Section One

Section One: Methodologies and Approaches

Summary

While the late twentieth century “spatial turn” is now a scholarly commonplace, considerations of space and place at the theatre lie at the heart of western debates about mimesis since the writings of Aristotle. Section One begins with a short “backstory” of space and place in dramatic theory before the later modern period; it reads Aristotle’s Poetics for its spatial politics and examines the political stakes behind the neoclassical “unity of place”. What does the quest for “unity” at the theatre do, socially and politically? Whose spatial imaginations does it serve, and whose does it marginalize? 

Following this brief historical framing, Section One turns to contemporary methodologies. 

First, we explore the role of cultural materialism alongside human geography’s “social turn” in developing materialist analyses of theatrical space and place in the second half of the twentieth century. Key thinkers discussed early in this section include Jen Harvie, Marvin Carlson, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Doreen Massey. The social/material turn leads us to the rise of Urban Performance Studies and the “creative city”, and the discussion outlines how cultural materialism, human geography, and performance studies weave together to generate the interdisciplinary methodology that shapes scholarship on urban performance in the early twenty-first century. Key thinkers discussed here include Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, and Richard Florida; important critiques of their labour by Doreen Massey and Jamie Peck are considered. This part of the section culminates in an extended discussion of critical work by Michael McKinnie and Marla Carlson. The former takes an economically-focused, and the latter an affect and memory-theory focused, approach to the limits of the “creative city” from within an Urban Performance Studies framework; together they demonstrate the flexibility as well as the interdisciplinarity of this methodology.

In the next part of this section, we turn toward the spatial orientations accomplished by theatrical genre, focusing on modernist realism and site-specific performance in turn. We begin by journeying together into Shakespeare’s Globe theatre on the Bankside in London: we think about the ways that theatre architecture subtly cues audiences to prepare for specific kinds of experiences once they are inside an auditorium space – and often, as at the Globe, to recognize the embodied, collective nature of theatrical space. Leaping from the English Renaissance into the late nineteenth century, we then enter the comparatively intimate, individualized theatres of stage realism to explore how avant-garde realism and naturalism oriented spectators to question previously orthodox distinctions between private and public space, as well as the social categories such spatial distinctions produced (such as man vs woman, and self vs “other”). Key thinkers and ideas discussed here include Henry Turner (“the topographic stage”), Stanton B. Garner Jr. (theatrical phenomenological and “embodied” space), Una Chaudhuri (“geopathology”), and Konstantin Stanislavsky (“experiencing”).

The final part of this section explores the legacies of environmental theatre (including site-specific and immersive performance) by linking these to the notion of “heterotopia” as a space of “alternate ordering” (the phrase is Kevin Hetherington’s) in which more progressive and equitable social relations become possible. We begin by considering both differences and similarities between environmental theatre and avant-garde realism, unpicking their separate (yet related) spatial technologies; Richard Schechner’s work on environmental performance is discussed, as is the critique of that work by Laura Levin. Next, we look at length at Michel Foucault’s influential concept of “heterotopia”, linking it first to Lefebvre’s important idea of space as a social construction (which thus might be constructed differently), and then to late twentieth century theories of theatrical ghosting. The section concludes with a thorough exploration of site-specific performance’s investment in theatre’s heterotopic potential, culminating in a brief reading of the 2017 Gate Theatre production of The Unknown Island.