumming of the industrial music group Test Dept in the 1980’s, mutated into extravagant performances in warehouses and docklands n the 1990’s and found most recent form in 2005 in The Storr, a night-time hike through a site of special scientific interest on the Isle of Skye.

To see The Path, audiences had to travel by minibus to a mystery location in the southern Highlands. Dropped off in the dark, they followed a string of tiny bulbs illuminating a walk over the mountain.

The star of the show was the landscape of Glen Lyon itself, but it was enhanced en route by a band of Portuguese drummers, a light show picking out the features of a waterfall, Tibetan sherpas, a tree hung with ribbons, vague human figures picked out in the distance, a Tibetan nun singing acapella laments and echoing voices of the glen’s residents.

Whatever you’d prefer to call it – theatre, art, sponsored walk – it was a unique theatre experience.”

Mark Fisher, 12 March 2007, The Scotsman

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