Geography Compass

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Geographies of the Performing Arts: Landscapes, Places and Cities
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DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x
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Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x
Geographies of the Performing Arts: Landscapes, Places

and Cities
Amanda Rogers*
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London
Abstract
The performing arts of dance, theatre, music and live art have become established means through
which cultural geographers can examine how people experience and make sense of their everyday
worlds. Simultaneously, performance theorists and practitioners increasingly seek geographical tools
that help elucidate the broader processes or politics that underpin artistic genres of performance.
This review article works at this interdisciplinary nexus, exploring the diverse areas of engagement
between geography and the performing arts. It provides an overview of three spatialities around
which interdisciplinary exchanges take place, and where there are interesting synergies in the con-
ceptual approach to studying geographies of performance, namely: landscapes, places and cities. In
so doing, the article outlines some avenues where geography and performance studies academics
might further their mutual interests, and argues that geography is central to the constitution,
meaning and form that performance works take.
Introduction
In recent years, cultural geography has witnessed a burgeoning engagement with the the-
ories and practices of the performing arts. Geographers have viewed performance as a
means through which to examine how spaces are practiced and experienced through our
bodies. The performing arts are playful, creative and experimental, they draw attention to
the poetics of being in the world, to the experience of emotion and affect, and to the
constitution of subjectivity. When non-representational theory turned a geographical lens
onto the performing arts, their evocative modes of experience and expression were seen
to animate the understanding of how different spatialities are lived and constituted, mov-
ing away from a seemingly ‘deadening’ focus on textual representation (Thrift 2000,
2003; Thrift and Dewsbury 2000). However, whilst the performing arts reveal the experi-
ential qualities of space and place, they also provide a way to think about their power-
laden politics. Performances can reflect contestations around place and identity, they
highlight how people and places are embroiled in flows of capital, and they can even
intervene in the construction of built, material environments (Houston and Pulido 2002;
Nash 2000; Pratt and Johnston 2007). As a result, the performing arts elucidate much
broader concerns about the world we live in, and provide a means by which we might
re-imagine it.
In the past, geographers have used performing arts vocabularies to express their ideas,
such as with the humanistic conception that everyday life-worlds are ‘place ballets’
(Seamon 1980). Alternatively, geographers have drawn upon theories that find their inspi-
ration in performance, such as Erving Goffman’s (1956) notion of social life as theatre
(Crang 1994; Laurier and Philo 2006). Yet with the advent of non-representational the-
ory, the performing arts were no longer used as geographical metaphors but instead
ª 2012 The Author

Geography Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Geographies of the performing arts 61
became the object of geographical inquiry – particularly for dance and improvisation
(McCormack 2004, 2005; Nash 2000; Thrift 1997). At the same time, space and place
have become central to the theory and practice of the performing arts. Theatre critics
particularly highlight that to examine theatre is to examine geography because theatre is
the only art where ‘‘the name given to the place where the artistic event occurs is the
same as that of the art form itself’’ (McAuley 2000, 1). Performance practitioners infor-
mally remark about ‘using the space’ and incorporate features of places into their work,
such that geography is not only central to the location of the performing arts, but also to
their constitution (Pearson 2010; Schechner 1994; Wiles 2003). As performances have
moved outside traditional auditoria, this engagement with geography has proliferated
because practitioners are forced to engage with the qualities and politics of different places
– from disused factories to virtual environments – and thus the relationship between
space, place and praxis is continually being reconfigured.
At a simple, yet fundamental level, there are therefore areas of mutual interest between
geography and theatre and performance studies. In this review, I consider this rich inter-
section in more detail, drawing out dialogues between geographical literatures and work
occurring in the performing arts. In so doing, the article does not cover the full thematic
spectrum of geographical engagements with performance because these geographies are so
diverse, spanning the construction of home and identity (Blunt et al. 2007; Kong 1995;
Saldanha 2002), urban regeneration and political economy (Curtis 2010; Somdahl-Sands
2008), embodied spaces of being (Simpson 2009; Wood and Smith 2004) and contempo-
rary geopolitics (Ingram 2009; see the performance network In Place of War). Instead,
the review is organised through a focus on three geographies – landscape, places and cit-
ies – as it is here that interdisciplinary synergies are concentrated. The article demon-
strates the mutually illuminating nature of interdisciplinary exchanges, and highlights areas
that may further this process. By discussing a range of examples, the article emphasises
the continued importance and use of the performing arts in critically examining geo-
graphical issues.
Before continuing, it is worth briefly highlighting one definitional issue. Although the
‘performing arts’ seems a commonsensical enough descriptor for the live arts of theatre,
performance art, dance and music, ‘performance’ is also ‘‘an inclusive term’’ that encom-
passes play, sport, ceremonies, and everyday actions like waving to someone you know
(Schechner 2003, xvii). However, all of these forms can bleed into one another; think,
for instance, of protests where demonstrators use different ‘staging’ strategies such as
enacting political skits on the street whilst chanting, waving banners and banging drums.
These activities blend carnival, play, music and theatre to convey the message of a cause,
such that protest includes both specialist and everyday forms of performance. In reviewing
literatures on the performing arts, this article maintains the sense that performance
involves skills and practices that are separate from the everyday, but it also recognises that
this divide might blur at times (Read 1993).
Landscape and Ecology

The most intense series of exchanges between geography and the performing arts revolve
around landscape and ecology, developing the idea of landscape as performance, and
investigating how performances can excavate, illuminate and become part of landscapes.
Within theatre studies, landscape has been viewed as the paradigmatic spatiality of theatre
texts and practices (Chaudhuri and Fuchs 2002). Theatrical analyses often focus on the
representation of landscapes in scripts, examining the ideological meanings conveyed
ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

62 Geographies of the performing arts
when landscape is not just a scenic backdrop, but integral to understanding characters’
psychology (Chaudhuri 1995; Fuchs 2002; Roach 2002). Una Chaudhuri (2002) has also
traced how the development of landscape painting and perspective led to the placing of
performance within a frame (i.e. the proscenium arch), turning audiences into viewers by
spatially segmenting the stage and the auditorium. This distanced ‘‘way of seeing’’ (Cos-
grove 1984; 1) also underpinned Cosgrove and Daniel’s (1989) description of geographi-
cal fieldwork as theatre, with different staging and viewing perspectives being used as a
means through which to collect information.
Although this research views landscape in terms of pictorial representation, academics
in theatre and performance studies have found greater synergies with geographical writ-
ings that move away from such textual understandings. The exchange of ideas around
landscape chorography and phenomenology have been the most fertile – as evidenced by
the special issue of Performance Research in December 2010 and the work of performance
studies academic Mike Pearson (Pearson and Shanks 2001; Pearson 2006, 2010). Pearson’s
(2006) book «In Comes I»: Performance, Memory and Landscape is a performance chorogra-
phy that describes the regional landscape of North Lincolnshire. Chorography is the detai
led topographical description of landscape – its features, terrains, geomorphology, histori-
cal sites, inhabitants and folk traditions. Pearson’s chorography is organised around geo-
graphical designators such as village, neighbourhood and region, and emphasises
performance. His own site-specific performances, such as Bubbling Tom, weave together
autobiography, memory and place with everyday speech or events (2006, 25). Yet
throughout the book, a range of performances emerge to define North Lincolnshire as a
region, from agricultural labour to folk traditions such as song contests or the Haxey
Hood, a form of competitive scrummage with a metre-long leather cylinder (Pearson
2006, 2010; Daniels et al. 2010).
Pearson’s work is influenced by Ingold’s (2000) notion of landscape as wayfinding
rather than mapping, a performative concept that emphasises embodied acts of storytell-
ing, dramatic event and scene setting (2006, 17). Yet Pearson also references humanistic
and non-representational geographers, particularly those writing about landscape, as these
literatures value creative practice and attend to the ‘‘affective ties between people and
place’’ (2006, 4). Pearson’s performance chorography also finds echoes with David Mat-
less’ (2000, 2008, 2010) work on the practices of chorographic representation in the Nor-
folk Broads. Performance articulates landscape as the intertwining of ‘‘nature, culture and
imagination within a spatial manifold’’ but it does so through creative, bodily practice
(Cosgrove 2004, 69). These intellectual dialogues in print have also occurred in practice,
for instance in Warplands, a soundwork created by Pearson and composer John Hardy
based upon workshops ⁄ fieldwork that entailed geographers, performance academics and
environmentalists sharing their reactions to, and different perspectives on, the North Lin-
colnshire landscape. Pearson’s performance-based approach to chorography has reinvigo-
rated this form of geographical inquiry, but it also dovetails with other geographical
attempts to creatively engage landscape, particularly through performative styles of writing
(see Lorimer and Wylie 2010; Wylie 2002, 2005).
Geography and performance studies both also view landscape as lived, using phenome-
nology to highlight how ‘‘body and environment fold into and co-construct each other
through a series of practices and relations’’ (Wylie 2007, 144). Stewart (2010), for
instance, has analysed how his dance movements engaged with, and responded to, the
shifting landscape of sand, water, tides and air in Morecambe Bay. Pearson also describes
how for participants in the Haxey Hood, landscape is a ‘‘somatic space’’ constructed
through context and action, movement and feeling (2006, 157). Landscapes are thus

conceptualised as sensory environments, paralleling geographical literatures that view

landscape as an emergent process constructed and understood through kinaesthetic
motion – whether through walking (Wylie 2005), painting (Tolia-Kelly 2008) or road
travel (Merriman and Webster 2009). Landscape is therefore a performance, because it is
lively and constructed through embodied actions (Crouch 2010).
In geography, this notion of landscape as performance is only beginning to encompass
the layering and interweaving of subterranean and atmospheric geographies. For instance,
Lorimer and Wylie’s (2010) account of walking includes an appreciation of the atmo-
spheric and the sonic; similarly McCormack’s (2010) discussion of ballooning experi-
ments (artistic and scientific) interweave surface and aerial geographies. In this regard,
the performing arts better appreciate landscape as part of an all-encompassing environ-
ment. Pearson and Shanks (2001) highlight how performance and archaeological prac-
tices can work together to create a ‘‘deep map’’ that connects ephemeral performances
to material histories below the surface (64–6) (see also Feenstra 2010). Conversely, aerial
and vertical dance emphasise the importance of atmosphere, as the weather is continually
negotiated during a dance (Bernasconi and Smith 2008; Lawrence 2010). This relation-
ship between body and environment is emphasised in Body Weather, a performance
technique that uses sensory, muscle and bone exercises to create dance movements. Par-
ticipants concentrate upon landscape elements through the body, but the exercises also
explore how the body is ‘‘assimilated into the weather’’ such that atmosphere becomes
central to the creation and experience of performance (Cheng 2002, 322; Grant and de
Quincey 2006).
Body Weather is also a form of ecological performance whereby performance articu-
lates the organic, living relationship between body and environment (McAuley 2006a).
This type of performance has its roots in happenings and land art, which heightened the
interaction between humans and the natural world through their emotive effects and scale
of construction (Thornes 2008; Wylie 2007). These works emerged in the 1960s as part
of an evolving ecological consciousness (Thornes 2008) but in contemporary performance
studies, the relationship between performance and the environment has a radical, ethical
agenda. Baz Kershaw’s (2007) provocative book Theatre Ecology traces how theatre and
performance are not only implicated in, but lie at the root of, ecological crises such as
climate change. Here, ecology signals the mutual interdependence of organic and non-
organic factors, such that any form of performance is seen to have environmental conse-
quences. Although phenomenological approaches may enable performers to perceive
themselves as part of landscape, for Kershaw, the concept of landscape is haunted by an
all-seeing observer separate from, and with dominion over, the natural world. Viewing
artistic performances as ecological thus forces greater attention to the ethical implications
of our everyday embodied actions and their impact on our surrounding biosphere.
Ecology has become a lively, emerging area of theatre and performance studies. Perfor-
mance can heighten audiences’ awareness of their relationship to the environment, cri-
tique our current relationship of exploitation, and provoke more ethical ways of living
(see the 2010 special issue of Canadian Theatre Review on Canadian ‘Theatre in an Age of
Eco-Crisis’; Kenney 2010). A whole sphere of playwriting has emerged that directly
addresses climate change, what May (2010, 6) calls ‘‘ecodramaturgy’’ where ‘‘ecological
reciprocity and community [are] at the centre of its theatrical and thematic intent.’’ Per-
formances can represent ecological problems in traditional theatres, but they may also be
set outdoors and use natural materials to draw attention to environmental politics (for
instance The Only Animal company in Vancouver created a theatre space made from ice
that gradually melted as the play progressed). The sensory qualities of performance can

therefore be used to critical effect, highlighting how humans are organisms that are part
of broader ecological relations.
Theatre ecology is also concerned with the environmental sustainability of the per-
forming arts themselves, particularly as they leave carbon footprints when touring. For
instance Phantom of the Opera needs 27 lorries to move the set alone (Morley 2006, 164
in Harvie 2009, 34). There have been developments in the building of sustainable the-
atres (McKernan and Schweitzer 2010) and attempts to implement sustainability in the
practice and production of performance – particularly through sharing resources (see
the work of the Centre for Sustainable Practice for the Arts in Los Angeles). However,
the economic arguments for sustainability can, contradictorily, work against ecological
principles, because once the performing arts are viewed in terms of economic rationalism,
they can become easily divorced from the politics and concerns of local audiences. As a
result, performances may fail to be ecological in the sense that they are not cultivating
responsive and responsible relationships to their immediate surroundings or environment.
As environments encompass humans and nonhumans, then any imbalances in this rela-
tionship affect the production of performance ecologies (see Kershaw 2007; chapters 6
and 7). This ambivalent political potential of performance parallels geographical debates
around whether art contains the potential to engage the public in discussions about cli-
mate change, or whether artworks merely create distance between audiences and the issue
at hand (Miles 2010; Thornes 2008).
Performance ecology also chimes with perspectives that view place as ecological, as an
assemblage that responds to varied exchanges (Thrift 1999; in performance studies see
Knowles 2010 on Toronto’s ‘performance ecology’ as a city). Simpson’s (2008) rhythm-
analysis of street performance explicitly deploys an ecological perspective, examining the
relationship between the outdoor environment and street performers through different
temporalities. Although this research analyses the interplay between performing bodies
and affective or non-human nature, ecology is more of an approach than an ethical
engagement with the ‘natural’ world. Elsewhere in geography, the critical edge of perfor-
mance ecology is reflected in performative writings that critique how humans use the
environment (Krupar 2007) as well as in post-human geographies that examine the hybrid
co-evolution of bodies, technologies, and environments through performance (Abrahams-
son and Abrahamsson 2007; Whatmore 2006). This work shares a conceptual affinity
with how performance links ‘‘ecology and aesthetics ... [to] outline the biocentric world
view in certain works, a nonhierarchical embrace of the multiplicty of species’’ (Marranca
1996, xvi).
Academics in geography and performance studies therefore share similar concerns
around how landscape can be seen as performance, the relationship between performance
and environmental change, what performance can achieve ecologically, if being overtly
activist can alienate audiences, and whether performance can raise consciousness or
change behaviour. This is particularly because both geographical and performance based
work highlights the disparity between what we know about ecological problems and
how we actually conduct our everyday lives. These synergies are manifest in a range of
interdisciplinary and international networks that harness collaboration to answer these
questions, such as http://performancefootprint.co.uk; the PLaCE (Place, Location, Con-
text and Environment) Research Centres in England, Minneapolis, Scotland and Austra-
lia; and http://www.mappingspectraltraces.org. Geographical literatures and perspectives
are central to these initiatives, and allow geographers to enter a direct dialogue with the
performing arts, but at present geography seems to be one of several raw materials for a
performance oriented output. Within geography the effect seems to be more indirect, as

these initiatives seem to be interesting, thought provoking exercises that perhaps inform
other areas of writing, but there has yet to be an explicitly geographical agenda on per-
formance and environment emerging from these activities.
Places of ⁄ Site-Specific Performance

The second area of conceptual overlap between geography and the performing arts can
be found in literatures on place-based and site-specific performance. The genre of site-
specific performance emerged from a sense of dissatisfaction with theatrical convention,
particularly the binding landscape ⁄ representational lens and the set spatial configuration of
the relationship between performance and audience (Pearson 1998, 2010). By moving
performance outside conventional theatres, site-specific practitioners feel better able to
explore the embodied event of performance and to develop an egalitarian sense of
responsiveness to place and public (Wilkie 2002). Site-specific work is difficult to define
as it is so all-encompassing, but it generally highlights the ‘‘exchanges between the work
of art and the places in which its meanings are defined’’ (Kaye 2000, 1). Site-specific per-
formances often derive their form, content and identity from places, exploring their fea-
tures from different material, conceptual or historical perspectives (Pearson and Shanks
2001). The ‘site’ of site-specific work is various and can include architectural spaces such
as factories or power stations, settlements such as farms, villages, towns, or cities, specific
routes, such as, roads or pathways, and commercial places such as shops – but site-specific
work is also created in relation to the living communities of those places. However, this
sense of responsiveness may not always be harmonious as performances may expose con-
tested political and social issues or reveal new understandings of place (McAuley 2006a;
Wilkie 2002).
Although ‘‘site-specific theatre privileges place’’ the terms ‘site’ and ‘place’ are not nec-
essarily synonymous (Wilkie 2008, 89). However, in performance studies literatures they
often overlap, with site-specific work emphasising an embodied sense of being in and expe-
riencing the uniqueness of place. Geographers can help to unpack this relationship between
site and place – and have already begun to do so. For instance, in the realm of the visual
arts, Morris and Cant (2006) have examined how Miwon Kwon’s (2004) three paradigms
of site-specific art (phenomenological, social ⁄ institutional, and discursive) relate to notions
of location, locale and sense of place inherent within an understanding of place as ‘‘a
meaningful location’’ (Cresswell 2004, 7). In turn, they find that examining artistic pro-
cesses helps geographers conceptualise site as porous and fluid. In performance studies,
Mackey (2007) and Wilkie (2008) have similarly distinguished between site and place. In
tracing these debates, the first key difference is that the site-specific can encompass multi-
ple geographies; it is ‘‘an idea that is often produced as a result of the performative fram-
ing of more than one place’’ (Wilkie 2008, 100). Secondly, ‘site’ may be a set of
discursive debates explored through the body, rather than the material reality that geogra-
phers often associate with places (Cresswell 2004, 7). Geographers can therefore help to
refine broad terms like ‘site’ by comparing approaches and creating a dialogue with their
conceptual underpinnings as Morris and Cant (2006) have done in the visual arts.
Before exploring literatures on place ⁄ site and performance, it is worth briefly highlight-
ing that although the genre of site-specific performance emerged as an anti-theatrical
genre, theatres are still places of performance with their own geographies (McAuley
2000). There is a strong tradition of theatre history that examines the physical spaces and
stages in which theatre performances occur, demonstrating how these can signal different
‘‘socio-political and philosophical assumptions’’ through their aesthetics and organisation

(Carlson 1989; Wiles 2003, 10). Theatre historians and practitioners have also attended to
the use and structure of theatre spaces, analysing how the meaning of theatre can shift as
its location or architectural form changes (Schechner 2003; Wiles 2003). Similarly, sceno-
graphic or directorial practices can manipulate the organisation of stage space, particularly
when attempting to create different audience-performer relationships or stimulate emo-
tional responses (Collins and Nisbet 2010; Howard 2002; Schechner 1994). These activi-
ties testify to the importance of geography to theatre practice, communication and
interpretation, and demonstrate that theatre is socially produced – it is not a neutral place
of representation (McAuley 2000; Nield 2006).
The remainder of this section discusses literature on place and performance. It is
noticeable that in site-specific work performances emerge from, or are created for, a par-
ticular place. In contrast, geographical writings tend to explore how performance illumi-
nates place rather than being created in response to it. Geographers therefore ask slightly
different questions to those in performance studies by emphasising place. However, if we
demonstrate how place ⁄ site influences performance aesthetics and practices without losing
the geographical nuance, then our ideas will gain much wider currency beyond geogra-
phy. This is an important agenda because there are common areas of interdisciplinary
interest. Firstly, there is a concern with how the performing arts can evoke memories or
contest identities by engaging with place-based politics. For instance, geographer Katrinka
Somdahl-Sands (2008) examines the Mission Wall Dances of Jo Kreiter in San Francisco,
detailing how the dance used a past event to connect contemporary debates around gen-
trification in the Mission District to the area’s histories of displacement. In so doing, the
performance challenged processes of forgetting and exclusion, but also created new,
shared memories among the community ⁄ audience. Similarly, but in performance studies,
McAuley’s (2006b) edited collection Unstable Ground: Performance and the politics of place
explicitly demonstrates how a place-based focus is inevitably politicised in Australia owing
to the country’s settler history and its ongoing postcolonial contestations around memory,
displacement and Aboriginal rights. By focussing on remembrance ceremonies and perfor-
mances in places of trauma and violence, the collection highlights the ethical issues and
political ambiguities that performance brings to the fore.
This emphasis on the politics of performing in place is further demonstrated by Geral-
dine Pratt’s examination of Marxist theatres, forms that explicitly open up, and attempt to
rework, the power relationships embedded in place (Pratt and Johnston 2007; Pratt and
Kirby 2003; see also Houston and Pulido 2002; Vasudevan 2007). Pratt and Johnston’s
(2007) discussion of Practicing Democracy, an attempt to use Boal’s Legislative Theatre in
Vancouver, highlights the ambivalent political potential of this type of performance. Prac-
ticing Democracy occupied the City Hall, symbolically drawing upon and disrupting that
place’s authority in order to protest against cuts in social welfare. Yet when the theatre
company produced a report with recommendations for legislative change, the perfor-
mance became abstracted, moving into what could be termed a site of discourse. The
emplaced performance therefore challenged power relations but the decontextualised
report reinforced the authority of policy makers, highlighting the importance of the phys-
ical relationship between performance and place for articulating politics. Artistic processes
thus reflect, and literally work out, the tensions surrounding place, something further evi-
dent when considering how performance represents geographies of identity.
Much of the geographical literature on performance highlights that it represents people
and places in new ways as it establishes a safe space of creative play (Nagar 2002; Pratt
and Kirby 2003; Rogers 2010). Performance can thus be seen as ‘‘responding to and
interrogating ... the spatial dimension of contemporary identities’’ – but it may also elide

complications surrounding the politics of representation (Wilkie 2008, 89). This problem
is well demonstrated by Mattingly’s (2001) examination of a community theatre project
in San Diego, where the teenagers involved in the performance were not given control
over the representation of their identities or neighbourhood. However, by partaking in
performance, a sense of togetherness and shared emotional intimacy can be established,
something highlighted in accounts of dance and music inspired by non-representational
theory (Revill 2004, 2005; Wood and Smith 2004; Wood et al. 2007). This emotive
power of performance has the potential to shape identities, such as nationality or race, by
mobilising feelings of belonging, struggle and resistance (Revill 2000; Smith 2000; Wood
2002; Wood and Smith 2004). Yet performance can also complicate these feelings of
belonging. In her study of Australian music festivals, Duffy (2005) examines how perfor-
mance continually creates and disrupts connections with place, such that communal iden-
tities become highly fluid, and easily fractured by issues of inclusion and exclusion (see
also Saldanha 2005).
In the above research, performance occurs in particular places such as concert halls,
beaches and pubs, but these locations are not necessarily as central to the constitution of
performance as they are with site-specific work. Yet through performance, places can lit-
erally become synecdoches for other geographies and their identities – particularly nation-
ality. For example, the national theatres of Scotland and Wales no longer perform solely
in a theatre (unlike the National Theatre in London). These theatres create seasons of
site-specific performances, such that different places stand in for the nation as a whole.
Site-specific performances therefore use place to contest, rework, and hybridise what it
means to be Scottish or Welsh, providing complex mediations of geography and identity
(see Harvie 2005; Roms 2008; Wilkie 2008). The Scottish and Welsh national theatres
are therefore ‘‘not a building but a mobile idea’’ and promote a multi-placial conception
of identity (Wilkie 2008, 87). However, these site-specific performances are usually
bound to a single place and seem internally reflective – if a performance travels, for
instance, it is seen to lose some of its nuance and meaning.
This relationship between performance, place and travel is an emerging area of work
within theatre and performance studies. Movement reinforces the idea that places are por-
ous, but the implications of this geographical openness are yet to be fully worked
through. A 2007 issue of Performance Research on ‘Traveling Performance’ highlights the
challenges of conceptualising sited performances as fully mobile, particularly regarding
how performance can address the politics of encounter in places of flows, and how places
may stimulate mobility. Geographers and sociologists explicitly address these questions,
examining the relationship between stasis and movement whilst attending to different
politics of mobility (Cresswell 2006; Cresswell and Merriman 2010; Urry 2000 Urry
2007). Although studies of theatre and performance attend to how performances travel
and acquire new meanings (see Liz Schafer’s stage histories of The Taming of the Shrew
(2003) and Twelfth Night (2009)), geographical issues of circulation, directionality, and the
factors driving movement have been under-examined (but see Rogers 2011). There is
therefore great potential to develop a geographical account of the relationship between
performance, place ⁄ site, and mobility but the impetus perhaps lies with geographers tak-
ing ideas and approaches to performance studies. It is noticeable that geographical exam-
inations of mobility and performance that focus on particular performance forms, plays,
or individuals – especially where the body is central to the analysis – have been of great
interest in interdisciplinary workshops, if not yet in print (e.g. Cresswell 2006; Merriman
2010). To develop this intellectual exchange may require geographers to write more
about their analytical ideas in relation to ‘obvious’ performances and creative bodily

practices, analyse their performance-based exchanges and activities (Johnston and Pratt
2010), and use interdisciplinary outlets to do so (e.g. for work on the ‘Americas’ the
journal E-Misférica is an interdisciplinary journal published by the Hemispheric Institute
of Performance and Politics in New York).
City Spaces
The final area of interdisciplinary interest for geographers and academics in theatre and
performance studies revolves around the geography of the city. Cities are a particular type
of place where the performing arts are staged, but there are a variety of relationships
between performance and urban space. For instance, the performing arts may reflect the
material conditions and social exclusions within cities, reveal how global flows of capital
are integral to urban life, and can be central to the production, contestation and redevel-
opment of urban space. Different types of performance also mix together in cities, from
civic processions to festivals, from protests to general theatre-going. Our participation in
these performances shapes the city, such that urban space is continually re-created. As
evidenced above, much of the writing on the performing arts implicitly or explicitly
occurs in cities, but critics suggest that ‘‘the broadest and deepest implications of the
weave between the theatrical and the urban ... lack sustained exploration in performance
studies, urban studies and human geography’’ (Garner 2002; Solga et al. 2009, 4). In this
final section I review research on performance and geographies of the city to highlight
that this claim is partly overstated but also to argue that more work is needed to move
towards Harvie’s suggestion that performances do ‘‘more than demonstrate urban processes
... [they are] part of urban processes, producing urban experience and thereby producing
the city itself’’ (2009, 7 original emphasis; for a notable exception see Hamera 2007).
In thinking about the production of urban space it is apparent that performance is inte-
gral to infrastructural geographies of the city. Examining the spatial distribution of perfor-
mance cultures can offer a way to conceptualise the city geographically. Meiling Cheng
(2002) examines how the performance scene of Los Angeles reflects and reinforces the
city’s multicentricity. In Other Los Angeleses analyses how artists mobilize and create differ-
ent cultural places that gather people together. These centres operate autonomously, but
they also acknowledge and reinforce other centres of performance to help produce L.A.’s
polycentric urban structure (2002, 47). Similarly, Robinson (2010) maps the geographical
and temporal relations between different performance events in Nottingham, such that
the city is understood and constructed through networks of performance (see http://
www.nottingham.ac.uk/mapmoment). Theatre and performance also spatially segment
cities; think of the West End or the South Bank in London, or Broadway and Off-
Broadway in New York. Each of these areas is also inscribed with particular meanings
that affect the qualities attributed to the performances occurring within them. Similarly,
the location of a theatre can affect its sense of identity. For instance, the Barbican Centre
in London is indelibly linked to its position within the financial district of ‘The City’,
something reflected in its diverse and experimental programming that mirrors the cosmo-
politan and risky ethos of London’s financial centre (McKinnie 2009).
More problematically, the creation of performing arts infrastructures and districts relates
to wider economies of consumption and urban regeneration. Areas of diversity are
‘cleaned up’ to produce multi-purpose commercial spaces that displace the poor and less
powerful – something particularly highlighted by the pedestrianisation of Times Square in
New York (Bennett 2005; Harvie 2009; Román 2005). Performance is thus embroiled in
the politics of capitalism that underpin the city’s material infrastructure (Levin and Solga

2009). The contested relationship between performance, capitalism and the city has been
most recently and openly highlighted by the Occupy Wall Street protests that started in
New York and spread across the world. These demonstrations against social and eco-
nomic inequality have been made visible through the camps, speeches, and masses of
people who have ‘occupied’ sites associated with the capitalist accumulation of wealth
(for a geographical perspective on these events, see the Forum on the Occupy Movement
at http: ⁄ ⁄ societyandspace.com). Yet it is only recently that geographers have become con-
cerned with the antagonistic relationship between performative activities and the repro-
duction of city spaces and sites. Instead, there has been a tendency towards a more
romantic notion of how performance can envision, if not necessarily produce, equitable
and liveable urban environments. For instance, Merriman’s work on Anna and Lawrence
Halprin in San Francisco examines how these artists believed that choreographing peo-
ple’s movements could provide a means by which communities could engage with their
environment and with the process of urban planning (2010, 10). Lawrence Halprin’s per-
formance workshops both included the views and experiences of those living in an area
but also rethought ‘‘the role of, and relationship between, ‘experts’ and ‘communities’ ’’
(2010, 13). Halprin thus used performance as a mode through which city spaces could be
more democratically designed.
Geographical writings are therefore dominated by discussion of performance’s social
and political potential. When discussing the city, this work usually examines how street
theatre transgresses spatial borders and contests power relations. Reid (2005) for example,
examines how performance artist Sandra Johnston engages with Belfast’s sectarian spaces,
detailing how her performances work against the production of a spatial order that con-
trols, and can do violence against, the presence of women in public space. Performance
thus complicates and challenges the division between public and private, masculine and
feminine space in the city, with city streets viewed as places where this critique and con-
testation occurs (see Houston and Pulido 2002 regarding the use of street theatre, fasts
and protests to resolve labour disputes; Nagar 2002). Yet whilst street performance may
rework power relationships, it can also reinforce existing social hierarchies (Nagar 2002;
Pinder 2005). Street parades and civic processions, for instance, may display actual or
symbolic power, and reproduce divisions between groups (Robinson 2010; Wiles 2003).
Different performances and their effects thus come together in everyday spaces, reflecting
the contradictions of living in cities.
Despite this cautionary note, the over-riding emphasis in geography is on how city-
based performances can produce new forms politics and sociality. For instance, Duffy
et al. (2007) demonstrate how musical parades create ‘‘event-full moments’’ that encour-
age participants and audiences to clap, sing and dance, temporarily producing new forms
of community that work across difference (17; in performance studies see also Hamera’s
2007 work on dance in Los Angeles). Performances may also create new experiences of
the city, potentially reworking the mundane, everyday relations that produce the urban
(Loftus 2009). In particular, the act of walking through the city, especially when using
psychogeographical techniques of urban exploration, can reveal concealed histories and
access the surprising or overlooked production of city space (Battista et al. 2005; Fenton
2005; Hand 2005). Games, mapping, and events are playful engagements that ‘‘open up
different pathways and possibilities’’ through the city by emphasising active participation
(Pinder 2005, 390). Such performances thus imaginatively re-construct urban space and
provide opportunities for unexpected meetings or encounters.
In thinking further about this relationship between performance and the imagination of
the city, it is worth discussing performing arts festivals. These events have proliferated as

a way to build city identities and create ‘buzzy’ environments that attract tourists, creative
professionals and investment for regeneration (Evans 2003; Peterson 2009). Festivals are
often billed as unique place-based experiences and may define a town or city. Wangaratta
in Australia has become uniquely identified with its jazz festival, particularly among musi-
cians, and has built a reputation as somewhere special for them to meet, perform and
exchange ideas (Curtis 2010; see also Harvie 2005 on Edinburgh). However, both geo-
graphical and performance literatures highlight that performing arts festivals are frequently
elitist, as city branding produces both safe art (comfortable, familiar, not challenging) and
safe space (people only go to ‘nice’ areas of the city) (Jamieson 2004; Peterson 2009;
Quinn 2005b; Waterman 1998). As a result, ‘‘real opportunities for genuine engagement
with the culture and multiple realities of the place ... remain sidelined’’ (Quinn 2005a,
936). Although festivals are seen as integral to the image of cities, the contributions they
make to the production of urban space (in terms of facilities, regeneration impacts,
income, the identities of areas, or a sense of belonging for city residents) remain under-
examined (Quinn 2005a).
Cities are also places of great cultural, social and economic diversity, and there is
debate in the literature about the extent to which this is represented in performance,
especially at festivals. Festivals can promote diversity, particularly culturally, but this may
only be engaged with at a superficial level through spectacle or stereotype (Duffy 2005;
Gilbert and Lo 2007; Peterson 2009). In theatre and performance studies, research has
highlighted that government policy and market demand impact on festival programming,
shaping the direction of cross-cultural consumption (see Gilbert and Lo’s 2007 discussion
of the Adelaide Festival). More broadly, however, policy decisions around multicultural-
ism and immigration can also impact on how intercultural performances are enabled,
understood and represented in cities. For instance, Knowles (2009) details how arts fund-
ing in Toronto entrenches whiteness, keeping ‘other’ cultures in a static and idealised
state, rather than encouraging the emergence of an intercultural performance culture in
the city that engages the differences visible on the city’s streets. Performance can thus be
divorced from its urban context through funding structures that reinforce national
objectives.
The specific geographies of the city become a backdrop in these latter accounts, rather
than exploring how performance and urban space might be co-constitutive. However, a
future direction is suggested by Sotelo (2010) who details how intercultural communica-
tion was created during a walk on the outskirts of Bogota, Columbia. Here, a perfor-
mance was designed to enable interaction with difference. Being in a particular place
with people who had different understandings or attachments to that place, triggered
questions and facilitated dialogue. This grounding of performance in and around city
space therefore enabled interculturalism, rather than using performance to reflect an imag-
ined version of the city and its inhabitants. Geographers have similarly found that using
art and performance works are useful for unpacking the complexities of urban processes.
Again in Bogota, Till (2010) suggests that such works enable geographers to ‘‘think
through social arrangement, think through and experience how, when and where urban
places, stories and residues are mapped or ignored.’’ There is therefore scope for using
collaborations to consider how intercultural difference in performance explicitly relates to
different city spaces – as well as how urbanisation and redevelopment impacts on the
form, content, meaning and location of the performing arts. The full interplay between
performance and urban space would therefore benefit from further interdisciplinary
engagements.

Conclusion
The synergies between geography and the performing arts have thus been lively and
diverse, as explored here through a focus on landscapes, places, and cities. These areas of
research are differently accented but whilst they have been presented as discrete, they do
overlap, as evidenced in ecological perspectives on the city (Loftus 2009; Simpson 2008)
or the fact that cities are often places of performance – albeit ones that present challenges
for how performance might engage with cultural diversity, political economy and the built
environment (Knowles 2009; Pratt and Johnston 2007). Underpinning the three sections is
a common interest in how performance engages with people and politics through material
geographies (Somdahl-Sands 2006, 2008). There is also a sense that performances have
lasting impacts, whether on the environment, communities, or urban infrastructures,
despite being ephemeral events. The review has also outlined some specific areas where
interdisciplinary engagements might be taken forward. These areas include articulating a
geographical agenda on performance and the environment, delineating the conceptualisa-
tion of site and place, examining the relationship between performance, place and mobility
through a focus on bodily practices, or paying greater attention to how performance can
reflect geographies of difference and diversity in the city. Such suggestions can be collec-
tively characterised as highlighting the need to pay further attention to different geographies
of performance, in order that performance is not just viewed as a window onto geography
but rather that geography remains integral to the material event of performance.
Short Biography
Amanda Rogers is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Geogra-
phy, Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on geographies of the
performing arts, especially theatre, and is interested in how these art forms may be used
to express identity for different ‘Asian’ communities. She has authored papers on this area
for Cultural Geographies, Social and Cultural Geography and Annals of the Association of Ameri-
can Geographers. Amanda is currently working on a book length project about creative
geographies of transnational theatre, focussing on practitioners and performances that tra-
vel between the UK, the USA and Singapore. She was previously an ESRC Postdoctoral
Fellow at Royal Holloway, having been awarded her Ph.D. on ‘Geographies of Perfor-
mance and Identity in Asian American Theatre’ in 2008.
Note
* Correspondence address: Amanda Rogers, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London,
Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK. E-mail: a.rogers@rhul.ac.uk.
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Geographies of the Performing Arts: Landscapes, Places

ª 2012 The Author

Landscape and Ecology

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

conceptualised as sensory environments, paralleling geographical literatures that view

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

Places of ⁄ Site-Specific Performance

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass 6/2 (2012): 60–75, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471.x

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