Out of Space

Out of Space: The rise of vagrancy in scenography
Performance Research, 18(3), 109-118. doi:10.1080/13528165.2013.818321
2013

When performance vacated the interior of the theatre to work with site – factory, shop, square, street, landscape – it not only shifted the practice of scenography, it left us to ask the following: do we construct the experiencing of scenography and performance through the contract of the theatre that is performer/spectator, seen/unseen, sensed/felt, light/darkness, stasis/movement, silence/sound and imagined/real? In this article I will propose that scenography, the body and spectacle become implicated through the spatial appearances of site-specific performance. The exploration of scenography within site-specific performance will not be based on making more dualities as above or more widely, a debate of formal space (theatre) versus informal space (site-specific), rather it will be about ‘positioning’ and ‘situating’ scenography. Positioning, it will be argued, is the resistance to fixity and permanence, conjuring scenography in a constant state of flux. Situating will be argued as the spatial exchange with spectator and performer through site and place.