Transcript Geopathology + site specific theatre

On “geopathology”
+ Site Specific
Theatre
November 2014
English 3556E:
20th Century Drama
(Guest visitor Joanne Tompkins,
Professor of Theatre
University of Queensland,
Brisbane)
Nostalgia
“The derivation of ‘nostalgia’ from the Greek nostos, to return
home, links nostalgia to sameness, suggesting a desire to return
to already known conditions of the past. Present uses of the word
largely ignore or ironize the connection with pain (algia), but
nostalgia was formerly understood as a medical condition
triggered in soldiers or exiles by sensory reminders of home,
susceptible of cure by returning (Hirsch: 257–8).” (Carlson 20)
Carlson, Marla. “Ways to Walk New York After 9/11,”
In Performance and the City.
Ed. D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga.
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
Source note
• Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of
Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.
“Geopathology”: definition
Geopathology defines “home” as a “longed-for
stable container for identity” that turns out to be a
place of entrapment and deep dissatisfaction
(Chaudhuri 82).
Geopathology recognizes the dissatisfaction of an
individual’s experience of a particular kind of
“home” that is supposed to fit but doesn’t (for
example, what Nora feels).
Chaudhuri writes:
“…an incessant dialogue between belonging and exile,
home and homelessness” in the theatre (15);
“the double-edged problem of place and place as
problem” (53).
What is “site-specific theatre”?
Suitcase (2008),
Liverpool Street Station, London
Suitcase is a performance about the
“Kindertransport” trains that brought Jewish
children to London before WW2.
It was performed at Liverpool Street train station,
where the original Kindertransport trains would
have arrived in the 1930s.
Can “site-specific theatre” travel?
Other site-specific performances
• A Roving Soul: Walking the City with Walter Benjamin
(Click here for the iTunes download, and try it around
town this weekend!)
• And While London Burns (download the audio here)
Site specific theatre near you?
• What kinds of site-specific theatre have you seen here
at Western, in London, or elsewhere in Ontario or
Canada?
• What kinds of site-specific theatre can you imagine
creating around you?
…Turn to your neighbours. Brainstorm together for a few
minutes. What can you remember, or imagine, together?
Why make theatre this way?
How do you make theatre
this way?
• Do you have a specific relationship to a space that
bears exploring?
• Rejection of large venues in which theatre is
traditionally made, and what they stand for
• A response to the high cost of renting traditional
venues (many theatre companies today don’t own their
own spaces!)
• What logistical problems might you face as you
prepare your site-specific performance?
A final note, to take away…
• How might making, attending, or thinking about sitespecific theatre affect the way we understand space –
what space means, how space makes meaning – in
more traditional theatre pieces?
• Could we, for example, imagine Antony Minghella’s
film version of Play as a site-specific piece?
Joanne Tompkins’ work on
theatrical space is extensive!
• Theatre’s Heterotopias. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. (Hot off the presses!)
• Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place,
Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012
(with Anna Birch).
• Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary
Australian Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006.
• Space and the Geographies of Theatre. Special
issue of the journal Modern Drama, 2004.
…and she wrote a great article
about Suitcase…
• "Theatre's Heterotopia and the Site-Specific
Production of Suitcase." TDR 214 (2012):
101-112.
• You can get this article in PDF format at
Western’s library; click here and follow the
e-resource links!