Mapping the Terrain: a Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain

2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Wilkie
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Funding Policy ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Specific Mode ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
A Site ◽  
The University ◽  
A Performance

Who is producing site-specific performance in Britain? Who sees it? Where do these performances occur, or, more particularly, ‘take place’? What tools are used to construct a performance of place? Why is the site-specific mode chosen? And, crucially, how is it variously defined? Drawing on a survey of British practitioners conducted between November 2000 and December 2001, Fiona Wilkie sets out to explore these questions. While pointing to the wide variety of practices that might be delineated by the term ‘site-specific’, she analyzes the implications of such generalizations as can be made – about the types of performance site chosen, the effects of funding policy on the character of work being made, the possibilities for identifying a ‘site-specific’ audience, and the debates surrounding the terminology itself. Fiona Wilkie is currently completing a PhD at the University of Surrey, on which this article is based, which aims to develop a theoretical model for site-specific performance, with particular reference to the spectatorial role.

Site-Specific Dance in a Corporate Landscape

2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Kloetzel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
The Body ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Alternative Spaces ◽  
A Site ◽  
The University

Site-specific performance relies on the terms space and place as markers for discussing a performance's engagement with a site. However, practitioners and researchers are often disgruntled by the limitations such terms impose upon site-specific performance – as was Melanie Kloetzel, in the creation of The Sanitastics, a site-specific dance film created in the Calgary Walkway System. In this article, Kloetzel examines how theorists have struggled with space and place in the last four decades and how bringing in the perspective of the body allows us to reassess our assumptions about these terms. As she analyzes her creative process, she discovers the restrictions as well as possibilities in space and place, but she also notes the need for Marc Augé's idea of non-place to clarify her site-specific efforts in the homogenized, corporate landscape of the Walkway System. Kloetzel is an associate professor at the University of Calgary and the artistic director of kloetzel&co, a dance company founded in New York City in 1997 that has presented work across North America. Her site-specific films have been shown in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, and her anthology with Carolyn Pavlik, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2009.

scholarly journals Flexible Characterization: Herstorical Performance in Heritage Sites

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-368
Author(s):  
Victoria Bianchi
Keyword(s):  
Identity Performance ◽  
School Of Education ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
Women's Narratives ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Spatial Exploration ◽  
The University ◽  
Heritage Performance ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores how performance and character can be used to represent the lives of real women in spaces of heritage. It focuses on two different site-specific performances created by the author in the South Ayrshire region of Scotland: CauseWay: The Story of the Alloway Suffragettes and In Hidden Spaces: The Untold Stories of the Women of Rozelle House. These were created with a practice-as-research methodology and aim to offer new models for the use of character in site-specific performance practice. The article explores the variety of methods and techniques used, including verbatim writing, spatial exploration, and Herstorical research, in order to demonstrate the ways in which women’s narratives were represented in a theoretically informed, site-specific manner. Drawing on Phil Smith’s mythogeography, and responding to Laurajane Smith’s work on gender and heritage, the conflicting tensions of identity, performance, and authenticity are drawn together to offer flexible characterization as a new model for the creation of feminist heritage performance. Victoria Bianchi is a theatre-maker and academic in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. Her work explores the relationship between space, feminism, and identity. She has written and performed work for the National Trust for Scotland, Camden People’s Theatre, and Assembly at Edinburgh, among other institutions.

Città Invisibili of Teatro Potlach

2017 ◽  
pp. 536-562
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Sansone
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Memory Space ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
A Site ◽  
Citta Invisibili

Città Invisibili is a multidisciplinary art project made by the Italian company Teatro Potlach. Compared to the canonical theatrical performances, Città Invisibili, being in its essence a site-specific performance, interacts with the place where it grows. With the project, the Italian group builds next to the existing space of the place (physical space and memory space) other two spaces, the space of the staging and the space of the performer, using different materials, in particular cloths and video projections. Moreover Teatro Potlach conducts a historical, anthropological and social research trying to bring out the latent memory of places. All these interventions bring out from the place a city never seen before, invisible to the eyes of its inhabitants, but present and buried in the meanderings of their memory. The objective is to bring out this memory so that the inhabitants preserve and hand down it to new generations.

Raising the ghosts of justice: Staging time and the memory of Empire inThe Trial of Governor Eyre

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-259
Author(s):  
Jason Allen-Paisant
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Cultural Adaptation ◽  
Problem Space ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Site

I examine the staging of time, justice and performance in The Trial of Governor Eyre, investigating what this site-specific performance reveals about the experience of time in the context of colonial violence. In doing so, I show that the work’s discourse on temporality reflects a vital sense of performativity within an Afro-diasporic context. The work’s use of temporality, besides reflecting a cultural adaptation, allows for a remoulding of forms, coupling law and theatre in confronting Eyre’s mass executions of 1865. This remoulding of forms (law as theatre, theatre as law) provides a potential for postcolonial witnessing not available when either performance protocol is used on its own. Using Blazevic’s and Cale Feldman’s concept of ‘misperformance’, I argue that this play-trial arises out of a Benjaminian sense of historicity, providing an experience of inchoate justice that finds fulfilment in the present. The Trial of Governor Eyre points, more broadly, to a new ‘problem-space’ in African diaspora political theory, where resistance against colonial structures of oppression is increasingly mounted on the ground of justice itself and through which the legal apparatuses of colonialism become a site of critical memory. Through the play’s deployment of ritual and its plastic moulding of time, 1865 is enlisted as a key historical conjuncture for thinking through the cultural disenchantment of race, but also of the formalist, creative resources that can be mobilised for reimagining humanness in the contemporary moment.

Braiding Borders: Performance as Care and Resistance on the US-Mexico Border

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Kaitlin M. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Body Politics ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Female Immigrant ◽  
The Us ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
A Site ◽  
Us Mexico Border ◽  
Rhetorical Violence

Braiding Borders, a site-specific performance in which women from both Mexico and the US braided their hair together across the US-Mexico border, challenged exclusionary geopolitical demarcations and physical and rhetorical violence against female, immigrant, and Latinx bodies. As a collective, performative mobilization of bodies, it dismantled and reinvented mobilities of belonging and body politics of dissent.

Puppets, kites and the swirling waters: Convergent boundaries in a site-specific performance

Scene ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-114
Author(s):  
Julia Listengarten ◽  
Sarah Yates
Keyword(s):  
Site Specific ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
A Site

Productive Mis-mappings: Critical Disorientations on the University of South Carolina’s Historic Horseshoe

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Rae Cooley
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
College Campus ◽  
The South ◽  
University Of South Carolina ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Fire Insurance ◽  
A Site ◽  
The University

Located at the heart of the University of South Carolina campus is the historic Horseshoe—originally the South Carolina College campus (est. 1801)—a site whose construction during the antebellum years relied on enslaved labor. Ghosts of the Horseshoe is a cross-College, collaborative “critical interactive” for iPad that features the Horseshoe campus and endeavors to make visible this unacknowledged history. The application uses as its dedicated navigational interface a historic 1884 Sanborn Fire Insurance map of the site; participants can also activate a Google Map overlay of the site and determine its degree of opacity with respect to the archival map image. Importantly, however, the two maps do not actually “map” onto each other. This serves as a first mis-mapping of several mis-mappings. This article considers how such mis-mappings, involving geo-locative contingencies, representational disjunctions, and potential dis-locations, mediate site-specific explorations and, as such, make possible alternative historiographic understandings of place.

Collaborating across the disciplines in a site-specific performance

Scene ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-106
Author(s):  
Julia Listengarten ◽  
Sarah Yates
Keyword(s):  
Site Specific ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
A Site
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