New Spatialities: Performing Arts and Outdoor Space

By changing space, by leaving the space of ones usual sensibilities,

one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating.
[] For we do not change place, we change our nature.
Gaston Bachelard -The Poetics of Space1
Exploring the core theme of PQ 2015 SharedSpace: Music Weather Politics, the Hellenic Participation revolves around the theme: New Spatialities: Performing Arts and
Outdoor Space.
The quest for new spatialities shaped by diverse negotiations and the dynamics of the
physical, open, outdoor and public space constitutes part of the driving force behind
some of the more recent developments in the field of performance space.
The concept that any space is potentially a stage is of great importance. Space is thus
regarded as an open territory, an open system for the performance event, a boundless
space in continuous process of emergence and metamorphosis.
The projects selected for the Hellenic Participation at PQ 2015 follow upon this expanded understanding of the spatialities of outdoor/open spaces.
Projects do not just recreate given spatial conventions of interior space or utilize conventional and fixed frameworks of outdoor performance architecture. Each performance event has been created specifically for the outdoor space.
The shifting from indoor to open and outdoor space has been accompanied by an
increased demand for site-specificity. Exiting from indoor space has also been linked
to the political signification of the utilization of outdoor and public space and to new
awareness of shared space.
Using outdoor or public space as performance space is a crucial step towards reclaiming public space, which nowadays is challenged, degraded and under constant diminution due to its commercialization and privatization.
The spectators relationship to the performance event has also acquired greater importance, as it has moved towards a more active and engaged participation.
Moreover, the shifting from indoor to outdoor space has been accompanied by the
gradual rejection of the ideologies of representation that have shaped the majority of
the western indoor performance spaces since the Renaissance.
The spaces of the performing arts have mostly been constructed around a highly hierarchized auditorium (which radically redefined the way the audience was accommodated during western modernity), the invention of the architectural barrier of proscenium arch and the art of scenography.
These spaces were organized in such a way as to create separation and distance
between the stage and the auditorium and, most importantly, to enhance the scenic
illusion and to create representation; that is, a field of artificiality not based on the rules
of the original thing represented but on a simplification of the World.
These performance spaces expressed, through systems of visual ordering as scale,
proportion, geometry, monumentality and perspective, the representational spatial
ideal of western modernity.
They were formed by and corresponded to the subjectification processes that preconceived and pre-configured the autonomous and sovereign subject of the era; a
subject with his own unique and stable identity at the centre of a coherent reality and a
knowable world, driven by the belief in a set of supposedly universal and eternal truths,
and the profound wish for a rigorous control of signification. As Allan Megill puts it,
excellent demonstrations of the vain desire to impose arbitrary structures or order on
the world hence participating in the corruption of all that is present.2
Audiences and performers with predicable bodily movements, controlled within the
limits of the striated3 indoor performance spaces, worked towards avoiding the contagious and destabilizing aporias of the chaotic and non centered physical world.
Nonetheless, the rigorous control on form has been an important aspect of many of
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20th centurys historical avant-gardes. Some other artistic and performance movements, such as dada and surrealism, evolved towards randomness, unpredictability
and emergence, articulating the destabilization of the autonomous subject.
he performance events selected for the Hellenic Participation at PQ 2015 have transgressed the representational space of scenography and its conventions towards the
dynamics of the real, open, outdoor, and public space.
By doing so, they mark a transition towards the elements of unpredictability and improvisation, triggered by the inherent randomness, ambiguity and chaotic complexity
of the visuality of the outdoor space.
In addition, the inevitable influence of the weather, of the transient fluid environmental conditions and the constant transformations of the outdoor soundscapes, create
performance events that viscerally affect the bodies, the mind as well as the space
perception of the audience.
If we consider spaces as sites of subjectification4 then the following questions have
been an important driving force for the curatorial work:
What kind of potentialities do the open outdoor performance spaces offer as sites of
subjectification, or rather as components of subjectification?5
What does it mean for the mobile and nomadic bodies of the performers and the audience to move in heterogeneous spaces that lack metric regularity?
What kind of relations are created by sharing physical experiences of increased and
vibrant sensorial perceptions that involve all the senses and transcend visuality?
These are questions and aporias that may form the basis for a future conference,
creating the opportunity for a new phase in the ongoing dialogue with the participating
artists.
The caleidoscopic structure of the Hellenic participation corresponds to the multiformity of the artistic works and the multitude of artists selected to take part in the
Prague Quadrennial 2015. In accordance with the curatorial concept that promotes
heterogeneity, ambiguity, multifocality, complexity and chaotic self-organizing as distinctive elements of spectating in open spaces, the exhibition has the form of an
assemblage: a juxtaposition of disparate and mixed ideas, aspects and works that are
gathered together but not interlocked.
Acknowledging the nuances, differences and singularities of each project, the curatorial concept follows a fragmentary pattern and moves in various directions, opening
up opportunities for possible correspondences and the development of interactions
of meaning.

ing to the level of collective consciousness this novel performance paradigm that has
recently evolved in our country. This paradigm features extraordinary dynamics, based
on producing new forms, emphasizing innovation and personal artistic identity and
facilitating adaptation in a constantly changing environment.
My wish is that the Hellenic participation will lead up to the formation of an ephemeral
collectivity, composed of exceptional, polymorphous and heterogeneous singularities,
almost on the verge of no cohesion, freed from the aesthetic categories of the past
but instead able to truly invest in exploring the demands of the present and of the
society we live in.
Is this, then, a moment of kairological time? Is this the proper temporality for gestating
ideas and initiatives? Is this the proper Kairos? Only time will tell!
Thanos Vovolis
Scenographer
Curator of the Hellenic National Participation, PQ 2015

https://independent.academia.edu/ThanosVovolis

Notes
1

Allan Megill: Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, University of California Press, 1987, p. 197.

3
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Plateau
1440: The Smooth and the Striated. Translation and foreword by Brian Massumi. The University
of Minnesota Press, 1987.
4

Foucault M, 1980 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings.

Edited by C. Gordon Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, Herts. 1980, p. 149.

The curatorial concept has provided the form of the exhibition. In order to create the
installations of the Hellenic participation, the creative team, consisting of the architects George Parmenidis, Christine Longuepee, Ifigenia Mari and assisted by the curator, worked on the great differences of visuality and spectating between indoor performance spaces or architecturally shaped outdoor theatre constructions (both having as
their basic mode of operation the control of audiences gaze and its spatial positioning)
on one side, and the multifocal polyvocality of a 360 degrees vision of the outdoor
space spectatorship on the other.
The installations aim to recreate the basic premises of spectatorship in open/outdoor spaces, and to create a chaotic visuality where effort, commitment and active
participation is needed by the spectator in order to view the works of the artists and
experience the installations.
Furthermore, in the case of the exhibition space of the Clam-Gallas Palace, the installation is intended to work in synergy with the complexity, extravagance, impetuousness
and dynamism of 18th century baroque aesthetics of the Palace; affective aesthetics
which seek to stir the senses in a continuous folding, unfolding and refolding of form.
Of course, in notable contrast to the historical baroque palace is the contemporary
technological form of the installation; its dynamism is expressed in guises that are
technologically and visually different from those of the 18th century building.
Finally, I hope that the Hellenic participation will provide the necessary frame for rais-

Bachelard, G. 1969. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

Felix Guattari: The Three Ecologies. New formations, nr 8, Summer 1989, p. 131

Thanos Vovolis is a Scenographer, Masking designer and Artistic Researcher. His work
comprises more than 80 theatre productions in Greece, Sweden, Iceland, Spain, Romania, etc. His artistic research is on the mask in Ancient Greek Theatre and in the
European Theatre of the 20th Century. Appointed Visiting Professor at the Dramatic
Institute, Stockholm 2007-2010, he is currently the Curator for the Hellenic National
Participation at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, 2015. Exhibitions on his theatre works have been shown in London, Berlin, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Athens, Madrid, Merida, Sevilla, Delph.

https://independent.academia.edu/ThanosVovolis
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