What is site-specific theatre?
To begin, it will be useful to say what is not meant here by site-specific theatre. For example, site-specific theatre has only a superficial resemblance to “open-air” theatre. It is not simply a performance that takes place outside, in a factory, in a house, or in a museum. Neither is it just a performance that makes reference to the place in which it is performed. The purposes of site-specific theatre are more ambitious and more subtle, at times even invisible from the audience’s perspective. Beyond the performance itself, there is artistry in the building of relationships with a place and its people, navigating the local governance, engaging with native organisations, and collaborating directly with the local population. At the highest levels, this new theatre seeks the reforging of art with its society, culture, and civics—a new relationship of art to the common man based on mutuality.
In Western European and American culture the arts are sociologically neutered. What is not explicitly commercial (advertising, for example) is put to the side—something to quiet the boredom and invigorate the senses, even the intellect, but not to really do anything. The idea of “art for art’s sake” can only exist and maintain its coherence in this age and this place. Art is systematised—placed in its appropriate building where it can be observed with cool detachment, and thus analyzed and discussed with the unabashed pleasure of self-aggrandizement. Each form of art is given its own special building, its own special context, where specialists are free to make specious remarks without ridicule. This presentation of art destroys it from the inside out, as it empties it of living meaning. The meaning it has is a circular argument, a short-circuit that has no connection to life outside of the context of a museum, theatre, or gallery. No doubt that today contemporary art can have a message—in fact, an abundance of message-making is practically the only purpose seen as acceptable to many artists—but art is denied a function.
So, site-specific theatre is counter-culture—the culture it interweaves itself with is not the culture we have but one which we can hope to be in the process of creating, or which exists in a marginal form today. It is a movement that springs forth spontaneously from the corpse of European theatre—as it were, an inevitable reaction an artist must take when meeting face-to-face with the futility of contemporary arts. So, what does site-specific theatre do differently? And have we, artists, learned anything from the current age which has rendered the arts so impotent and inert?
In order to clarify what is meant by function, it will be useful to look beyond our own contexts and time in order to grasp the non-universality of our boxed and bound appreciation for the arts. For example, the “birth” of theatre in Athens, in the 4th century BC. It bears repeating that the ancient Greeks have nothing to do with the contemporary culture of Western Europe—their cultural and social norms would be as utterly bizarre to us today as any other foreign culture we might imagine—but their example serves to show that our concepts around art are far from eternal or progressive. Ours are specific to ourselves, and quite unique besides.
In the Ancient Athens of Aeschylus and Sophocles art owed its existence to its function, and by some token the city owed its existence to its art. The theatre of that day was fully integrated into the civic, religious, and cultural life of the city as can be shown by several details. Research can testify to the fact that the choruses were danced by elite young soldiers and the Great Dionysius was, for them, what we might call a graduation ceremony, solemnly undertaken before leaving the city and embarking for war. The time of the theatre festival was the time for Athen’s allies and protectorates to sail to her harbours in order to pay their mandatory protection fees, and as such the theatre performances were also displays of the might and ability of Athens to defend its allies. Furthermore, the seating of the audience in the theatre of Dionysius mirrored precisely the seating arrangement of the senate.
The integration of the theatre with the society and civic participation was so complete that to us it would have seemed not much like what we call theatre at all. So, for just under a century, the state and society were in harmony with the production of these arts. Our contemporary situation, also here, is very different. For by seeking to break the museum-theatre bubble and link the arts with communities in a living manner, site-specific theatre is in disharmony with the current age.
So, the work of our age is to dismantle the cultural relationships predicated on commerce, and to do so by constructing alternatives. Site-specific theatre is one manifestation of that organic impulse. It is part of a slow but inevitable process—the passing of a dying empire into its vibrant seed-form. The falsity is stripped away and what remains are living relationships between people and their expressions.
