Here’s what this thing is actually trying to do, and why it matters:
I’m not talking about phenomenology as some pristine moment of pure experience, that whole “unmediated presence” thing is academic horseshit and we all know it. This is about phenomenology as a verb, as something you do: you tune yourself to what’s actually happening, you orient yourself in space that’s already rigged, already political, already fucked in specific ways, and you let it change you. Or at least I try to.
The texts are organized to show how performance doesn’t represent reality, it reorganizes it. It messes with your perception, your body, your attention span. Theatre happens in real space and real time between real people, sure, but that space isn’t neutral. It’s produced. Contested. The everyday isn’t some innocent backdrop, it’s structured by systems that have already decided who gets to move where and how fast.
Site-specific or site-responsive or site-integrated and environmental work gets treated here as a practice, not a concept. Not “what does it mean?” but “what does it do?” Duration. Movement. The way sound hits you before you understand it. The sensory assault that interrupts your nice clean interpretation.
The political stuff, the participatory frameworks, they’re here not as solutions but as tests. Because performance can redistribute what’s visible and sayable, but that doesn’t automatically empower anyone. You don’t get to assume the work is doing good just because bodies are moving together in space.
And documentation? That’s not where performance lives. That’s its ghost. Its unresolved afterlife. Stop trying to make it the real thing.
Bottom line: site-specific theatre doesn’t ask you to figure it out. It asks you to transmit it, to stage it, to be altered by it. Comprehension is a luxury. Alteration is the point.
I. Phenomenology, Presence, and Event
(Foundational methodological axis: experience as alteration, not meaning)
Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
———. To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. Routledge, 1992.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Routledge, 2008.
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford UP, 2004.
Halling, Steen. Intimacy, Transcendence, and Psychology: Closeness and Openness in Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. U of Michigan P, 1995.
States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. U of California P, 1985.
———. “Performance as Metaphor.” Theatre Journal, vol. 48, no. 1, 1996, pp. 1–16.
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge, 1993.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003.
II. Space, Place, and Orientation
(Phenomenology of site without symbolic essentialism)
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Penguin Books, 2014.
Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Indiana UP, 1993.
Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. Pion, 1976.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.
Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. U of Michigan P, 1995.
III. Spatial Production, Rhythm, and Everyday Practice
(Counter-pressure to naïve phenomenology; space as produced, lived, and contested)
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1984.
Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006, pp. 50–54.
———. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, 1994.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991.
———. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore, Continuum, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2, edited by James D. Faubion, New Press, 1997, pp. 175–185.
IV. Movement, Walking, and Mobility
(Site as event produced through movement and duration)
Heddon, Dee, and Cathy Turner. Walking Women: Interviews with Artists on the Move. Triarchy Press, 2022.
Hunter, Victoria. Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance. Routledge, 2015.
Mock, Roberta, editor. Walking, Writing and Performance. Intellect, 2009.
Pearson, Mike. “Special Worlds, Secret Maps: A Poetics of Performance.” Staging Wales, edited by Anna-Marie Taylor, U of Wales P, 1997, pp. 95–106.
Wilkie, Fiona. Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
V. Site-Specific and Environmental Performance Practice
(Theatre as attunement, exposure, and spatial interference)
Birch, Anna, and Joanne Tompkins. Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Hill, Leslie, and Helen Paris. Performance and Place. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Houston, Andrew. Environmental and Site-Specific Theatre. Playwrights Canada Press, 2007.
Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. Routledge, 2000.
Pearson, Mike. Site-Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Pearson, Mike, and Michael Shanks. Theatre/Archaeology. Routledge, 2001.
VI. Sound, Sensation, and the Sensorium
(Phenomenology with material consequence)
Banes, Sally, and André Lepecki, editors. The Senses in Performance. Routledge, 2007.
Brown, Ross. Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan UP, 1961.
Kendrick, Lynne, and David Roesner, editors. Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Destiny Books, 1994.
Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication. Ablex, 2001.
VII. Genealogies of Event-Based and Environmental Art
(Historical ballast, not ontological grounding)
Halprin, Lawrence, et al. Where the Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space. Spacemaker Press, 2009.
Kaprow, Allan. Assemblages, Environments, Happenings. Abrams, 1965.
———. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley, U of California P, 1993.
Smithson, Robert. The Collected Writings. Edited by Jack D. Flam, U of California P, 1996.
VIII. Politics, Participation, and the Distribution of the Sensible
(Politics as reorientation, not pedagogy)
Berlant, Lauren. Intimacy. U of Chicago P, 2000.
Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Routledge, 1992.
———. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, Pluto Press, 2013.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2009.
———. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2004.
IX. Mediation, Documentation, and Afterlives
(Acknowledged, constrained, unresolved)
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2008.
Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield, editors. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Intellect, 2012.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke UP, 2003.