Mis-Guidance and Spatial Planning: Dramaturgies of Public Space

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Notes

1. George Dodds, ‘Performance Anxiety’, Journal of Architectural Education, 4.61 (August 2008), 3.

2. For instance, this anxiety was evident at many conferences on dramaturgy held in England in recent years, including ‘Mentors or Censors?’, Birmingham University, 1999; ‘Dramaturgy: A User's Guide’, Central School of Speech and Drama, 1999; ‘What is Dramaturgy?’, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 2005; ‘Dramatrix 05’, London Oval, 2005.

3. DRAMAforum, Instytut Teatralny with Jagellonian University, Warsaw, 24–25 January 2009.

4. It may be noted that Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri observe related shifts in their book Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), suggesting that during the twentieth century, ‘landscape would encroach on the traditional dramaturgy of plot and character to become a perspective and a method’, and urging a new theorization of ‘the non-human order’ within the theatre (pp. 3–4).

5. Peter Eckersall, ‘Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on the Cultural Intervention Project’, Theatre Research International, 3.31 (2006), 383–97.

6. Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 3.

7. Cited in Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance, p. 180, my emphasis.

8. Ruth Little, notes in response to questions from Synne Behrndt and Cathy Turner, 2 March 2007.

9. Patrice Pavis, Analyzing Performance: Theatre, Dance and Film, trans. by David Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 8.

10. Heidi Taylor, ‘Deep Dramaturgy: Excavating the Architecture of the Site-Specific Performance’, Canadian Theatre Review, 119 (Summer 2004), 16–19 (p. 19), my emphasis.

11. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London: Routledge 2001), p. 24.

12. Ibid., pp. 106–7.

13. Ibid., pp. 89–90.

14. Synne Behrndt, ‘Dramaturgy and Architecture: An Experiment in the Cross-breeding of Disciplines' (paper given at Performance Studies International [PSi 14], ‘Interregnum’, August 2008, University of Copenhagen).

15. Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 188.

16. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes (Barcelona and Mexico: GG, 2002), p. 178.

17. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 138–39.

18. Tony Fretton, ‘Dramaturgy and Architecture’, in Dramaturgy: A User's Guide, ed. by Total Theatre and Central School of Speech and Drama (London: Total Theatre and CSSD, 1999), pp. 14–15.

19. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 256; see also by Bernard Tschumi: Event-Cities: Praxis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Event-Cities 2 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002); Event-Cities 3: Concept vs. Context vs. Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

20. Bernard Tschumi, cited in Dorita Hannah and Omar Khan, ‘Performance/Architecture: An Interview with Bernard Tschumi’, Journal of Architectural Education, 4.61 (August 2008), 52–8 (p. 53).

21. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday and Anchor Books, 1959).

22. Statement on company website, http://www.corridorperformance.org/about.htm.

23. Maarten A. Hajer, ‘Setting the Stage: A Dramaturgy of Policy Deliberation’, Administration and Society, 36.6 (January 2005), 624–47, and ‘Rebuilding Ground Zero: The Politics of Performance’, Planning Theory and Practice, 6.4 (December 2005), 445–64. I am grateful to Andrew Filmer for drawing my attention to Hajer's work.

24. Hajer, ‘Setting the Stage’, p. 642.

25. Whitehead's work is described by Jayne Bradley, of the commissioning body Midlands Architecture and the Designed Environment (MADE), as ‘a perfect marriage of artistic process and urban research’; see ‘Revealing the Loop’, in Lost in Ladywood, by Simon Whitehead (Abercych: Shoeless, 2007), p. 5.

26. Hajer, ‘Setting the Stage’, p. 628.

27. Hajer, ‘Rebuilding Ground Zero’, pp. 458–59.

28. Hajer, ‘Setting the Stage’, pp. 636–37.

29. There are other examples of related work, such as Platform's Effra Redevelopment Agency (1992), where the artists proposed an imaginative redevelopment of the buried river Effra in Brixton, in order to focus public attention on the question of restoring the area.

30. Wrights & Sites, Possible Forests (2007), commissioned and exhibited by the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Haldon Forest, Exeter.

31. Mis-Guided in Fribourg, a season of work commissioned for the Belluard Bollwerk International Festival, Fribourg, Switzerland (July 2008). Initial concept and artistic direction by Wrights & Sites.

32. Wrights & Sites, An Exeter Mis-Guide (Exeter: Wrights & Sites, 2003), and A Mis-Guide to Anywhere (Exeter: Wrights & Sites, 2006).

33. Eyal Weizman, ‘Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, Radical Philosophy, 136 (March-April 2006), 8–21.

34. Hajer ‘Setting the Stage’, p. 631, and ‘Rebuilding Ground Zero’, p. 449.

35. Hajer, ‘Rebuilding Ground Zero’, p. 458.

36. All references are taken from Stephen Hodge,Documentation of Possible Forests, documentation on DVD-ROM (Exeter: Wrights & Sites; not available for public viewing).

37. Zigmunt Bauman, cited in Guy Baeten, ‘Western Utopianism/Dystopianism and the Political Mediocrity of Critical Urban Research’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, Special Issue: ‘The Dialectics of Utopia and Dystopia’, 84.3–4 (2002), 143–52 (p. 144).

38. Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 164.

39. Ibid., p. 105.

40. ‘Poacher’ (review of A Mis-Guide to Anywhere), http://www.mountain7.co.uk, posted 25 March 2008.