Image from:

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue76/8243

This week’s reading was chapter 3 of Site-Specific Performance by Mike Pearson.

Site: Places gave context about what to expect from a site-specific performance. It “draws attention to the details of location, valorising them, pulling them out of the everyday into relief, acknowledging them, staking claim to them in passing, as places to be, to do, to watch” (Pearson, 2010, 48). Pearson explained how “site and performance are caught in an embrace, intimately entangled” (Pearson, 2010, 48).

The first case study that was detailed was a field in Haxey, Lincolnshire. Throughout this performance, it was explained how “the sway men make the land, giving the apparently featureless terrain significance through action. They mark it, with varying degrees of performance: a collapsed wall here, a filthy pub carpet there. And it marks them, with bruises and sprains. They play within a historical dimension” (Pearson, 2010, 50). This signifies how the performer becomes the site and how the performance created would be meaningless anywhere but at the site it was created for.

Works Cited:

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.