Site-Specific Performance

Why Site?

Site-specific theatre allows the performers' ideas and bodies to interact with the place. Sites have peculiar physical features to interact with: a big, open space tells different stories to a small space with many hidden corners.

Sites have moods, souls: an artist approaches a site not as an urban planner or documenter. A performance finds ways to animate a space imaginatively. Sites have habits and rules: people who use the space implicitly agree to a set of acceptable behaviour. A funeral home allows certain behaviours (crying) while forbidding others (a strip show). A performance can interact with these.

A site has history. People have owned it, lost it, died on it, made love on it. It is not the neutral black space of the theatre stage, which excels at make-belief. However, it doesn't mean that site-specificity is all about actuality. Sites have histories, and this certainly informs the production. However, the job of theatre is to imagine a possible history (and hence future) for a site. Theatre can uncover memories and stories hidden in the space which no humans have witnessed and documented.

The site of the Old Gaol has obvious historical connotations. It is also a rough, enclosed space, throwing audience and performers into close proximity. The high walls make you look up towards the sky, yearning for freedom. And yet it is now also a social place: a backpackers, a bar and restaurant, a place of meeting. In "amaQueerKwere", a foreigner meets a spectre from the past in a dream-like, fantastical encounter; they animate the past and present of the site and push them together as if a palimpsest. For 40 minutes a day, the site is both a jail and a bar, and yet also neither of those: it becomes a portal into the hidden secrets of the site, accessed through imagination.