Bolt of lightning

“Running has become central to my life; I run for work, I run for pleasure and I run for my sanity.” It’s ironic then, that in the year that Angus Farquhar, Creative Director of NVA, is translating his love of running into one of the biggest pieces of art the company has ever created, he has just found out that his running days may be over.

“I got told by an orthopaedic surgeon that either I’ve got the wrong foot or the wrong job,” he tells me. He has neuritis, caused by misaligned bones in his toes, made worse by years of long-distance running. Though hard to deal with, he’s trying to be philosophical about the diagnosis. “I really pushed it last year and it helped me make this work. If it can’t carry on forever, so be it.”

Difficult though it would be to give up running, at least he’d be going out on a high – literally and metaphorically. NVA’s most ambitious project yet, Speed of Light sees the Glaswegian company take over Edinburgh’s famous geographical landmark, Arthur’s Seat, to create a living light show involving 4,500 runners and an audience of 800 people a night. Wearing light suits, a team of runners weave patterns and colours into the mountain paths around the base, while the walking audience, carrying movement-activated light sticks, ascend to the summit to view the illuminations below.

Farquhar compares the experience to looking at the earth from space. “You start on the same level as the runners and as you rise above them you begin to see that beauty of effort and the fragility of life. It depends how poetic you are as a thinker; other people will just enjoy the lights,” he laughs, “but I like to see the poetic side, that’s what inspires me.”

Three years in the making, the project was a response to the call for contributions to the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad. For Farquhar it offered a chance to combine NVA’s experience of creating participatory, landscape-based works of “public art” (such as 2005’s The Storr, a light installation on the Isle of Skye) with his love of running. “Endurance running and hill running, they are slightly unsung heroes as sports,” he says. “It’s quite a hidden world, it doesn’t get televised a lot, the people who do it do it for the love of it, it’s not over commercialised.”

The act of endurance intrinsic to long-distance running is something he knows well. “It’s a very concrete way of showing you what you are and being able to access parts of your character that don’t come out at other times. Willpower and the ability to override pain is one of the things that humans can do. Not many other animals choose to do that, we choose to do it as a way of knowing ourselves.”

It’s a feeling no doubt shared by the team of 4,500 runners recruited for Speed of Light’s three-week run. Donning a light suit and running up Arthur’s Seat isn’t your average jog in the park, and Farquhar says the response during trials has been hugely positive, regardless of ability. “Some hill runners can do what we are proposing in their sleep, but for other people it’s been a real effort and they’ve really upped their game. For them that becomes a really aspirational thing.”

Coordinating such a large volume of people, who aren’t performers, strikes me as a daunting task, but NVA—which celebrates its 20th birthday this year—is experienced enough in participatory work to take this in its stride. “Runners are a pretty good constituency to work with, because they’re not complainers. They are used to doing something quite tough and the thing that is tough is what they love doing. I think them becoming performers is an interesting variable and that’s quite a challenge, but that’s what NVA’s work is about, putting people into circumstances and situations that they are not used to.”

Farquhar may have had the creative vision, but he feels indebted to his international team of “near geniuses” who have created the bespoke technology: energy harvesting light sticks which generate light and sound from the walker’s movement, and the runners’ light suits, each wirelessly controlled so the colour and intensity can be altered. “The team sometimes have what I call the thousand yard stare, which is where the sheer enormity of what they are trying to pull off is slightly daunting," says Farquhar, "but you just work it through.”