Volume 11, Issue 1

Punchdrunk is often considered the pioneer within the field of immersive theatre, which “[places] the audience at the heart of the work” (Machon 22) and abolishes the distinction between stage and auditorium to merge them into one single space. Founded by Felix Barrett in 2000, the British company is known for creating detailed theatrical worlds that inhabit the space of disused buildings in which the audience is invited to roam free. Whilst most of Punchdrunk’s productions maintain a separation between the real world and the imagined world by staying within the confines of a building, Kabeiroi (2017) opens up to the busy streets of London and immerses the participants in real life. This ambulatory theatrical exploration superimposes the world of fiction onto the geography of the city, weaving a web of complex interactions between the two. How does Kabeiroi interact with the city it pervades? To what extent does the urban space inform the performance, and, conversely, does the immediate reality impact the participants’ experience and immersive feeling? Using concepts such as performance walks (Tomlin), “host” and “ghost” (McLucas), frames (Goffman), and errant immersion (Alston), this article explores the way Kabeiroi blurs the boundaries between street and stage, participants, performers, and passersby, reality and fiction.

As COVID-19-related closures affected theatre and performance venues worldwide, the question of how theatrical practices might be adapted to these new circumstances became particularly pertinent in the context of immersive theatre and site-specific performance, forms which heavily draw on the audience’s experiential encounter with site and performers for its process of meaning-making. Focussing on ANU Productions’ The Party to End All Parties (2020) as a hybrid form of site-specific pandemic theatre set in the cityscape of Dublin, this article investigates how the production translated the “host/ghost” relationship as a central aspect of site-specific theatre to the virtual realm. It demonstrates how this notion is transformed into a thematic thread woven into the performance, arguing that it engages with the host/ghost relationship through spatial as well as temporal “ghosting,” which blurs the lines between the contemporary setting of lockdown Dublin and the historical landmark of O’Connell Bridge as a site inextricably connected to the emergence of Ireland as a republic. At the same time, this notion is explored through the connections between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility (or, indeed, spectrality) in the three characters’ personal journeys.

In considering some of the aspects that are brought to the site-specific process, this article explores how theatre renegotiates patterns of intraurban movement, enacting complex approaches to space and memory. The focus is on O Ben’Groes at Droed Amser , a Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru and National Theatre Wales production, created in collaboration with BBC Cymru Wales and BBC Arts in 2020 as part of Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru’s new programme in response to the COVID-19 emergency and the challenge of creating original dramatic work during lockdown. By allowing virtual audiences to join author and poet Karen Owen on a bus journey from her home and the street where she grew up to Bangor city centre, the production articulated the experience of the city in terms of individual and collective memory, bringing together issues of performance, representation, history, and heritage to reveal alternative layers to the reality of the urban landscape. Memory, I argue, emerged from this production as a performative construct open to renegotiation through a range of present relationships to landscape. In addition to this, the production also offered an alternative to the privileged figure of the walker, performing a subversion of codified patterns of movement.

Contemporary Britain is experiencing an enduring and devastating housing crisis spearheaded in 1980 by Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of the “Right to Buy” social housing and sustained by an enduring neoliberal hegemony. This article contextualises the housing crisis through data and information drawn from journalism, charities, and government. It then explores how the crisis is conveyed in two recent plays. Sh!t Theatre’s 2016 Letters to Windsor House focusses on company members Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit’s overcrowded and unsafe North London flatshare. Home is a verbatim show set in a hostel for homeless young people in East London, produced by the National Theatre and co-researched and directed by Nadia Fall in 2013. As well as exploring the shows’ narration of the devastating social and material impacts of the housing crisis, the article draws on urban theory’s concept of psychogeography alongside video documentation of both plays to explore how they affectively convey the spatial and emotional consequences of the crisis. The article shows how the spatialisation of theatre – not just its textual elements – helps articulate both the spatiality of the housing crisis in contemporary urban life in neoliberal Britain and, especially, how that spatiality feels. It makes the case for thinking psychogeographically about theatre in order to focus on the ways it braids spatial and emotional understanding – crucial factors for properly comprehending, and potentially changing, the UK housing crisis.

Cities and borders are interlinked by a necropolitics that is particularly pertinent on the coasts of the European continent and the settlements along its coastlines. While these borderscapes become what Achille Mbembe refers to as death worlds, refugee cityscapes turn into Fanonian zones-of-nonbeing. The play The Jungle (2017) by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, the ensuing travelling festival The Walk (2021) featuring the performative journey of the refugee girl Little Amal, and the play Lampedusa (2015) by Anders Lustgarten engage with these necrogeographies and the way in which refugees and migrants are exposed to necropower in these spaces of ontological negation. This article maps how the refugee camp builds on colonial practices of citizenship and racialisation extended to the biopolitical city, delineating the interrelation of cities and borders through necropower. It also discusses the refugee camp as necrocity and necrocitizenship while exploring theatre as a means of transgressing colonial racial capitalist (b)order in the city in the three migration performances. By bringing these performances and geographies in conversation, the article explores theatre as rebellious practice that creates spaces for the necropolitical and biopolitical to touch and to move towards a shared humanity.

In The Ontology of the Accident , Catherine Malabou describes the phenomenon of a “form born of the accident, born by accident, a kind of accident,” when due to a “deep cut” in a biography, the individual’s path of life trajectory splits and a “new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person” (1–2). This article proposes that Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer-awarded drama Cost of Living can be understood through Malabou’s extensive work on physical trauma and ruptures to the human life cycle as a result of accidents. In Majok’s work, two intertwining impositions of a new form on an old form are explored through the characters of Ani, a Polish immigrant who has become quadriplegic following a tragic car crash, and Jess, a first-generation graduate who struggles both financially and emotionally to find her place in a city hostile to immigrants. The city backdrop of the play, described by Majok as “ the urban East of America ” (5), acts as perimeter of and boundary to mobility, but also as a conceptual frame. The article uses Malabou’s concept of destructive plasticity to explore how the city with its inbound and outbound mobility becomes a spatial and political frame for articulating the consequences of the lack of exteriority which usually serves as a mental escape and space of existential relief.

The American parade has been investigated in terms of how it transforms urban streets into a place where collective memory and identity are consolidated along lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender (Ryan; Roach). However, the role of the rural parade has heretofore seen little critical analysis. Since any conception of the urban relies on the rural as a foil, we wonder how the American parade, existing in both urban and rural landscapes, promotes and challenges the unchecked expansion of cosmopolitan culture and dominant ideology. This article examines how the parade genre functions as a civic ritual that seeks to unite individuals through nationalism and consumerism, yet may paradoxically become a stage for political dissent. By juxtaposing performances from the Bread and Puppet Theater at the Fourth of July Celebration in the rural town of Cabot, Vermont, and Tony Sarg’s “upside-down marionettes” in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, I theorize how conventions of the parade work to inculcate spectators with a sense of group identity. I argue that these same conventions lay the foundation for political dissent, via a process that José Muñoz calls disidentification, to propose (and at times enact) alternatives to dominant ideology.

Following the 2022 CDE conference’s concern regarding “how theatre and the city are productively embroiled and [. . .] how contemporary Anglophone theatre has redefined [. . .] [and blurred the] borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator” (Garson et al.), I will focus on Tim Price’s Protest Song , which was commissioned by the National Theatre and was staged there in December 2013. Setting the play in the streets of London in front of the iconic urban space of St Paul’s Cathedral, starring a homeless main character, and transgressing the boundaries between theatrical and actual spaces, Price arguably questions conventional urban and social binaries as well as economic and social hierarchies. With the help of experimental and critical strategies, he examines the city street movement Occupy Wall Street and its repercussions. The present article analyses these strategies and asks how they represent, perform, question, and assess urban hierarchies, city street activism, and the financial sector, as they are symbolised by the (urban and mental) spaces of London as capital and London as city of capital. I will furthermore look into how Price’s strategies reframe social inequality and turbo-capitalism as well as to what extent they redefine the borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator.

This article introduces the concept of a walkshop, an artistic and pedagogical practice based on walking and engaging in encounters with the cityscape. Performers and participants partake in an experience that mediates other forms of relationship with the city while they circulate, contemplate, and discover its spaces, acknowledging its inhabitants and their singularities. When we focus attention on the path and the act of walking, the focus of this movement shifts away from the point that we are directed towards and becomes the journey itself. Moving in a nonfunctional manner transforms walking into an artistic, aesthetic, and political action. As our case in point for this reflection, we concentrate on Walkshop Paris which took place in the French capital on 24 June 2022 during the “Theatre and the City” conference.