Performance Perspectives

4.3 The lives and times of performance

By Tony Gardner (pp.102-110)

The time in which the work can be experienced by an audience is not the control of that audience: being there fundamentally means being there at the right time.

The audience appears to give up individual control of time as part of the basic contract of live theater and submits to the “shared time” of the performance.

“Live performance exists in the present, and human beings have a need to be present in this life”. (McBurney)

Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

By Scott Palmer

Scenography:

Advocates a more active intervention and a holistic approach to design for performance in which the design of space is central – a space created for performing bodies to interact with other than against (space, object, material, light and sound)

“the seamless synthesis of space, text, research, art, actors, directors and spectators that contribute to an original creation” (Howard, 2002: 130)

“it is concerned with audience reception and engagement” (McKinney and Butterworth, 2009:4)

Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

By Dorita Hannah (pp. 54-63)

Space – whether a suspended pause, a blank area, an empty room or a limitless cosmos – performs.

Ways of transitory events:
-historic (epic incidents)
-aesthetic (theatrical plays)
-banal (daily occurences)

Architecture mutely incorporates power systems into the built environment – defining, regulating and limiting our daily practices.

Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

By Louise Ann Wilson in conversation with Scott Palmer (pp. 63-74)

People’s identities are inextricably linked to their sense of place.
Place itself holds the memory of the people who have dwelt there.

Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

By Scott Palmer (pp. 74-84)

Theatre spaces by their way of nature seek to organize people and place them in specific relationships to the performers and to each other.

Place is a practised space. Space becomes place when it develops significance by its inhabitants or users (Michel de Certeau, 1984).

“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 theatre although, admittedly, it is one that is most often felt subconsciously” (Aronson, 2005:1)

Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan