Non-Traditional Theatre Space

By Marvin Carlson

Normally when we think of theatrical performance the image that comes to mind
is an event in a building specifically designed for that purpose. In the West, this is a
tradition that goes all the way back to the earliest development of the art, in classic
Greece. In modern times, the allied forces of colonialism and commerce have carried this
Western model to every part of the globe. Even without this Western tradition, however,
a similar association of mimetic representation with structures created for such
representation is very widespread, as may be seen in the imperial theatres of classic
China, the Noh stages of Japan, and the Sanskrit temple stages of classic India.
In more modern times, however, particularly from the late nineteenth century
onward, there has developed an extremely varied and widespread interest in and
experimentation with the theatrical use of spaces outside these traditional structures, a
trend that intensified in the latter part of the twentieth century, so that today performances
in spaces outside traditional theatre buildings comprise a major part of the contemporary
theatre, especially the experimental theatre
Perhaps the most common term associated with such performance today is that of
site-specific, but despite or perhaps because of its ubiquity, it is open to many
interpretations. A 2009 article in the leading British newspaper, The Manchester
Guardian, attempted to clarify the term in an article provocatively entitled: Site-specific
theatre? Please be more specific. The article reports that the term site-specific has
far expanded beyond its first rather narrow use, which the Guardian traces to the

beginning of the 1980s. At that time students in the newly formed program of
Performance Studies at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales began to collaborate in
creating what they performances they called site-specific in local villages and castles with
a group of artists called Brith Gof. A later site specific company based in Exeter,
Wrights and Sights, described these creations as performances specifically generated
from or for one site, the implication being that the performance was not imposed on a
site but was inspired by the site, perhaps involved with the specific history of the site and
in any case unique to that site. The most famous European site-specific company,
Dogtroep in the Netherlands, was in fact created earlier still, in 1975, and over the next
two decades the Netherlands became the European center of site-specific work.
As site-specific theatre became a more and more important theatrical activity in
the United States and a number of European countries after 1980, the term began to be
applied to an ever-wider range of activities, resulting in the vagueness and potential
confusion complained of by the Guardian. These days, the article complained, sitespecific can be just about anything that doesnt happen in a theatre. While this
complaint is clearly somewhat exaggerated, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that
generally speaking today there are two rather different ideas of what constitutes site
specific theatre and the tension between those two shows itself in the Guardian article.
On the one hand there is what might be called the traditionalist view, recently well
articulated in an essay on the weblog Arts Journal whose author quoted his friend J,
identified as a site specific theatre aficionado. According to J, so-called site-specific
performances such as Samuel Becketts Happy Days on a beach or Hamlet on the
battlements of an actual castle are not in fact site specific in the true sense of the term.

In this true sense, a production is site specific ONLY when its conceived specifically
for the space in which it is produced. In other words, the space comes first and the
creation of the performance, second. Site specific work is therefore always newly
written or devised and can never be replicated in any other venue or locale. 1
The most common alternative definition is far more open and has been well
articulated by the Scottish Arts Council. According to this view, site specific
performance fully exploits the properties, qualities and meanings of a given site. The
chosen site can be one of endless possibilities, from abandoned docks, to graveyards, to
small hotel rooms. The only real consistent factor in these productions is that they do not
take place in the traditional theatre arena. 2
Viewed in this light, it is relatively easy to see how much of the interest that
emerged in site-specific theatre during the late 1970s and early 1980s was a part of a
more general reaction in America and Europe against the conservative and highly
traditional mid-century theatre, with its formal and well-established conventions of
performance, architectural arrangements, and audience/actor relationships. Not
surprisingly, an important part of the avant-garde experimentation of that period took
place, in the words of the Scottish Arts Council, outside the traditional theatre arena.
Before we leave the conventional theatre building to consider the development of
space outside traditional theatre, however, I would like to note a few interesting
transitional experiments, in which experimental directors broke open the traditional stage
space to theatricalize the world outside. A major pioneer in such was the Russian
director Yury Lyubimov. As early as his second production, of Ten Days that Shook the
World, in 1965, he began the performance outside his Moscow theatre, the Taganka, with

loudspeakers playing revolutionary songs, and ushers dressed as Red Guards punching
tickets with their bayonets.
The New York experimental art world offered a striking variation on this
theatricalization of reality in1976, with Robert Whitmans piece, Light Touch. Here, the
audience was seated in a trucking warehouse and the main warehouse door before them
was opened to reveal the actual street outside, framed by gossamer curtains like a stage
setting. According to phenomenologist Bruce Wilshire, who provides a fascinating study
of this experiment, the normally banal spectacle of passing traffic was thus converted into
a strange and fascinating kind of theatre simply by an alteration of perception:
Cars appeared occasionally, framed by the door, as they passed on the
street directly outside. Appeared, but appeared transfigured, as if a spell
had been case over them. Details of their shape and movement ordinarily
not noticed, leapt out, as if from a numinous aura. It was as if cars were
being seen for the first time. [need reference]
One of the most memorable uses of this sort of theatrical framing of the external
world I have ever encountered was in Lyubimovs Moscow production of Three Sisters,
which opened in 1983. This was the first production in a new theatre built for the
Taganka, but still entered through the old lobby. The audience entered a new, still only
partly finished auditorium, with the main stage in front and a smaller runway stage at the
side backed by four panels of mirrors, reflecting the audience. During the evening the
sisters knocked at the mirrors as they expressed their desire to go to Moscow. This
gesture was explained at the conclusion, when the mirror panels turned, to open to the
audiences view the actual contemporary Moscow, no dream city but a dark jumble of

unattractive lots and low buildings against a skyline of grim Soviet apartment towers.
The ironic contrast of what had become of the dreams of these characters was truly
stunning, with interpretive resonances far beyond the phenomenological effects noted by
Wilshire in Light Touch.
Let us now, however, leave the theatre building entirely and consider nontheatrical spaces adapted for theatre work in recent times. A variety of nineteenth and
twentieth century experiments may be seen as precursors of such performances. With the
rise of realism and an interest in settings of scrupulous accuracy, it is hardly surprising
that some directors were inspired to seek out locations outside the theatre that would
reproduce the exact or approximate setting imaged by the playwright. Thus we find the
Pastoral Players in England in the 1880s, presenting woodland plays of Shakespeare and
Fletcher in actual woods and meadows, the annual productions of William Tell in Alpine
villages in Switzerland beginning in 1912, Max Reinhardts Merchant of Venice in a
Venetian Square in 1934, and productions later that decade of Hamlet at Elsinore Castle
in Denmark. Such performances of classic plays in the sites of their presumed actions
has proven an irresistible attraction in the modern era of global tourism. Hamlet is still
being performed at Elsinore (most recently by the British Globe Theatre in August of
2011) and Wilhelm Tell is staged annually in the Rugen forest near Interlaken. Similarly,
at the Peer Gynt festival by Lake Gl in Vistra, Norway, Ibsens epic play is performed
against the scenic background associated with his picaresque hero.
Even more common in the contemporary theatre is the staging of classic works
like these neither in traditional theatres nor in these realistically-inspired authentic
locations, but in all sorts of found spaces which may or may not have some historic or

metaphoric connection with the content of the play. A major inspiration for such activity
was the productions and writings of Peter Brook, one of the most admired and influential
directors in the modern theatre. His 1968 book and manifesto, The Empty Space, begins
with the often quoted sentence: I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.
There is an interesting parallel here to the process known in the social sciences as
interpellation, by which process Althusser, the theorist most associated with the concept,
means the creation of social subject by his or her being called out. The classic example is
the policemans challenge of hey, you there. Similarly Brook proposes calling a
theatre into existence not by the construction of a particular kind of building, but simply
by interpellation. Implied in this concept of course, is the acquiescence of a participating
audience, who accepts the interpellation and views its experience in the newly claimed
space as a theatrical one.
Probably the best-known of the many empty spaces that Brook interpellated as
theatres was an abandoned quarry, the Callet, near Avignon. It was inaugurated as a
performance space with Brooks Mahabharata in 1985. Since that time the Callet Quarry
has been so often utilized during the Avignon Festival that it is no longer a sort of found
space, as it was when Brook first utilized it, but has become one of a number of accepted
theatre venues within the Avignon area. Such conversion of non-theatrical spaces into
theatres has become frequent in contemporary design, and many examples were on
display in the 2011PQ. The Spanish exhibition, to take a single example, showed
performance spaces created from a former granary, a military barracks, an industrial
workshop, textile factory, slaughterhouse, and supply market. All of these converted
spaces continue to be used, but found spaces may also be utilized for a single production

and concept. A memorable recent example of such performance was the 2007 Paul Chan
staging for the Classical Theatre of Harlem of Waiting for Godot, Becketts tragicomedy
of hopeless waiting, outdoors in the devastated Ninth Ward of New Orleans, reduced to a
desolate flood plain by Hurricane Katrina.
In the contemporary theatre, an ever-increasing number and variety of so-called
site specific performances do not utilize scripts with a previous performance history, but
present material either created with a particular non-theatrical space in mind or even are
created out of improvisational work within the space. An excellent description of the
thinking behind much of such work was provided by French director Armand Gatti, a
leader in politically oriented site-specific work in that country. Much of his work has
been staged in spaces associated with the working class, especially factories. The entire
German exhibition at the 2011 PQ featured converted factories, which in the Ruhr valley
have become an important element of contemporary German theatre architecture. Of one
such factory production Gatti explained:
With this kind of subject its mostly the place, the architecture that
does the writing. The theatre was located not in some kind of Utopian place, but
in a historic place, a place with a history. There was grease, and there were acid
marks, because it was a chemical factory; you could still see traces of work; there
were still work clothes around; there were still lunch-pails in the corner, etc. In
other words, all these left-over traces of work had their own language. These
rooms that had known the labor of human beings day after day had their own
language, and you either used that language or you didnt say anything. 3

Not all site-specific performance has so politically grounded a concern, but the
majority of it shares Gattis conviction that the place inspires the writing. This can be
seen in much of the work of En Garde Arts, which operated in New York from 1965 to
1999, under the direction of Annie Hamburger, who went on to work in the creation of
Theme Parks for Walt Disney productions. One of the first major productions of this
group took place in New Yorks Victorian Chelsea Hotel, where a series of rooms were
devoted to short works dealing with people who had stayed at this famous New York
landmark. Stonewall, dealing with the modern gay-rights movement, was staged in the
neighborhood of the Stonewall Tavern, where the protests which began that movement in
the city took place; J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation took place on the steps of the Federal
Hall National Memorial on Wall Street, close to the New York Stock Exchange and
across the street from the headquarters of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company which
was founded by J.P. Morgan. One production, Crowbar, was even set in an abandoned
New York theatre, and performers embodied the ghosts that inhabited that location.
As theatrical production increasingly utilized non-theatre spaces in the late
twentieth century, it still almost always maintained the tradition spatial arrangements of
the physical theatre it was deserting, at least initially. Productions might take place in
quarries, factories, warehouses, churches, parks, indoor and outdoor spaces of all kinds,
but these almost invariably involved the establishment of a fixed stage area for the actors
facing rows of seats for the spectators. During the last years of the century however and
much more commonly after 2000, this imposition of an imaginary traditional theatre
space on non-theatre locations was increasingly challenged.

During these years many designers and directors interested in site-specific work
began to introduce more flexibility into their use of these sites, abandoning the stationary
spaces of conventional theatre for productions in which actors and audience moved about
into different parts of the new found space. Such productions have come to be commonly
designed in Great Britain as promenade productions, a term now gaining currency in
other countries as well. An early prominent example of such work was John Krizancs
Tamara, created in Toronto in 1981 and moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and New York in
1987. For each production, ten rooms of the palatial villa of the Italian author Gabriele
dAnnunzio, were created in some elegant, pre-existing Victorian building; in New York
the Park Avenue Armory was used. There was not a single line of action, but multiple
scenes playing simultaneously, so, although audience members did not have total
freedom of movement, they could freely choose which of a number of these scenes they
would watch or what character they would follow.
Woodshed Collective, organized in 2002, initially presented conventional
proscenium-style productions, but in 2006 turned to site-specific theatre, presenting their
Twelve Ophelias in a vast abandoned swimming pool in the Williamsburg section of
Brooklyn that had been built in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration.
Despite this unusual venue the audience remained conventionally seated and static. Then
however the Collective turned to Tamara-style locations divided into multiple areas, with
audiences free to move about and put together their own collage of performance. Their
2009 adaptation of Melvilles The Confidence Man scattered acted scenes and YouTube
videos throughout the spaces offered by a decommissioned US Coast Guard ship through
which audiences could wonder as their fancy took them. For their most recent work, The

Tenant, audiences were asked to put together pieces of the complex story as they
wandered through five floors of an abandoned parish house and adjacent church in New
Yorks upper West Side.
In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, this sort of interactive
environment became in effect a distinct sub-genre of performance. Indeed the British
company, Punchdrunk, formed in 2000 and a leader in such work, has coined the term
immersive theatre to describe it. Their productions create elaborate environments
within abandoned buildingswarehouses, factories, hotelsand people these with
performers who interact with spectators in partly scripted but largely improvised openended evenings. Their first production in New York, Sleep No More, in 2011 (with
earlier versions in London in 2003 and Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2009), presented
material from Hitchcock, gothic novels and Macbeth on several floors of three adjacent
abandoned warehouses that had more recently been used as a massive nightclub. It was
identified in publicity material, however, as the abandoned McKittrick Hotel.
Even more ambitious is the Scandinavian group Signa, formed in 2004.Typically,
they occupy large abandoned spaces or buildings and create within them installations in
which their actor inhabitants live for a number of days and interact with visiting
spectators on an improvised bases. The 2007 Ruby Town Oracle was one of their most
elaborate works to date, creating a complete slum community with several dozen
dwellings inhabited by 40 actors and opened non-stop for 84 hours for improvised
interaction with visitors (who had to obtain visas to enter).
Promenade productions have also moved outside of individual buildings to cover
whole areas or districts. One of the first of these was Reza Abdohs 1990 Dostoevsky

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adaptation for En Garde Arts, Father was a Peculiar Man, presented in various locations
over a four block area of New York's meatpacking district. The 2011 PQ exhibits
suggested something of the range of such work today, from guided walking tours along
mountain paths in Norway (in the architecture exhibits) to Brazils prize-winning
production by Teatro da Vertigem, which unrolled along the banks of the Tiet River as
the audience passed on boats. Among other means of transportation adapted to
promenade style work have been buses (Foundry Theatre, New York) and subways (Gob
Squad, Germany).
Experiments with more technological variations of promenade work have been
conducted by groups in Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and elsewhere. One of the
first and surely the best known of these is Berlins Rimini Protokoll, who first combined
promenade work and electronics in their 2005 project Call Cutta, which provided
participants in Berlin with cell phones connected to operators in India who then guided
the participants individually on interactive tours through the Kreuzberg section of Berlin.
The sites they visited were all related to the negotiations between India and Germany
early in the second World War. Ghostly sounds from the past haunted the visited sites
and the living people encountered by the one-person audience were in some cases
aware of the performance and in most cases not. The Netherlands Looking for . . . project
at the 2011 PQ provided a variation of Call Cutta, using a set of historic Prague
photographs to organize its smart phone walking tour.
In 2011 Rimini Protokoll extended such experimentation further in their 50
Aktenkilometer, based on the history and activities of the notorious Stasi, the secret police
of East Germany. For the production Rimini Protokoll recorded memories concerned the

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Stasi from more than a hundred Berlin residents, and assembled an archive of other
recorded material from that eranewscasts, official meetings, music, and so on. These
were then beamed to one hundred hot spots extended over a large area of East Berlin,
Audience members received headphones, a cellphone with electronic map to show their
location, and a physical map showing the locations of the hundred bubbles. They were
then free to wander about, at their own pace, composing their own trajectory, creating a
performance of and within the city center out of these pre-selected materials.
By first expanding into non-theatrical spaces, then by giving the audience
increasing freedom of movement within these spaces, and finally by providing flexible
electronic networks of urban spaces, experimental theatre companies in the past two
decades have created a kind of performance environment that has altered in almost every
respect traditional reception strategies and experiences as they have existed in the theatre
for centuries.

www.artsjournal.com/lies/2009/09/not-all-site-specific-theatre.html. Published August 25, 2009,

accessed March 11, 2010.
2
Theatre Style: Site-specific theatre,
www.sottisharts.org.uk/1/artsinscotland/drama/features/archive/themesitespecifictheatre.aspx. Accessed
March 11, 2009.
3
Armand Gatti, Armand Gatti on Time, Place, and the Theatrical Event, trans. Nancy Oakes, Modern
Drama 25:1 (March, 1982), 71-72.

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