Performance Perspectives:

A Critical Introduction

Editors: Jonathan Pitches and Sita Popat

 CHAPTER 2: SPACE
Introduced and edited by Scott Palmer

Introduction

Space is a fundamental concern of all performance practitioners, but as a

performance concept that underlies practice, it is rarely foregrounded. In this chapter
we examine a range of approaches to understanding the organisation of space in
theatrical work, its importance as a signifier and the way it can be manipulated to
make meaning for an audience. We shall explore the range of ways in which space
functions, from the practical arrangement of the audience and the design of the
performance area, to the ability of the space and the theatre architecture itself to
perform.

A central focus in this chapter is the role of scenography and the function of the
scenographer or theatre designer in the shaping and organisation of stage space in
performance. Scenography1 is an ancient Greek term originating from Aristotle who
informs us that Sophocles first introduced ‘skenographia’ to the stage (Poetics
1449a). The compound term derives from ‘skene’ (stage building) and the verb
‘grapho’ which means ‘to make line drawings’ or ‘write’. So the term ‘scenography’
might be considered not drawing for the scene but drawing in or with the scene. In
contemporary performance practice the term has come to represent the complex
interrelationships between space, object, material, light and sound which define the
space and place of performance. Scenography therefore goes beyond the traditional
art of ‘scenic design,’ with its connotations of creating pictures and illustrating the
stage with the use of painted backdrops for example. Instead the term advocates a
holistic approach to design for performance in which the design of space is central –
a space created for performing bodies to interact with rather than against.

                                                        
1  The term’s likely origin is between 469-456 BC when the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus were first
staged. For a detailed discussion of the origins and problems associated with the term see Beer, J.
pp.26-7 Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy, Contributions in Drama and Theatre
Studies. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.
Roman scholar Vitruvius c.25BC refers to scenographia as perspective in relation to architecture (De
Architectura Book1 Vol 2, 1970 p15) and describes how Aeschylus employed Agatharchus of Samos to
paint a perspective background for the stage in around 458 BC. (De Architectura Book VII, Preface,
p11.) The Renaissance architect and theatre designer Sebastiano Serlio also refers to scenografia as a
means of integrating the science and craft of architecture, scenery, and painting into a combined space
of both stage and auditorium. (Architettura Book II, 1545, p45).
Contemporary academic and scenographer Pamela Howard in her book What is
Scenography? asserts that this contested term lies at the heart of creative
performance processes:

Scenography is the seamless synthesis of space, text, research, art, actors,

directors and spectators that contributes to an original creation.
(Howard, 2002: 130)

This compositional contribution to the evolution of a theatrical event not only affects
the performer directly (e.g. how and where they move, what they wear), but also
fundamentally the way a performance is understood. It therefore has a profound
impact on the nature of the spectator’s experience:

Scenography is not simply concerned with creating and presenting images to

an audience; it is concerned with audience reception and engagement. It is a
sensory as well as an intellectual experience, emotional as well as rational.
(McKinney and Butterworth 2009: 4)

The scenographer is responsible for the construction and organisation of the stage
space as an elementary aspect of the creative process, not simply as a practical
solution to the staging. In this chapter we will consider a range of factors which
impact on this contribution and explore how space makes meaning in performance:

[S]pace is the first and foremost challenge of the scenographer. Space is part
of the scenographic vocabulary. We talk about translating space and adapting
space; creating suggestive space and linking space with dramatic time. We
think of space in action, how we can make it and break it, what we need to
create the right space, and how it can be constructed with form and colour to
enhance the human being and the text. Some play games with space,
searching for its metaphor and meaning in the quest to define dramatic
space.
(Howard 2002: 1)

In working with stage space, the scenographer must consider the very nature and
qualities of the site, - the place of performance. Since ancient history, architects have
wrestled with the fundamental problems inherent in organising stage space and
audience space and in creating structures in which performance events can be
housed. In the first section of this chapter, Dorita Hannah examines the nature of the
architecture of the space itself and how this organisation of space forms a critical
element of all theatrical events. Space is traditionally considered as a three-
dimensional extent in which objects and events occur, but this volume is never static
and its constantly changing nature suggests that we should acknowledge its fourth
dimension - time. Hannah writes about this dynamic in developing her notion of
event-space and how even what appear to be permanent spaces are changed or
destroyed through time. She provokes us through a series of examples to consider
how the space itself performs and how it needs to be considered as an integral
aspect of the performance experience, reminding us that the space is never fixed but
continually changing in an active state of becoming.

In the second section, Louise Ann Wilson concentrates on the role of scenography
and in particular on the creation of performance space beyond the theatre building.
This interview echoes many of the themes explored by Hannah, focusing on
examples from Wilson’s own work to explore the impact of the way theatrical space
is designed in site-specific work. A given playing space not only changes as
performers move within it, but the space itself also provides us with echoes of
previous events – be they memories of previous performances or traces of past
histories. Both Hannah and Wilson see space as central to their creative practices,
whether the space that they respond to is purpose built for performance or a found
space for which a performance is designed.

The last section of this chapter provides an overview of some key aspects of working
with space in performance, considering how approaches to organising space (as a
place of performance) and designing space (scenography) impact on the reception of
a theatrical event. Factors which influence our response to space and ways of
understanding the use of space in performance will be explored through specific
examples, highlighting key theories and practitioners for further study and
investigation.

Space As Event
The following section is written by Dorita Hannah, Professor of Spatial Design at
Massey University’s College of Creative Arts in New Zealand. As an architect and
scenographer her focus lies in the intersection between space and performance with
a specialization in the design of buildings for the visual and performing arts. Hannah
views the stage as a space to explore social, political and economic issues and the
role of the scenographer as “a theatre artist commenting on the contemporary
condition.”

Hannah examines the notion of Space as Event and asks us to consider the frame of
the theatre architecture in our understanding of the performance itself. Hannah
argues that we need to acknowledge the way that all spaces perform and that an
awareness of the spatial context existing prior to the performance event is essential.
This understanding of space not only provides a starting point which might then be
adapted through scenographic intervention, Hannah argues, but also provides a
basis for the radical re-evaluation of performance practices by challenging accepted
models of existing performance architectures.
Section 1
EVENT-SPACE: PERFORMANCE SPACE AND SPATIAL PERFORMATIVITY
Dorita Hannah

But one can say that there is no space, there are spaces. Space is not one,
but space is plural, a plurality, a heterogeneity, a difference. That would also
make us look at spacing differently. We would not be looking for one.
(Libeskind 2000: 68)

Performing Space
Space – whether a suspended pause, a blank area, an empty room or a limitless
cosmos – performs. As a concept theorised over centuries by philosophers,
scientists, artists and dramatists, space remains complex and elusive, although it is
the fundamental immaterial-material utilised by designers creating sites for theatrical
performance. Space is the stuff of architects (who construct it) and scenographers
(who abstract it); experienced by inhabitants (immersed within it) and spectators
(who regard it).

Considering sites that accommodate staged events, this essay outlines how space is
a performative medium, and therefore an inherently active entity, which reciprocally
acts on, and is activated by, its occupants who need not be physically present within
it. As a practicing scenographer and theatre architect, one of my ongoing projects
has been to develop the notion of event-space – a term that emerged toward the end
of the 20th century – in order to consider spatial performativity generally and
performance space specifically. Approaching space by way of the transitory event –
whether historic (epic incidents), aesthetic (theatrical displays) or banal (daily
occurrences) – realigns the static object of built form with the dynamic flux of
performance, thereby exposing an intricate system of active forces that undermine
architecture’s traditional role as a fixed, durable object designed to order space and
those who inhabit it.

I will therefore argue how, through the event, space is an intricate and active player
in our everyday lives. This notion of the ‘evental’ emerged from spatiotemporal
revolutions in 20th-century science, arts, and communication, whereby the static
spatialization of time shifted to a more dynamic temporalization of space, which
emphasised movement, relativity, and duration. Radical shifts in modernism exposed
space as a temporal event, undermining the discrete object of architecture, and
allowing us to perceive the built environment more in a state of active becoming than
passive being. The well-constructed playhouse now seems as meaningless as the
well-made play.

Event-Space and Spatial Events

The question of architecture is in fact that of place, of taking place in space…

an event.
(Derrida cited in Leach 1997: 302)

Event-space – bridging theatrical and spatial theory – becomes a useful paradigm for
articulating how space performs and how performance is spatialized by the event,
specifically in theatre architecture, long considered the ‘proper’ site of performance.
The term is attributed to contemporary architect, Bernard Tschumi,2 whose mantra
has long been “there is no space without event” (1996: 39). His alliances with
thinkers like Jacques Derrida, as well as his belief in the active nature of the built
environment, have served to influence and shape recent architectural theory as “the
discourse of events as much as the discourse of spaces,” thereby challenging
architecture to be more active (ibid: 149). This link between event and space
questions architecture’s traditional association with continuity, coherence, and
autonomy by focusing on time, action and movement. If performance is, as theorist
Elin Diamond (1996: 5) contends, both “a doing and a thing done” then ‘spacing’ –
like the words ‘building’ and ‘construction’ (a structure and the act of its making) –
represents both noun and verb: thing and action. Because action in space has a
reciprocal relationship with space in action, our banal everyday environments can be
perceived and utilised as continually fluctuating performances. This is further
confounded by how the so-called ‘real world’ is informed by the virtual worlds
emerging from various media and our own imaginations.

Considering performance space as ‘evental’ repositions built and imagined space as

both embodied experience and evolving time-based event, where the constructed
environment itself (whether architecture or scenography) is no longer perceived as a
static object but as a volatile spatial subject. A theory of the “event” (with its fleeting

                                                        
2
Although Bernard Tschumi’s specific mention of this term is not prevalent in his texts, K. Michael Hays
has cited him as its progenitor in Architecture Theory Since 1968, 216. Hays states in an interview that
“the term ‘event-space’ belongs to Tschumi.” Manifold 3, (Rice University Publication) Winter 2009:82
elusive qualities) therefore undermines the proper place of both theatre and
architecture, traditionally sited in the playhouse. Acknowledging that performance
occurs all around us in the everyday or quotidian world results in its un-housing and
desire to leave the conventional stage and auditorium that discipline the spatial
practices of spectators and performers; dictating how they act, re-act and inter-act.
So, while the dramatic event negotiates between real time and fictive time, existing
site and scenography - as well as between actors and actors, actors and audience,
audience and audience - the quotidian event focuses on what Tschumi refers to as
the “spectacle of everyday life,” (ibid: 22) which is neither singular nor isolated, but
fragmented, overlapping and mobile. As dynamic spatial action, event-space
operates between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the subtle and the spectacular,
the banal and the epic. Implicated in monumental, aesthetic and daily events, places
are shaped by significant historic moments, such as natural and human-made
disasters as well as socio-political and philosophical revolutions, which shift thought,
by dramatic spectacles that demand and manipulate public attention, and by the
overabundance of quotidian performances happening all around us.

The diverse nature of the event—as a turning-point, a dramatic presentation, and a

singular moment capable of being perceptually isolated amid the plurality and chaos
of reality—establishes the intricate system of forces at play in the constructed
environment that, operating in the realms of reality and possibility, are both actual
and virtual (see Grosz 2001: 12). This complex interplay is further complicated when
leaving the confines of buildings built to house aesthetic performances, the dramatic
event intersects more overtly with the multiplicity of the quotidian event-space that
often lacks the explicit architectural frame, collapsing the theatrical into the everyday.

This collapse opens up the ever-present abyss that haunts lived space, encapsulated
in the darkly veiled stage houses and black box theatres, which proliferated in the
second half of the last century. Built as an instrumentalized theatrical void, both
proscenium stage and black box negate the object of architecture itself by presenting
a symbolic location cut off from concrete reality. As dark floating worlds –
incorporeal, aspatial and atemporal – they are designed to admit the virtual, those
ghosts and gods we have summoned on stage since ancient times. Constructed
voids, they play host to the phantasmagoria and fleeting acts of theatre, undermining
architecture’s aim to be secure and eternal (see Phelan 1993).
The End of Illusion
How did this void open up in theatrical space? The 19th century was brought to a
close with the echoes of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation that
“God is dead” (trans., Kaufmann 1974: 95). As a seminal modernist event, the death
of God called into doubt the physical space of worship and therefore architectural
typology—“What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of
God?” (ibid). More radically, it emphasized the disappearance of any absolute
reference to a closed system of spatiotemporal coordinates previously defined by
Cartesian perspectivalism.3 This signalled the end of mimetic representation, which,
since the 16th century, had bound art, architecture, and theatre through
scenography, defining our ways of seeing and experiencing both architectural and
theatrical space. The framed perspectival construction within the 19th-century
proscenium arch simultaneously distances and centralizes the viewer in the event,
integrating the monumental architecture of the house with the pictorial architectonics
of scenery. The plane of the proscenium forms both window and mirror, beyond
which a perspectival world is artificially constructed through spatial collapse and
distortion. The spectator’s gaze apprehends a spatial continuum via geometric
projection that is dependent on a horizon line and vanishing point “where infinity,
aesthetics, mathematics, and theology meet on a unified plane whose grandeur and
perfection symbolizes God himself” (Weiss 1995: 59).

However, Nietzsche’s pronouncement declared the end of that classic age to be the
end of illusion, wiping away the rational, stable and homogenous space defined by
geometric projection. It coincided with a loss of desire to represent within the field of
art, as a mimetic crisis in which the world had become unrepresentable. This in turn
destabilized both architecture and the stage, neither of which could now play a role in
representing a closed, complete universe as a finitely constructed totality. The edifice
of classic representation was therefore in a state of slow and inexorable collapse,
reconfiguring how space is constructed not only for events, but also as events. Since
Nietzsche’s proclamation, the monumental theatre with its picture frame stage has
been continuously challenged and often abandoned.

The Empty Space

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this
                                                        
3
Cartesian perspectivalism is also referred to as the ancien scopic regime, whereby space, its subjects
and objects, are constructed and perceived through Euclidean Geometry.
 empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed
for an act of theatre to be engaged.
(Brook 1968: 11)

The idea of any given space as an essentially active site for theatrical encounter,
where action (of performer) is watched (by spectator), was articulated in 1968 by
Peter Brook as the archetypal “empty space”, which, rather than vacant and vacuous
is redolent with character and action. Every location contains its own particularities
that influence, shape, and are in turn shaped by multiple performances harnessed
through the spatial program and social codes of architectural inhabitation. These are
made more complex during the theatrical performance by the production’s mise-en-
scène4, which, often acknowledging the virtual (out of body, out of space and out of
time), is designed to admit other worlds – past, present and mythological.

Peter Brook’s treatise, which coincided with political and social rebellion enacted on
the global stage, was timely in its radical rethinking of the theatrical stage. In
drastically reducing the event to a direct and more confrontational spatial encounter,
Brook was insisting there was more at stake than comfortable middle-class
entertainment staged for people who sit submissively in the auditorium waiting for the
picture-framed performance to unfold before them. He was wiping away conventional
notions of theatre architecture that endured well into the 20th century and—despite
radical demands from the historical and second-wave avant-garde—continue to
persevere in the early 21st century. However, Brook’s demand was not for a
modernist tabula rasa in which architecture and its history are obliterated in favour of
a featureless spatial void, as evidenced in the continuing proliferation of black-box
studios since that time. Instead, his Empty Space challenged us to regard any space
(with its intrinsic character) not only as a site for performance, but also as a
performer in waiting. In reducing the staged event to a raw spatial encounter
between participants he was implicating the built and natural environment within the
event and highlighting the role existing space plays in both action and reception.

As a spatial event, architecture—traditionally perceived as rigid and enduring—

admits the more dynamic, ephemeral, and temporal aspects of performance. This
idea of the built environment as a complex system of fleeting and fluctuating forces
challenges the well-established notion eloquently expounded by Breton (1989: 4):
                                                        
4
Mise-en-scène, which literally means that which is “placed on stage”, folds scenography with
directorially determined performance to create a mediated experience for spectators.
 Theatre transcends architecture. The architectural framework may foster or
frustrate dramatic action but it is not the source of this emotion. Once the
theatrical spell has been cast, the limits of physical space become irrelevant.

Like many scholars focusing on theatre architecture, Breton renders it a secondary

scenic device that disappears when the lights are lowered. However the construction
of the live theatrical experience occurs through an intertwining of architecture,
audience, performance, and the fictive environment. It does not necessarily involve,
as McAuley (1999: 76) contends, an “inversion of interior and exterior” where
attention is shifted from auditorium to stage when the curtain rises and the non-stage
world “loses its power temporarily in face of the superior power of the attraction of the
performance.” Instead a more intricate spatiality is always at work, which encourages
or disturbs, and often complicates, the entire event dimension. This can be seen in
staged site-specific events where the inherent nature of a found-space remains both
relevant and powerful during the staged event: either co-opted as a major player or
silent and subtle in its performances.

Disciplinary Maneuvers
It is important to recognize that architecture mutely incorporates power systems into
the built environment—defining, regulating, and limiting our daily practices. This has
become acutely evident since the event of 9/11, after which our freedom of
movement and expression has been purposefully curtailed—locally and globally—in
the very name of “freedom.” It is interesting to note that architecture was deliberately
attacked in that decisive terrorist event for what it represented. Surrealist writer
Georges Bataille (1997: 21) maintained that architectural monuments were
themselves violent phenomena that had to be eradicated because—as static,
dominant, and regulated forms—they “impose silence on the multitudes” and “inspire
socially acceptable behavior, and often a very real fear.” The philosopher Michel
Foucault (1980: 149), who aligned the history of powers with the history of spaces,
highlighted architecture as a disciplinary mechanism as did his compatriot Henri
Lefebvre (1991: 57), who believed the “logic of space” conceals an authoritarian
force that conditions the competence and performance of the subject who can
experience it as a resistant element “at times as implacably hard as a concrete wall.”

Since the multileveled and gilded baroque auditorium (an architectural model that
dominated between the 16th and 19th centuries) was condemned for being
monumental and over-decorated, theatre architecture representing the status quo—
as state, municipal, commercial, or institutional performing arts venues—has
developed into a rigid and lifeless container that depends on the staged event to
enliven it: within the seemingly passive vessel of its auditorium, a homogeneous
plane of well-organized viewers’ gazes transfixed at highly composed images
enacted behind the technological frame of the proscenium stage. The archetypal
20th-century public auditorium persists in its construction of the supposed
homogeneity of what Lefebvre calls modernism’s “abstract space,” effecting “a brutal
condensation of social relationships” by reducing spatial practice to conform to its
apparent neutrality, transparency, and functional logic (ibid.). This is enforced to
detail through building laws and strict regulations for places of public assembly:
authoritative and authoritarian codes that fortify spatial control in the name of health
and safety, often foreclosing on architectural experimentation and resistance. Even
the contractual prerequisites of performers and the exigencies of surveillance
systems can present insurmountable obstacles for architects (Khan & Hannah 2008).

The repeatable format of the internationally recognizable public auditorium reinforces

behavioural expectations from venue to venue, and even from country to country. As
an inveterate model, with established conventions for staging, managing, and
producing performances, this cookie-cutter theatre is the result of accepted
interpretations of performance criteria—encapsulated by performance theorist Jon
McKenzie (2001) as aesthetic efficacy, organizational efficiency, and technical
effectiveness—that tend to limit innovation and place demands on the architect,
performers, audience, and management. This shifts performance into the realm of
behavioural expectations through social coding rather than aesthetic expression.
Global replication of this familiar model also excludes cultural difference and the
expression of varying spatial and theatrical practices specific to the local. It is
therefore my contention that the seemingly inert, neutral, and “democratic” form of
the archetypal modern auditorium is in fact none of these things. Instead, it actively
reduces the impact of audience and architectural presence, enacting a violent
gesture against any potential contribution, which is feared as a disruption to the
smooth running of the venue and event. Unfortunately, in October 2002 it took an
incredibly violent disruption to reveal the inherent brutality of public gathering space
when Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre was seized for three days by Chechen rebels,
illustrating how such venues provide an ideal site for “barricade hostage-taking”
(Dolnik & Pilch 2003: 589).5 Added to the tragedy of lives lost is the response of the
authorities after such terrifying attacks, who react by strengthening the barricades
rather than seeking more unbounded, communal, and fragile architectures that are
resistant to attack through their inherent openness and ephemerality.

Presencing Architecture
In Parables of the Virtual, Brian Massumi (2002: 79) writes: “What is pertinent about
an event-space is not its boundedness, but what elements it lets pass, according to
what criteria, at what rate, and to what effect.” Architectural theorist Ignaci Solà-
Morales (1997: 71) suggests we combat the brutal nature of disciplinary space with
“weak architecture” that utilizes the fleeting, vestigial, and ephemeral, to construct a
new type of monumentality “bound up with the lingering resonance of poetry after it
has been heard, with the recollection of architecture after it has been seen.” Solà-
Morales refers to the tendency for architecture to foreclose on chance by attempting
to create itineraries of control. In order for architecture to be transformed into a
dynamic and co-creative event, the aleatory and temporal, found in the theatrical
event, must be admitted: “This is the strength of weakness; that strength which art
and architecture are capable of producing precisely when they adopt a posture that is
not aggressive and dominating, but tangential and weak” (ibid). Solà-Morales’ notion
of weak architecture can exert its powers as both performative and resistant in
defying attack through transience, permeability, and anti-monumentality. This could
challenge architecture’s conformist tendency in times of fear and crisis. And yet,
ideally, theatre and the buildings that house it should provide a forum for open and
radical dialogue that critiques the status-quo. A free-flowing exchange of ideas can
be made present by architecture that operates figuratively and concretely as an
accessible platform.

Harnessing the virtual and housing the actual, an actively present architecture
operates between the intangible acts of performance and the rigidity of tectonic form.
As a combination of dynamic space and rigid form the building refuses to disappear
when the lights are dimmed, becoming an inscrutable force that must be considered
within performance. Theatre artist Tadeusz Kantor (1993: 275) acknowledged this
“reality” of the built environment and sought to incorporate its particular essence and
existence into his staged performance. The architecture was not to be neutralized by
                                                        
5 rd
On October 23 , 2002, the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow was seized by Chechen rebels who infiltrated
during the musical performance of Nord-Ost, interrupting and transforming the show into a prolonged
international spectacle of terror that ended after three days with Russia’s Spetsnaz soldiers storming the
building, having filled it with a narcotic gas that killed over 170 people.
staging conventions, but encouraged to contribute with its own architectonic
commentary.

Acknowledging architecture itself as a spatiotemporal event, with alternating and

overlapping realities, brings the slow time of built form into play with the varying
temporalities of performance and fictive space. On his Impossible Theatre Herbert
Blau wrote not only that “we must take the risk of letting the architect’s dreams infect
our dreams so that something really new may indeed come to it,” but that new
spaces, like any new art form, must turn on those who utilize them: “the question
remains whether our theatre artists can break out at the challenge were it to
materialize.” Challenging accepted models of theatre architecture allows us to
combat not only the rigidity of built environments but also the powers that shape
them. This would allow us to reclaim public space as The Empty Space of theatrical
expression, reminding ourselves that, no matter how empty it seems, space is full
and highly active.
Introduction to Section 2

Section 2 is an interview with artist and scenographer, Louise Ann Wilson. Wilson
creates site-specific theatre performances and designs and directs theatre, dance
and opera productions for conventional theatres and non-theatrical spaces both in
the UK and internationally. She is now the artistic director of the Louise Ann Wilson
Co. – a company that creates site-specific performance works that explore the
relationship between rural landscapes and human life events. The audience
experience is often central to Wilson’s work which is characterised by collaborations
with artists as well as experts from other disciplines not usually associated with
performance, such as neuro-scientists, geologists, cavers and sheep farmers. The
unique events which result from these creative collaborations frequently leave a
profound impression on those who witness them. Wilson’s innovative response to
place is fundamental to this experience, and lies at the heart of all of her creative
activity.

Between 1997 and 2008 Louise Ann Wilson worked in collaboration with Wils Wilson
as the company wilson+wilson. The company created a number of extraordinary
site-specific performances in locations across the UK in which their response to the
intrinsic qualities of place through the dramatic use of space was a central feature of
the performance experience. Indeed, these works were genuinely ‘site-specific’
because it would have been impossible to have created or performed them in any
other place. In House (1998) small audience groups navigated two abandoned
eighteenth-century worker’s cottages in a forgotten yard in Huddersfield town centre.
Mapping the Edge (2001) used the city of Sheffield as its performance space, and
took audiences on an epic journey across the city on foot, by bus and tram as three
interlinked stories unfolded around them. News from the Seventh Floor (2003)
involved an after-hours journey through Clements department store in Watford High
Street where the audience explored the length and breadth of the building, from a
hellish boiler room to the rooftop car park. Mulgrave (2005) required the audience to
undertake a demanding four-mile trek around a wooded hillside estate overlooking
the sea near Whitby.

In this conversation, Wilson begins by discussing her particular approach to

designing for building-based theatrical performances, but the rest of this exchange is
concerned with her work as a scenographer and maker of ‘evocative’ and ‘resonant’
multi-disciplinary, site-specific performance works. In focusing on House, and
Mulgrave, this material explores how Wilson’s innovative use of space enables
audiences to engage with the nature and histories of specific places and how through
performance they are encouraged to find new spaces and to rediscover familiar
places in a new light.
Section 2
SCENOGRAPHIC SPACE AND PLACE
Louise Ann Wilson in conversation with Scott Palmer

How do you work with theatre space?

My interest in working in response to place and with space has informed my

approach to designing productions in theatre spaces and non-theatre spaces alike.
Whether it is the Royal Exchange in Manchester, England, or a derelict chemical salt
factory in Essen, Germany, the space always provides some of the key starting
points for my scenographic work. Sometimes I have added to extant architectural
features. My design for Petrushevskaya’s Three Girls in Blue for example,
harnessed the evocative atmosphere and shape of the ramshackle White Bear
theatre in Kennington, London. The play is set in a leaky decrepit dacha, a room in
Moscow and in various rural locations. I lime-washed over the black walls and apex
roof of the main theatre space to give the impression of the dacha; I then covered the
floor with soil in which vegetables and weeds grew and gradually invaded the space;
I opened up surrounding rooms and corridors which were then crammed with
Russian-inspired objects and I added water pipes to those already suspended from
the ceiling which gradually sprang leaks throughout the performance until eventually
the space was engulfed in a dream-like rain storm and turned the earth to mud. With
a lighting transition and a shift in the performance language, the audience were
transported from the cramped interior rooms of the play into a melancholic, poetic
landscape that was Dostoevskian in atmosphere and scale.

On other occasions I have removed architectural elements of the space. At the

Unicorn Theatre, London for a production of Twelfth Night, my design responded to
the unseen physical features of the building. I discovered when working in the model
box that beneath the central floor of the theatre was a pit which I decided to open up.
I filled one half with water to create a pool of sea and raised the other half up and
planted it with a wild flower meadow. These two halves – split like twins – were then
joined by stepping stones of flotsam and jetsam (objects I found in the theatre’s prop
store) to create an island – Shakespeare’s ‘Illyria’ . By extending the usual seating
into ‘the round’, I found that not only the shape but the whole atmosphere and
dynamic of the theatre were changed.

How did you become interested in site-specific work?

I studied Theatre Design at Nottingham Trent University (1990–1993) where my
formal training was enhanced and informed by a culture of students creating work in
found spaces. Site-specific work captured my imagination and I created a number of
devised performances that took audiences into locations ranging in size from the
claustrophobic interior of a small broom cupboard, to a dungeon in Nottingham
castle, and Park Tunnel – a vast subterranean coach tunnel in which I created a
promenade production inspired by Persephone’s journey into Hades.

Looking back, these early pieces laid down the key themes, preoccupations and
methodologies that have continued to occupy me as a scenographer and site-
specific performance-maker. For instance, my work is frequently characterised by
the re-telling or making of mythic stories, typically involving a journey through or into
an underworld. All of this work originates from an in-depth investigation of a site and
is made in response to the physical, material, dynamic, architectural and atmospheric
features and qualities of the place for which it is being created. My work is
concerned with the nature of the audience's experience and seeks to create intimate,
multi-sensory experiences where small audience groups move in and amongst the
performance and travel physically with the action of the piece as it unfolds.

Looking back, these early pieces laid down the key themes, preoccupations and
methodologies that have continued to occupy me as a scenographer and site-
specific performance-maker. For instance, all my work then as now originates from
an in-depth investigation of a site and is made in response to the physical, material,
dynamic, architectural and atmospheric features and qualities of the place for which it
is being created. My work is frequently characterised by the re-telling or making of
mythic stories (made for and borne of a particular place), typically involving a journey
through or into other worlds. I remain concerned with the nature of the audience's
experience and seek to create intimate, multi-sensory experiences where small
audience groups move in and amongst the performance and travel physically with
the action of the piece as it unfolds.

Although the performances I create are exploratory in their staging and use of space,
my scenographic solutions can appear to be relatively ‘simple’ – a boat thrown up
into a tree top, a painted blue sky glimpsed on a concrete wall at the end of a
passageway, a police ‘crime scene’ set outside a solitary house. Frequently I seek to
find a juxtaposition of performer and space. In Mapping the Edge for example these
moments included a uniformed RAF officer and his WAAF girlfriend walking arm-in-
arm down a Sheffield street whilst kids on bikes and spiky-haired punks passed by,
and an exhausted Yemini woman making her way to the ‘workhouse’, glimpsed
leaning against a wall of colourful graffiti whilst her children (represented by puppets)
peered out from underneath her shawls.

Through my work I have found that each place, regardless of how ordinary it might
appear initially, is full of riches. I don’t use a space as a mere backdrop to the
performance but rather environmentally, that is as an integral part of the performance
itself. Within this dynamic environment, the audience can re-imagine the everyday
and see the familiar afresh. My concern is to create relationships between space,
performer and audience and to find ways of revealing, re-showing and re-enchanting
a place by saying: 'Look anew at what is here; witness the surface of things, and then
look again and you will see something more profound about this place and perhaps
about the world, and how we experience it, and our place within it’. This type of site-
specific work is born out of the place in which and for which it is made. Rather like
an archaeological dig, making work like this involves an approach to performance-
making in which I 'excavate' the performance 'out' of a specific landscape or place.

I first came across your work in House in 1998 when you and Wils Wilson had
recently formed the creative partnership wilson+wilson. House made a substantial
impact on the town and communities of Huddersfield. How did this piece come
about?

House was wilson+wilson’s first production, made in collaboration with the poet
Simon Armitage and the sonic artist Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner. The piece took
just over a year to make and was created for and performed within two derelict
nineteenth-century workers' cottages in Huddersfield. As London-based theatre
practitioners we wanted to return to our native Yorkshire in order to make a piece in
and about a place of dwelling and belonging. Both Simon and Wils are from
Huddersfield so it was there we began our search for a house, but it took nine months
and many detailed negotiations to secure a suitable one. The project became a
reality when the Kirklees Council Leader persuaded the chief executive of a property
developer to lend us two co-joined properties located in Goldthorp’s Yard. The
dwellings had been standing empty for years and were due to be renovated into an
upmarket public house as part of the locally contentious Kingsgate Shopping Centre
development, which was set to transform Huddersfield town centre.
With permission granted, and armed with a screwdriver, Simon, Wils and I found
ourselves ‘breaking into’ the boarded up houses and beginning a process of
excavation, in which the fabric of the building and the objects that we discovered
inspired the poetic and creative content of the piece. We incorporated this material
within the performance and found objects were exhibited alongside their imagined
histories. We undertook extensive research into the houses, discovering the names
and occupations of all the inhabitants since they were built in the early 1800s. The
realisation that 3 Goldthorp's Yard had been the Meetings Room of the Huddersfield
Naturalists' Society from 1866 to 1882 widened the thematic interest of House to
include the evolution of the species and a journey through deep time. This source
material was a jumping-off point for the artistic team, feeding our growing
preoccupation with time, change, the evolution of buildings and private space, and
raised questions relating to how we read the past. Many local individuals and
organisations became involved in the making of the piece, including the neighbouring
shop-keepers, workers and residents around Goldthorp's Yard, and in a wider sense,
the people of Huddersfield.

Can you explain how the performance of House unfolded?

An audience of fifteen journeyed from space to space, room to room in a piece which
combined visual art, installation, poetry, live performance, live and recorded sound
and music. It was performed over five weeks by a company of four actors. The
piece began with a walk from the nearby Lawrence Batley Theatre to Goldthorp's
Yard. Once inside the houses, the audience progressed through the rooms,
sometimes split into groups of five, sometimes brought together as one audience,
whilst events and images unfolded around them. Fragments of human stories past,
present and future were interwoven to create a rich narrative texture: (See also Figs.
5 & 6.)

You enter the performance space by opening the front door. An old man sleeps in
front of the fire, surrounded by the shored up fragments of his life. You can hear his
breathing. On the mantelpiece a clock is ticking loudly. Books maps and paintings –
Genesis and Darwin provide clues to how far we will travel. There is a model of the
Beagle, fish in a tank and two finches in a cage. We hear a poem ‘To the Occupier’,
written in response to the un-opened letters, dating back over many years which we
found on the door mat when we first entered.
 Figure 3: House created and produced by wilson+wilson (montage 1)
[Copyright: Fiver]

Top left – The Attic, [..] then rock that chair forwards and upwards off its feet, and let fly
(extract from ‘Bird Brain’s Big Night In’ by Simon Armitage.)
Top centre – Photo from the first expedition into number 5 Goldthorp’s Yard, Huddersfield
Top right – Old Man and Woman (Leader Hawkins and Ruth Mitchell) in Eden eat apple pies
whilst playing Snakes and Ladders
Middle left – Old Man (Leader Hawkins) in the Front Room nodding off over ‘The Origin of
Species’
Middle right - Young Man (Nick Bagnall) evolving from Ape to Man swings from the bathroom
ceiling to the floor
Bottom left – Scientist/investigator (Nicky Barnfield) examining, dissecting and labelling
objects found in the house
Bottom right - Woman (Grace Mitchell) conjured up from memory by her son/lover (Nick
Bagnall)
 Figure 4: House created and produced by wilson+wilson (montage 2)
[Copyright: Fiver]

Top –Man (Nick Bagnall) preaching on the nature of time in the cellar whilst fish swim at his
feet and rain falls from the ceiling pipes
Middle left – The ‘Huddersfield Half Sheep’ amongst found objects in the Specimens Room
Middle right – Scientist/collector/investigator (Nicky Barnfield) in the Specimens Room
dissecting found objects
Bottom left – Seth Moseley (Leader Hawkins) painting a botanical study of a Primrose
Bottom right – Child’s jacket and light bulbs found in the house during the first ‘excavation’ of
the house
In the tiny kitchen a young woman stands at a sink of icy water peeling potatoes –
her hands are red and chapped. She speaks as she dreams of escape and gazes
out of the window, but rather than looking across the hills to Castle Top, as was once
possible, she cannot see beyond the solid stone wall of the Lawrence Batley Theatre
which when built was the largest Methodist Chapel in the world.

You descend stone steps into an even smaller cellar. Lace, thread, tapestry and
needlepoint catch the dim light from the sewing machine. A doll’s face found in this
room peers out from the wall. A dodo egg nestles in the folds of a christening dress,
and a spidery voice caught in the thick stone walls whispers a magical web of
dreams and of escape.

Upstairs the wall of the bathroom has been cut open and we peer through glass to
see a man wearing pyjamas suddenly swing down from the ceiling and past our
noses like a live specimen in a case. He evolves from ape to human through a few
minutes of precisely choreographed and executed movement.

In the bedroom an old woman sits at her dressing table in warm candlelight. The air
is heavy with the evocative perfumes of face powder, rouge and cologne. A young
man bursts in. He is dressed in black and as the poem is spoken you realise that he
is dressed for her funeral.

We follow a sound that takes us up to the attic – someone has just left … but not by
the door. The old man’s pipe and slippers hang in the air, the floor is covered with a
young boy’s toy aeroplanes (cut in half), the music is airy and meditative, you hear a
poem about evolution spoken by the voice of the old man’s voice – a poem of finger
tips becoming feathers, of a desire to fly.

You crawl through a hole in the wall into a different space. It is a laboratory, full of
found objects which have now become specimens: an archaeology of Goldthorp’s
Yard. Each one is meticulously labelled, numbered and classified. You realise that
an experiment is in process here: an experiment into the nature of time. A young
woman scientist sings a song like a nursery-rhyme to herself as she works endlessly
on her lonely obsession. She is dissecting objects, cutting them in half and placing
scrapings of them under the microscope in search of their essence and the
memories they hold. There is a [pre Damien Hirst] sheep cut in half and a half
hedgehog, and in the corner Seth Moseley is studiously painting specimens of local
flora.

In a small room, beyond a heavy curtain, you put on a headset. The poet’s voice
speaks in your ear a poem about breaking down the door and entering the house for
the first time. The incident turns into a polar expedition, a desert trek, an odyssey.
Slides flash up on the walls: pictures of the derelict, rubbish-filled house, interspersed
with Antarctic vistas, icebergs, hazy desert horizons and lonely lunar landscapes.

Dark, pulsating music draws you downwards and you descend two steep flights of
stairs into the cellar. A man greets you from behind a broken window – a preacher?
A mad scientist? He starts to speak – a sermon about time in which you are ‘both
witness and proof, audience and evidence, observer and specimen in the same
breath’. Time unfurls before you and behind you as he speaks. You look down to
find that you stand on the edge of a black abyss. It suddenly fills with light and you
see that it is a swamp filled with brightly coloured fish, swimming at your feet.

You climb upstairs, into the light, where an ancient couple – the old man and woman
that you have met before – are sitting drinking tea and playing snakes and ladders in
the Garden of Eden. Real grass grows under their feet, there are primroses and you
can hear birdsong. The young couple are there as well, putting the finishing touches
to the walls of this, their new home. The walls are painted with the Huddersfield
skyline in beautifully rich blues, greens and pinks – it is the once visible view. All four
actors speak directly to the audience, a poem about their lives and all our lives: the
past, the present and the future.

The space was a fifth, silent performer in this piece, and audiences responded to this
key element of the work. What did your audience make of the performance?

Audiences came from far afield and from just around the corner. We often found the
people who came did so because they had a personal connection to the place or
were intrigued by what we were doing. Some were former residents who brought
with them memories of growing up there; one day three sisters in their seventies and
eighties came to re-visit the house in which they had lived in the 1920s. There were
also a few accidental ‘guests’; on one occasion an inquisitive, elderly lady who was
out shopping was ‘scooped up’ with the audience and only towards the end of the
piece did she call out ‘Can I leave now, I have bus to catch?’!

Following each performance we asked the audience to write their comments in a

visitor’s book and their responses included: ‘A new emotional experience – it opened
parts of my mind and senses that other media has never touched before’; ‘it was one
of those occasions when you know theatre is the essence of life’; ‘very moving: I
know much more about what it is to be human’; ‘it was so evocative, so compelling:
the resonances live on for some considerable time afterwards’.

House demonstrated that site-specific performance of a particularly poetic and

innovative kind has the ability to juxtapose many different references which can bring
to the surface deep layers of personal and cultural memory. The overwhelmingly
positive responses from audience members indicate that people’s identities are
inextricably linked to their sense of place, and that place itself holds the memory of
the people who have dwelt there.

In complete contrast, in Mulgrave (2005) you chose to locate your performance in a

heavily wooded part of the North Yorkshire coastline!

Initially inspired by Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees where the world is seen
from a tree top perspective, Mulgrave came about because we wanted to create a
piece in rural North Yorkshire that took audiences up into the tops of some trees from
where they could look across open sea whilst being close to the sky. We were
interested in how naval explorers such as Captain Cook, native to this part of the
world, traversed the oceans by astronavigation; how boats such as The Endeavour
were built from the wood of different types of tree and how many maritime journeys
were dedicated to bringing non-native plant specimens back to the UK. To add to
these lines of enquiry we discovered that Whitby was home to the crow’s nest.

With all these ideas in hand, and after an exhaustive search, we discovered, by
happenstance, the well-hidden Mulgrave Woods a few miles north of Whitby.
Working closely with poet Amanda Dalton and composer Hugh Nankivell, our early
visits to the woods soon revealed unexpected treasures that shifted and informed our
ideas and creative thinking about the piece. As well as having inspired many local
folk stories and myths they contained an astonishing array of tree species from
around the world and were the home to two castles, a hermit’s cave, two valleys, two
 Figure 5: Mulgrave created and produced by wilson+wilson [Copyright: Dominic Ibbotson]

Top left – ‘The Boy Who Ran From The Sea’ (Asif Khan)
Top centre – Carriage conveying Joseph Banks, Omai the Polynesian and Sea Captain
Phipps into the woods
Top right – Mrs Clough (Sally Armstrong), amateur naturalist gives a talk on Shield Bugs
Middle left – Gull, the feral girl (Cerianne Roberts) on castle ruins
Middle right – Sea Captain Phipps (Martin Pirongs) surveys the horizon.
Bottom left – Victorian Girl (Cerianne Roberts) on the lawn with ‘stolen’ items
Bottom right – Footman (Deka Walmsley) and Victorian Girl (Cerianne Roberts) in tree house
rivers and extensive pictorial landscaping designed by Humphrey Repton. We read
accounts of visits by Joseph Banks the plant collector, Omai ‘the noble savage’ –
brought back from his Tahitian island on one of Cook's ships – and the story of
Maharajah Duleep Singh who, following military defeat in India, had been forced to
give up the famous koh-i-noor diamond which was re-cut and incorporated into the
crown jewels by Queen Victoria. Duleep Singh hired the Mulgrave estate, walked his
elephants on the beach and took to dressing in the style of an English country
gentleman.

Gradually over many months we wove this research into a production that was
deeply rooted in and inspired by the woods, their atmosphere, their topography and
their stories past and present, and so created a piece where, travelling mostly on foot
and sometimes on six-seater buggies, audiences of 40 were taken on a four-mile
journey whilst music, visual images, live action, song and installations unfolded
around them. Their journey – from the sea, into the woods, and back down to the
sea – was like a great wave, and was fundamental to the structure, narrative and
visual imagery of the piece.

The woods themselves were stunning and dramatic so the designed ‘worlds’ I
created were placed in specific locations or experienced whilst on the move. Many
had a dream-like quality: a ghostly-suited drowned man walks in the river searching
for his life; a colourful rickshaw rattling past carries an Indian dowager as hunters
with nets and guns congregate in the woodyard before speeding off in a Landrover; a
fishing boat and buoys are seen marooned in the tree-tops and shoals of drift-wood
fish are suspended amongst the branches as if the woods had been engulfed by a
huge wave; a summer tea-party is seen and the Maharajah appears atop an
elephant; a feral girl peers from the undergrowth where she hides-out from
conventional society; we see trails of stones and chairs set out for a woodland
lecture; Banks leaps from a horse-drawn carriage laden with plant specimens; a girl
perches on a platform in an oak tree surrounded by hanging objects ‘stolen’ from the
castle. (See Fig. 5)

Recently you have established your own company and are exploring new creative
possibilities. How does your current work with the Louise Ann Wilson Co. differ in
approach?
My work is still concerned with making performances through an extended period of
immersion in, and investigation of, a chosen place. I have recently embarked on a
series of new works which focus on the rural landscape as a place for performance in
which the relationship between human beings and the environment can be re-
imagined. These works seek to explore ways in which live performance can
dramatise, articulate and reflect upon significant life events, creating multi-sensory
experiences which make resonant: the life experiences of the people of the locality.
The form, shape and content of the pieces respond to the physical nature of the
landscape of a place (which could cover many square miles), its geology,
topography, geography, history and archaeology. The works incorporate the
experiences and ‘knowledges’ of people who through living, working or spending
leisure time there have intimate and specific understandings of the place and its
landscape. And it is their activities, combined with different live art forms that
become the tools through which the piece is constructed and performed.

You describe yourself as a scenographer? What does this mean for you?

Even when working as a designer for theatre and opera my work involves more than
what is often 'traditionally' seen as the work of a designer, i.e the design of the
costumes and set. In addition to creating the visual and spatial landscape of the
production, I am equally interested in the performance language, the soundscape,
the lighting and the relationships between the space, the performers and the
audience – elements that fuse, juxtapose or interweave to create the physical world
of a production. If I am not directing, I work closely with the director, and always in
close collaboration with the lighting designer, sound designer, composer and
choreographer in order to create the whole 'world' of the piece.

I have only recently begun to use the term scenographer when describing myself and
as the term finds currency it becomes increasingly helpful to me. My work combines
and synthesises many different aspects and disciplines and it feels inadequate to
categorise it using the more conventional, and a times frustratingly undervalued term
of ‘designer’. When I am making site-specific work I describe myself as an artist and
scenographer and I credit myself as the creator and director of the work because I
envision the whole production.

I think the current discourse around ‘what scenography is’ makes it a good time for
practitioners such as me to evolve and define the scenographer as an artist with a
unique set of creative, technical and collaborative skills with an inter-disciplinary
approach to theatre and performance making.

Acknowledgement
All wilson+wilson performances were co-created by Louise Ann Wilson and Wils
Wilson
Websites: http://www.wilsonandwilson.org.uk/
http://www.louiseannwilson.co.uk/
Section 3
AUDIENCE SPACE/SCENOGRAPHIC SPACE
Scott Palmer

The two perspectives on performance space in this chapter raise some important
questions about how we use space in contemporary performance. This section
attempts to draw some parallels and highlight a number of associated factors which
impact on our understanding and response to space in performance.

Performance Space and the Audience

The Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991) suggests that place emerges as a
particular form of lived space – and that such places are created and defined through
the distinctive activities which take place there. Michel de Certeau (1984) also argues
that place is a practiced space and that space becomes place when it develops
significance by its inhabitants or users. The theatre then would seem to be more than
an ‘empty space’ but rather a practised space for bodies to perform and to be
observed within.

The theatre (from Greek ‘Theatron’ or ‘seeing place’) is both a noun and a verb. It is
not only a place which is defined by the activities that it contains, but also by the way
in which space is organised within it – both onstage through the scenography which
establishes the world of the performance and the overall qualities of the space of the
theatre itself. The relationship between the architecture of the space, the positioning
of the audience space and the stage or playing area dictates the very nature of the
experience that the audience will have in performance. These complex
interrelationships condition the reception and extent of audience engagement and
are of fundamental importance, especially as once established the staging conditions
are rarely able to be changed during a performance.

I recently attended a performance of The History Boys at the Quarry Theatre at the
West Yorkshire Playhouse and was seated high up towards the back of the
amphitheatre-style auditorium. Whilst this meant that I had a good overview of the
stage and could appreciate the way in which the entire space was used both during
and in between scenes, I felt distanced and detached from the events on stage.
During the interval however, I was able to change position and moved to an empty
seat in the front row. The second half of the performance was experienced therefore
from a totally different perspective. With this new proximity to the stage, I was more
fully engaged in the dramatic action whilst also able to notice the subtler nuances of
the actors’ performances which had not been possible from the rear of the
auditorium. The play felt like a totally different experience.

The relationship between performers’ space and audience space is a primary

concern of architect and theatre consultant Iain Mackintosh, who argues that there is
much we can learn from ad quadratum geometry, a classical system of proportions
based on the square. It was employed by Renaissance theatre architects and is
typical of the 18th century Georgian Playhouses such as those at Richmond and
Bury St Edmunds in the UK. In these spaces the proscenium divide is equidistant
from the rear of the stage and the back wall of the auditorium. This ensures that the
actor, when standing on the forestage, is positioned at a critical intersection - in a
powerful sacred space or vesica piscis at the centre of the whole space’s volume
(see Fig. 6).

Figure 6: Sacred Space (after Mackintosh) [Copyright: Scott Palmer]

Ad quadratum geometry shows that C18th theatres are focused on the ‘vesica piscis’. The thrust or
apron stage extends beyond the proscenium to create a powerful area where the space of audience and
performer intersect.
i) Philosophy ii) Geometry iii) Plan of C18th theatre space

The relatively small scale of these playhouses ensures that the audience member is
never far from the playing area, and this proximity helps to ensure their success as
performance spaces for audience and performers alike. This shared sense of
intimacy suggests that there is a clear link between the feeling of such spaces and
their overall volume. The end-on arrangement, where the audience is arranged at
one end of a space and the performance takes place at the other, originates from the
indoor spaces converted for theatre since the Renaissance. These ‘found’
rectangular spaces such as halls or tennis courts suggested a particular arrangement
of audience and performers which has become the dominant format for Western
theatre spaces.

The introduction of the proscenium formalised this relationship by segregating the

players from the spectators. The auditorium therefore became a separate physical
space to the stage area, which could then be isolated further by the introduction of
the curtain. Theatre buildings with the characteristic picture frame stage dominated in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whilst this form enabled the viewpoint of the
spectator to be easily controlled, it created a legacy of a theatre building which as
Hannah suggests, can be little more than “a rigid, lifeless container.” Crucially, the
proscenium divide prevents the spectator from directly experiencing the space that
the performers inhabit.

A conventional theatre experience displaces the senses from the word go.
We sit in a dark auditorium, watching actors in costume and make-up move
about a set under artificial light, and willingly suspend our disbelief […]
Though conventional theatre-going is a real time, real space experience and
thus has the potential to be sensually immersive, it is more often than not an
audio-visual experience that offers little to the other three senses.
(Hill 2006:48)

In contrast alternative arrangements of playing area and audience area seek to offer
a more dynamic relationship between player and spectator in which the sense of
illusion and theatrical artifice is diminished. The thrust stage, where the stage area
advances into the auditorium and the audience are positioned on three sides, was
used in both Greek amphitheatres and Elizabethan playhouses – and regained
currency in the twentieth century. The arena or island stage where performances are
staged in-the-round is also an ancient arrangement of performance space which,
when championed by practitioners such as Stephen Joseph, has resulted in dynamic
permanent theatre spaces such as Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre.

Where performance space is not organised in such a formal way, dramatic action
happens within and around the spectators in shared space. Richard Schechner
coined the term ‘environmental theater’ to describe such work, which developed from
Alan Kaprow’s Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The re-evaluation of
the performer-audience relationship is at the heart of such work, which although
considered by some as ‘experimental’ builds on a long legacy of ‘non-frontal’
performance styles employed in folk and non-Western theatre. Although not
continuous, this environmental tradition extends back throughout the history of
theatre (Aronson 1981: 15) where the divisions between audience and performance
space have been blurred. There are clearly times when the need for less-rigid and
more spontaneous styles of performance-making seem not only to be relevant but
vitally necessary. In the UK this has been evidenced in the work of companies such
as Punchdrunk and Shunt, by the growing interest in making performances outside of
theatre buildings and by the proliferation of city-wide celebratory public performance
festivals.

De La Guarda’s Villa Villa (1998) was a promenade-style multi-sensory performance

which has been adapted for a variety of spaces throughout the world. Its arrival in
London appealed to the zeitgeist by offering a carnivalesque celebration of life in an
Artuadian rave-like experience that proved particularly popular with youthful
audiences. Immersed within a theatrical environment, which was at first partly
obscured by a gigantic paper ceiling, the audience were surrounded by performers
who bombarded them from all directions, including from above on aerial ropes. In
separate parts of the performance little plastic toy objects rained down onto the
audience, water was sprayed and audience members were assaulted by light, sound,
and wind. The audience became physically incorporated into the performance in a
number of ways; encouraged to dance along with the performers to a heavy Latin
drumbeat or lifted above the floor by performers on ropes in an extreme sensory
experience.

Performance Place and Scenographic Space

Whilst promenade-style or immersive environments offer a radical alternative to the
more traditional and static relationship of performer and audience, the use of a
specific place for performance introduces further qualities to the experience as we
have seen from the work of Louise Ann Wilson. The feelings stimulated through site-
specific work are evoked through an embodied response to the particular space.
Often it is precisely the richness of this phenomenological, multisensory experience
of place that makes the event so memorable as visual, aural, olfactory and tactile
elements become an integral and often heightened part of the audience experience.

The poignancy of the final scene of Mulgrave (2005) was created through the
combination of live music, the visual framing of the action and the physical sense of
place experienced through our bodies. The sea could be smelt, the wind felt on our
faces and, standing on a grass bank, our legs ached from the distance travelled and
the range of surfaces which had been traversed during the performance. We
watched the drowned man, still dressed in a suit, stumbling despairingly in the river
past us and out to sea, where he disappeared into the waves. (See Fig. 7.)

Figure 7: The final moments of Mulgrave [Copyright: Dominic Ibbotson]

The Maharajah Duleep Singh’s elephant crosses the bridge at Sandsend whilst ‘The Boy
Who Ran’ (Asif Khan) returns to the sea.

The sense of taste had also been invoked earlier in the performance as a cup of tea
had been served in the ruins of a 13th Century castle. This mid-performance ‘interval’
in the journey had a practical function but also worked on another level as the taking
(and tasting) of tea suggested direct connections to key themes of the performance
and linked the exotic, non-native plants of the estate to English social customs and
the histories of the sub-continent. Scenographic elements which acknowledge the
sensory and stimulate embodied responses are able to evoke profound responses
and create meaning through drawing subtly upon the themes of the piece.

Space is traditionally considered as a three-dimensional extent in which objects and

events occur, but this volume is never static and its constantly changing nature
suggests that we should acknowledge its fourth dimension - time. In section 1 of this
chapter, Hannah addresses this dynamic in developing her notion of event-space,
explaining how even what appear to be permanent spaces are changed or destroyed
through time. She urges us to think again about the apparent permanence of
architecture and in particular the playhouse in relation to the fleeting moments of
theatrical activity which are staged within it.
A given playing space not only changes as performers move within it, but the space
itself also provides us with echoes of prior events – be they memories of previous
performances or traces of past histories. Louise Ann Wilson draws on these past
events as rich material in her site-specific work, but theatre buildings also have their
own unique echoes whether they be Ariane Mnouchkine’s adapted Parisian
gunpowder factory La Cartoucherie, or Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord in the same
city where the theatre’s past has been consciously exposed and can be seen etched
into the fabric of the auditorium walls. Each theatre space therefore has its own
particular history that forms a part of each performance - one cannot for example
escape from reflecting on actor-manager Henry Irving when attending a performance
at London’s Lyceum Theatre. His presence is also etched, both literally and
metaphorically, into the very fabric of the space in which he practiced in the late
nineteenth century.

Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) writes about the sensual, and emotional dimensions of space and
our unseen attachments to it. We assign particular feelings to places which may be
evoked by fleeting moments which touch our consciousness:

Intimate experiences lie buried in our innermost being so that not only do we
lack the words to give them form but often we are not even aware of them.
(Tuan 1977: 136)

These barely remembered feelings can create a poignancy which can be evoked
through the experience of theatrical performance. The emotional attachment to
place, known as Topophilia, is evident in my own unseen attachment to a bland
street in Huddersfield for example. I cannot walk along it without remembering
wilson+wilson’s extraordinary House. Even though the space in which that
performance occurred has long since been lost to commercial development, my
experience on a winter’s night in 1998 has created an intangible bond to the locale.

A physical response to space is central to our understanding of performance:

We are spatial creatures; we respond instinctively to space…it is the

apprehension of space that may be the most profound and powerful
experience of live theater although, admittedly, it is one that is most often felt
subconsciously.
(Aronson 2005: 1)
Punchdrunk draw directly on this practice through allowing their audience freedom to
choose what they watch and where they go within the spatial environments that they
create. The audience is therefore not viewed as passive but instead is encouraged to
roam the performance space experiencing and exploring the unknown:

What we do differently is to focus as much attention on the audience and the

space as we give to the performers and text.
(Punchdrunk website)

Scenographic space was the key component of Punchdrunk’s It Felt Like a Kiss
(2009) in which small groups of audience explored six floors of a central Manchester
office building. A multitude of spaces were experienced, in sequence rather like an
exhibition and strangely largely devoid of human performers. The spaces provided
evidence of human activity with their many objects, film sequences, sounds and
smells which were redolent of 1960’s America and the audience were left to piece
together a series of narratives rather like a detective story. The journey through these
designed spaces culminated in an experience akin to a visceral computer game in
which their senses were gradually heightened. In navigating labyrinthine corridors the
small groups of audience found themselves treated like rats in some large-scale
laboratory experiment. In this uncomfortable world, where the American Dream had
clearly turned to nightmare, the audience were chased by a man with a chainsaw,
before finding themselves in a dark basement where they became systematically
segregated in space. Passing through a series of turnstiles, the audience were no
longer able to rely upon the security of the group as it became repeatedly subdivided
until, in conventional horror movie style, each individual found themselves, in a
narrow black corridor, alone and in the dark. This way of working echoes
Schechner’s environmental theater practice in advocating a more active role for the
audience:

Spaces ought to open to each other so that spectators can see each other
and move from one place to another. The overall feel of the theater ought to
be a place where choices can be made.
(Schechner 1994: 30)

The Empty Space and the Performer

As Hannah mentions in Section 1 of this chapter, Brook’s famous proposition (see
p.xxx) begs many questions for the scenographer. Where is this ‘empty space’? How
big is it? What are its volume, height, width, and depth? What defines this space?
How is it reached or approached? From where is the audience experiencing it? What
is beyond the space or located around it? What else can be seen? What does the
space sound like? How does it smell? What does it feel like? How is this space lit?
What is its history? And in terms of the ‘man’ walking across this space there are
perhaps an even greater multitude of questions that need resolving.

We have already explored the impact of the scenographer in shaping dramatic space
and how the way that spaces are designed and manipulated directly affects the
experience of the performance by an audience. Scenographic space is of course
also created for and through the actions of performers, and the scenographer needs
to consider carefully the way in which designed space impacts directly on the
performer:

Understanding the dynamic of the space means recognising through

observing it’s there the power lies – in height, length, width, depth or the
horizontal and vertical diagonals. Every space has a line of power, reaching
from the acting area to the spectator, that the scenographer has to reveal and
explore […] and is actively felt by performers on the stage.
(Howard 2002: 1-2)

Howard echoes the notion of Mackintosh’s vesica piscis in establishing the

importance of particular zones in a given performance stage. Space is felt
kinaesthetically through multiple senses – it dictates how we feel and how we relate
to others. In the theatre, the space also imposes conditions. The arrangement of
seats, the number of people in the space and the sightlines all impact directly on the
performer who needs to react by altering how the voice is used to communicate for
example. Brook recognises that the spatial relationship is the essential ingredient of
performance practice:

To my mind, the theatre is based on a particular human characteristic, which

is the need at times to be in a new and intimate relationship with one’s fellow
men.
(Brook 1988 :147)
Space defines our very being: “Je suis l’espace ou je suis”6 - Noël Amaud asserts,
(Bachelard 1968: 137) but it also extends beyond the body and from the performer to
all parts of the theatre space. Edward T Hall pioneered the study of humankind’s
perception and use of space through his study of proxemics, which defined human
activity into four distinct types of space:

Table 1: Spacing Behaviour (after Hall 1959, 1966)7

Bodily distances* Imperial Metric
measurement equivalent

Public space 10 feet and over 3 metres Domain of impersonal and relatively
beyond anonymous public interaction such as
in a shopping precinct or public park.

Social- 4-10 feet 120 cm - 3m Typical of routine social interactions

consultative and includes interactions with
space acquaintances and strangers and of
more formal social occasions.
Personal-casual 1.5-4 feet 45 – 120 cm Area of interaction with good personal
space friends and people who you know
well. This category tends to have the
greatest variation between cultures.
Intimate space 0-18 inches Below 45 cm The closest ‘bubble’ of space
beginning at the body. This is a space
reserved for the closest of friends and
family. Interactions may include
hugging, whispers, close
conversation, kissing, and touch.

Oskar Schlemmer undertook experiments in the theatrical power of space at the

Dessau Bauhaus in the 1920’s where the idea of haptic space, raumempfindung or
‘felt volume’ was explored from the perspective of the performer. Schlemmer sought
to exploit the dynamic properties of space - its scale, texture and sound, as a
material with theatrical potential. He developed a series of dances based upon
sensations of space, to achieve a fusion between the performing figure and the
architecture of the performance space. Radical costumes were developed as a

                                                        
6
Literally “I am the space where I am”
7
These measurements are based on studies of Western, primarily North American social conventions
over 50 years ago. Importantly Hall acknowledges that other cultures set different norms for bodily
interaction and social closeness and that being too close or too far away can lead to significant
intercultural misunderstandings.
physical articulation of the felt space such as those for Stick Dance 1919-27 and The
Triadic Ballet 1922.

In performance terms it is useful to think of space not in abstract terms but in relation
to and centred upon the human body and an understanding of proxemics can assist
us in creating performance work. An audience will decode the arrangements of
figures on the stage and will read the relationship of characters to each other in
terms of the changing spatial conditions as well as what they might do or say in the
theatrical environment which we observe them moving within.

I believe there is an actual, living relationship between the spaces of the body
and the spaces the body moves through; that human living tissue does not
abruptly stop at the skin. […] human beings and space are both alive.
(Schechner 1994:12)

In concentrating on the theatrical space with which performing bodies and audiences
engage in an act of performance, this chapter has highlighted a key concern of
performance makers and identified a range of approaches which have informed a
new interest in experimenting with the use of space as the primary ingredient in
performance-making. A scenographic sensibility can assist in both designing new
spaces for performance and creating events where the role of the audience itself is
questioned - no longer seen as simply passive viewers but rather a dynamic entity
and active participants in the performance.

Activities
The use of space and our understanding of its particular qualities and potential
impact in performance can be explored through a series of simple exercises. The first
explores proxemics and the way that arrangements of human bodies might make
meaning for an audience.

Practical Task 1: Bodies in Space Exercise

In small groups explore spatial inter-relationships of 'characters' in brief
scenarios/tableaux. This could be a familiar situation such as an Interview, a
party or wedding reception, a bus queue. Think about the use of space and
distances between bodies. (Refer to Hall’s definitions of types of personal
space in Table X.)
 • Try different arrangements. What does the particular organisation of
bodies in space communicate? What inter-relationships are
established?
• Where are these arrangements being viewed from and why? How
does a change of viewpoint alter the reception and understanding of
the tableaux?

The next task is called the 6 Chairs Exercise. This is a variation of an Augusto Boal
activity for actors and non-actors which introduces key scenographic principles which
are valuable for performers and designers alike. The exercise explores relationships
between objects and stage space. It is useful to analyse the resulting arrangements
critically, from the perspective of an audience.

Practical Task 2: The 6 Chairs Exercise

Take 6 identical chairs.
Arrange the chairs so that one appears to be dominant in the group.
Step back and look at the resulting image. Discuss whether the chair is in a
dominant position, and why you read it in that way.

Invite another group member to enter the space and try to improve on the
arrangement or to suggest an alternative.

Review the new arrangement. Is this an improvement? What qualities are

heightened or weakened? What does the new arrangement suggest?
Do some arrangements in space work better than others? If so why is this?
Review and note the mltitude of possibilities. (You might find it helpful to
sketch the arrangements which you find most successful)

How is the arrangement of objects and space communicating to us? What do

these images suggest? Do they suggest a particular space or place that we
know or remember (e.g. a classroom, a bus, a doctor’s waiting room)?
Can these arrangements suggest anything else beyond a space/place? Do
they evoke particular emotions in us or suggest a feeling?
Can you arrange the chairs to create a space that evokes feelings of;
‘isolation’, ‘rejection’, ‘togetherness’, ‘opposition’?
How is space communicating in each of the solutions which you have found?
Building on your developing knowledge of proxemics and the arrangement of objects
in stage space, this exercise encourages small groups to combine these findings
through exploring scenographic solutions to a specific dramatic moment.

Practical Task 3: Space as a Dramatic Score

Take a well-known dramatic scene and use a short extract of text as a
starting point (e.g. Macbeth’s meeting with the three weird sisters for
example.) You need not concentrate on the words but instead focus on action
and movement. (Reducing the text to single key words or short lines may help
to punctuate the scene and to root the movement)

Some members of the group should act as ‘performers’ and others as

observers, commenting and feeding back. Then swap over.

Experiment with variations in spatial arrangements between the characters.

Observe the meanings created simply by changing the placing of bodies in
space and how they stand/move and relate to each other.

What do the variations suggest?

Are some arrangements stronger than others? In what way?
What principles are at work in creating these images?

Be aware of where these arrangements should be viewed from. Where is the

audience? How does the viewing point make a difference?

Try the same movement arrangements for a thrust stage with the audience
on three sides. What difference does this make to the performer and the
reception of the scene?

Experiment with placing the audience in different positions; e.g. surrounding

the playing area (arena stage), at either side (traverse staging) or with the
audience in the middle and the action surrounding them. Can you create an
immersive environment where the audience and performers experience the
same space and there is little distinction between them? What effect does this
have on the performance? Which arrangements seem to work best? Can you
identify the reasons why?
The final exercise brings together the key ideas of this chapter and asks you to
consider the role and function of scenography in small groups or seminar discussion.

Discussion Task 1: What is Scenography?

• How does it contribute to the performance event?
• What implications are there for practitioners of performance?
• Why is the arrangement of space/bodies and visual and aural signs on the
stage important?
• What examples are there from your own experience of performance?
• Are there moments from performances that you have experienced that you
remember specifically for their scenographic impact?
• How did they make you feel?
• How can scenographic images in performance be explained and
analysed?

Further Reading
Baugh, Christopher (2005) Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development
of Scenography in the 20th Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Collins, J. & Nisbet, A. (eds) (2010) Theatre & Performance Design: A Reader in
Scenography, London: Routledge
Howard, P. (2002) What is Scenography? London:Routledge
McAuley, G. (1999) Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre,
Michigan, USA: University of Michigan Press
McKinney, J. & Butterworth, P. (2009) The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography,
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Schechner, R. (1994) Environmental Theater 2nd edition, New York & London:
Applause