Repetition and Performativity: Site-Specific Performance and Film as Living Monument

Abstract

How can repeated visits to one urban and historically inflected’ site’ create meaning for local and global stakeholders? I was presented with a provocative canvas in and from which to explore this question when I discovered that Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) had lived and worked on Newington Green and had met her mentor, Richard Price (1723-91), on ‘the Green’ in north-east London, around the corner from where I live. Site-specific performance and film have provided my tools to produce a gender-inflected response to both the Wollstonecraft legacy and the practice of theatre production itself. Wollstonecraft herself offers a positive female role model for the twenty-first century, but the mode of production in this performance and film project encourages and extends the identification and ownership of that legacy in a number of key ways. In the absence of a physical monument to Wollstonecraft and her accomplishments,¹ I have generated a living monument that resists a single narrative, offering a discursive view of the identity of Mary Wollstonecraft herself and more widely of identity and its construction. This iterative monument interrogates traditional forms of monument construction and the process of commemoration while nevertheless being integrally connected to site.