Other Bibliography

Aronson, Arnold. The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981.
Although out of print and difficult to track down, this study examines the scenographic contexts of early environmental theatre and includes a visual record of early performances.

Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York, Verso, 1995.
Augé theorizes the non-place (e.g., highway, airport, supermarket, computer screen) as a location of transience through which we pass en-route to other places, and suggests how the invasion of non-spaces into our lives has affected our spatial awareness.

Benajmin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Belknap, 1999.
A collection of notes and half-arguments, Walter Benjamin’s posthumous (d. 1940) notebook analyzes and theorizes the arcades of nineteenth century Paris, and their chief inhabitant: the writer-spectator-walker-consumer, the flâneur.

Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. T London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
This analysis of the role of the audience in the meaning-making of theatre explores the idea of framing the theatrical event in terms of expectations, many of which are intrinsically concerned with the location of and architecture of the theatre itself.

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1968.
Director and writer Peter Brook argues for theatre based on the raw potential contained within an empty space, and theorizes theatre in terms of a performer and a spectator meeting within a space.

Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, The Sandwichman and The Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 98-140.
Buck-Morss analyzes Benjamin’s project and his particular attention to the margins of society (the flâneur, the sandwichman and the whore). She pays particular attention to their authority and role within the consumption-oriented space of the Paris arcades.

Carlson, Marvin. Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Semiotician and theatre historian Marvin Carlson explores how theatre buildings contribute to the meaning of the theatrical experience. Although not directly related to site-specific theatre, this book does serve as a model for decoding performance spaces.

Cohen-Cruz, Jan, Ed. Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
Featuring essays by Suzanne Lacy, Diana Taylor, Augusto Boal, Adrian Piper, Cindy Rosenthal, Richard Schechner, Dwight Conquergood and others from places as diverse as Russia, China, Phillippines, South Africa, Kenya, Denmark, Mexico, Germany, India and Chile, this volume is an invaluable resource in researching politically motivated street performance in all its various guises and with all of its various complications.

Etchells, Tim. Certain Fragments. London: Routledge, 1999.
Written by the artistic director of UK-based experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment, Certain Fragments examines the process of creating devised work, the role of the text in interdisciplinary theatre, and the role of the city in creating site-specific theatre.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Places.” Diacritics 16 (1986) 22-7.
In this article, Foucault theorizes the place of a heterotopia. An alternative to the idealized, unreal utopia, a heterotopia is the space that is both mythic and real, a place that contains both the unreal and the real in a sort of mirror image that contains and does not contain both.

Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Foucault’s theories here riff off of Bentham’s ideal prison, the Panopticon, which allows for prisoners feel like they are being watched at all times. Foucault extends this metaphor to an analysis of the location of power within space.

Garner, Stanton. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Garner theorizes the meeting of bodies (both the spectator’s and the performer’s) through the dual lenses of spatiality and phenomenology in order to uncover what exactly happens when the visual, environmental and embodied, or felt fields collide in the act of “watching” a performance.

Hutcheson, Maggie. “Demechanizing Our Politics: Street Performance and Making Change.” Wildfire: Art as Activism. Ed. D. Barndt. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2006. 79-87.
This essay reflects on a series of art-based public parades in and around Toronto, and explores the means by which art can lead to a collective demechanization of so-called public space and public processes by offering a glimpse of what a radically different society might look like.

Kaprow, Alan. Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1996.
The original theoretical framework for the Happenings movement of the 1960s, in which visual artists employed performance art and theatre strategies to stage events in public spaces that “happened” through the help of both artists, artist-participants, participants, and unplanned audiences.

Knowles, Ric. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Ric Knowles develops a method of analyzing theatrical performance that considers not only the performance itself, but also the material, economic, political, social and cultural forces that surround and contextualize the theatrical experience, in order to provide better frameworks for understanding how performances are received by their audiences.

Lee, Pamela M. “Public Art and the Spaces of Democracy.” Assemblage 35 (April 1998) 80-86.
Pamela Lee explores Public Art’s connections to democratic process, socio-economic factors and cultural factors and critiques the equation of public art with an authentic public perspective.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Drawing on art, literature, economics and architecture, Lefebvre attempts to reconcile the difference between the mental and imagined spaces we create, and the real, lived spaces we inhabit everyday through an analysis of the ideological framework of space and our experience of space in our everyday lives.

O’Donnell, Darren. Social Acupuncture. Toronto: Coach House Press, 2006.
In this book and dramatic script, Darren O’Donnell details in manifesto-like tone, the process by which his company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, goes about making theatre, making art and creating social change through a series of interactions in public spaces that they term “social acupuncture.”

Parr, Hester. “Felling, Reading, and Making Bodies in Space.” Geographical Review 91.1/2 (April 2001) 158-67.
This essay examines how a body can be used as an ethnographic research tool in order to research the behaviour of other bodies in public spaces.

Phillips, Patricia C, Ed. City Speculations. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.
This collection of essays and art-projects examines how a living city is transformed by urban planners, artists and architects into urban representation, and how the process of urban self-representation can affect the outcomes of urban design.

Phillips, Patricia C. “Temporality and Public Art.” Art Journal 48.4 (Winter 1989) 331-335.
This essay critiques how the idea of the public is invented and recreated through so-called public art that attempts to represent a “common” perspective on everyday life.

Turner, Cathy. “Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for Site-Specific Performance.” New Theatre Quarterly 20.4 (2004): 373-90.
Turner reads Pearson and Shanks (Theatre/Archaeology) together with an analysis of psychoanalytic object-relations to provide a critical vocabulary and methodology for exploring site-specific theatre, including the walking tours of her own company,
Wrights & Sites.

Ubersfeld, Anne. Reading Theatre. Trans. Frank Collins. Eds. Paul Perron and Patrick Debbeche. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Published originally in 1976, Ubersfeld provides a model of semiotic analysis of performance, paying particular attention to the symbolic structures of stage space and stage time.