How are we to understand the various concepts of ‘performance space’? I find it hard to believe that this question still relates to the physical site of performance, to the stage and auditorium. Plenty of practitioners are challenging the limits and confines of the performance terrain in terms of spatiality, geography and art taxonomy. Their innovations are far more revealing on the nature of performance space than any attempt to unpick the theory. It seems wise to investigate this idea within the context of contemporary practice.

Performance group These Horses have a particularly original approach to performance space and time. Bill Leslie, one third of the group, once performed in a Welcome Guest carpark on the M4, alone. While a camcorder substituted the spectator’s eye, the carpark, in all its bleakness, became a space to inhabit this unidentified moment. It became the signifier of the piece.

These Horses once dramatically (re)moved a performance (midway through) from the safety of a Brighton gallery down the road to the seafront, taking the audience with them. As a finale the three performers waded into the sea, leaving the bedazzled spectators to disperse at their leisure.

But let’s get down to basics for a moment. Essentially a performance space is anywhere a performance is happening. The place is the first thing that affects our expectations as an audience. ‘Where am I?’; ‘Am I outside or inside?’; ‘Where’s the performance in relation to me?’ The site and positions of performer-body and the audience-body permeate the collective experience – this sharing of the space is fundamental to the performance itself. A common facilitator of this shared space is the physical room.

The studio space is particularly concerned with ‘insideness’. Horribly obvious? Yes, but its insideness is what conditions the experience. It’s so disconnected from the outside – the world – reality.


An unmappable pocket of space with its own temporal order. Yet the studio’s boundaries of proximity, aesthetics and acoustics are rigid. Traditional use of this space has mainly involved interpretation of a script/narrative.

When These Horses relocated their performance to the beach they radically redefined a non-theatre space as performic. Rather than the architectural lines defining the performance edges (walls, stage, proscenium), it was the behaviour of the performance itself that articulated the space. Outside in the infinite landscape, the continuity of the spectacle, and the spectators’ loyalty to it, can be remarkable. This is how group member Emma Bennett describes it.

“Over time a performer walks over there and this becomes a space available to the performance. The space is always in the process of shifting; the performance claims new ground. And the audience are quick to reincorporate this new ground into their understanding of the space, and readjust to the new rules. People seem to become an audience willingly.”
 

This willingness is not just about standing in the right place and keeping quite. In all performance locations there’s a mutual pact (between the audience and performers) to enter out of the self and into the social and the spatial. This doesn’t end with the notion of public-private spaces, it’s more about the negotiation of the space between identities and positions. What Tim Etchells would call an essential part of the performance ‘presence’. For These Horses, this sociological space, is what now excites them the most about making performance.

“Positional relations interest me in terms of what interchanges happen between literal physical positions (me standing here, you standing there) and the sociological positions we occupy in acts of speech or interlocution.” (Emma Bennett again)
 

So performance space, in its fluidity, can also be social and conceptual. The temporality of a piece defines its margins just as the walls and locus flux do. Time indeed is the great arbiter of performance-scape. As we occupy a seat or an area of a room, we occupy a space in time. No artform makes us so experiencially aware of this as the performance.

Shakespeare’s Globe, the Metaphysical Wilderness intended by Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and one night on a Brighton beach: what do they tell us? That the borders are shifting and the potential for innovation is endless. That the inexhaustible creativity of performers will continue to instigate reactionary moments between the spectator and the spectacle; any time, any place.
 
hollypest@yahoo.co.uk