What is your experience of your current city or town as a stage for performance? Put down your book and take a walk: spend 15 or 20 minutes traveling on foot, by bicycle, or in your wheelchair in your immediate environment. (Note: your current city might be your “campus city”, and that’s ok!) Take note of how you “act”, and how others act around you. Take stock of the conditions you encounter: physical barriers to access, places where you must pay to enter, places that are free to enjoy for all. Gauge how you feel about the places you encounter and the others you encounter in them. What memories does this place hold for you? Make some notes as you go; when you get back to your desk, write a “thick description” of your travels that takes either a “cultural materialist” approach, or a “performance studies” approach, to your walk.
In the middle part of this section we explored avant-garde realism as a spatial technology, one that is organized by a tension between looking at (and diagnosing events on) the stage from a cool distance, and feeling the embodied pressures of being trapped inside little rooms crammed full of stuff, props detailed to the most miniscule degree. What other modernist genres might you consider from a “spatial” point of view? Could surrealism, or expressionism, or absurdist drama be imagined as a spatial technology in a similar way? What kind of politics would you associate with your chosen genre’s spatial labour? (If you’re unsure how to approach this question, try picking a favourite play from outside the realist mode, and then use one of the key terms we explored in this section – the “topographic” play; “geopathology”; “embodied space”; “experiencing” – as a way in.)
Do you know of a real-life heterotopia? Is there a place in your world that holds the power to make space “other to itself”, to reveal the typically invisible social configurations and hierarchies of “ordinary” space? What features give it this critical power? (Is it a place where you might envision creating a site-specific performance? If so, what might that performance be about?)
