The ‘Place’ and Practice of Site-Specific Theatre and Performance

Abstract

Performing Site-Specific Theatre engages with theatre and performance that is grounded in an in-depth exploration and expression of spatial practice. This volume emerged from the editors’ fascination with how different types of spatial arrangements affect our understanding of and relationships with performance: specifically, the particularities of ‘place’ and its capacity to recontextualize performance, just as performance can reformulate how we perceive and experience space and place.¹ The form continues to provoke questions about what both performance and site convey; in response, this volume investigates how the genre operates now and into the future, when space, place, site, landscape, and location are regularly characterized by ambiguity, contingency, and unsettlement.