Site-specific performance shares many of the features of environmental theatre, with its agenda to make a cultural intervention into a geographical space traditionally unassociated with performance. However, it achieved currency as a name in the 1980s and 1990s to identify performance that was produced in non-theatre sites, aimed to engage directly with the meaning and history of those sites, or take its creative impetus from those sites, and reached audiences who might not normally come to the theatre. This shift in production practices reflected an increasing imperative felt by many theatre and performance makers to address local audiences in the face of advancing globalization. The Welsh company Brith Gof produced devised shows in rural outdoor sites (Tri Bywyd, ‘Three Lives’, 1995) and a disused urban factory (Gododdin, 1988–90), provoking audiences to think about the significance of these sites in Wales’s recent post-industrial economy and culture. Orlan’s choice of an operating theatre as her site for The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–93) invited audiences to reflect on various aspects of such a site’s usual use, including its gender divisions. Tinderbox Theatre Company’s convictions (2000) staged seven short plays in Belfast’s disused Crumlin Road Courthouse, site of many ‘Troubles’ trials, to reflect on issues of justice and Northern Irish identity in the context of a faltering peace process. Some performances exploit the novelty of site-specific performance to attract large audiences without necessarily developing a critique of the site – an example might be the Cirque du Soleil, which commonly exploits rather than interrogates the cultural cachet of the urban sites in which it pitches its tent. Physical proximity between performers and audience does not necessarily produce critical or democratic interaction. What such work does consistently do is raise questions about the effectiveness of different performance sites, asking whether performance is more effective in a ‘neutral’ space that can be adapted or in a specifically selected space from which it takes inspiration or to which it explicitly refers. From the RCTP
Image: Photograph © Toby Farrow