Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, edited by Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

Abstract

In Performing Site-Specific Theatre editors Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins have collected contributions from a range of theorists and practitioners that address critical issues in contemporary site-specific theatre and performance. The volume is broad in scope, offering discussion of site-specific performance as it engages with politics, place, and protest; history, cultural policy, and community art practice; and media, sensory immersion and intimacy. Throughout, the authors of many of the chapters exhibit a shared interest in interrogating the instability of ‘site’ and ‘performance’ and the productive potential of site-specific work to destabilise and dislocate spectators. The volume therefore offers a many-voiced critical engagement with the features and function of site-specific performance, addressing issues pertinent to the often-contested politics of site and site work and providing analyses of a range of recent (and in one case, notably historic) site-specific performances.