Writing, texts and site-specific performance in the recent work of Deborah Warner
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360601058821
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Public Spaces through Art
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Lyn Gardner, ‘Playwrights? They're so last year’, Guardian, 8 August 2005. 2 Fiona Wilkie, ‘Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain’, New Theatre Quarterly, 18.2 (2002), pp. 140–160, 141. 3 In Nick Kaye, Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents (Newark: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), p. 211, emphasis in original. 4 Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 23. 5 The St Pancras Project took place between 18 and 24 June 1995 in the St Pancras Chambers at the disused Midland Grand Hotel near St Pancras and King's Cross railway stations in central London. The performances of The Waste Land took place between 14 December 1997 and 11 January 1998 in Wilton's Music Hall near Tower Hill Underground station. The Tower Project was performed between 14 June and 4 July 1999, in the Euston Tower, a former office building near Warren Street Underground station in central London, approximately ten minutes' walk from St Pancras. The building had been associated for a long time with Capital Radio, one of London's leading radio stations. 6 The key idea about ‘found’ space is that ‘the given elements of a space – its architecture, textural qualities, acoustics, and so on – are to be explored and used, not disguised’, see Richard Schechner, ‘Six Axioms for Environmental Theater’ in Schechner, Environmental Theatre (London: Applause, 1994 1973), p. xxxiii–xxxiv. For the term ‘fabricated’ space, referring to the extent to which the space has been transformed for performance, see Nick Kaye, Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents (Amsterdam, Harwood, 1996), p. 211. 7 See Daniel Buren, [Agrave] force de descendre dans la rue, l'art peut-il enfin y monter? (Paris: Sens and Tonka, 1998), p. 49. Here Buren, an artist best known for his black and white striped site-specific installations known as ‘Buren columns’, argues that site-specific art exemplifies the shift from well-defined and commonly agreed aesthetic criteria for judging the work of art to a more subjective interaction between the spectator's cultural competences and the artist's particular perspectives and cultural agenda. 8 Geraldine Cousin, ‘Exploring Theatre at Play. The Making of the Theatrical Event’, New Theatre Quarterly 12 (47), (1996), pp. 229–36, 234. 9 Cousin, ‘Exploring Theatre’, p. 233. 10 Cousin ‘Exploring Theatre’, p. 234. 11 Cousin ‘Exploring Theatre’, p. 234. 12 Kate Kellaway, review of The St Pancras Project, dir. Deborah Warner, Observer, 25 June 1995, rpt in Theatre Record, 7 August 1995, pp. 884–5. 13 Paul Taylor, review of The St Pancras Project, dir. Deborah Warner, Independent, 19 June 1995, rpt in Theatre Record, 7 August 1995, p. 883. 14 In Warner's words, ‘I think work gets interesting precisely at the point when it defies categorization’, qtd in Sarah Hemming, review of The St Pancras Project, dir. Deborah Warner, Financial Times, 10 June 1995, rpt in Theatre Record, 7 August 1995, pp. 883–4. 15 Kellaway 1995. 16 The section on critical responses to Warner's The Waste Land examines the 14 newspaper reviews of the production at Wilton's Music Hall. The reviews are dated from 15 December 1997 to 2 January 1998. All reviews are reprinted in Theatre Record, 3–31 December 1997, pp. 1611–15. 17 Alastair Macaulay, review of The Waste Land, dir. Deborah Warner, Financial Times, 23 December 1997, rpt. Theatre Record, 19 January 1998, p. 1614. 18 Susannah Clapp, review of The Waste Land, dir. Deborah Warner, Observer, 21 December 1997, rpt. Theatre Record, 19 January 1998, p. 1612. The Old Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park, Dublin, was built around 1734 to defend the Irish during the period of English rule. It was used as a military museum for many years but fell into a state of disrepair before its reconstruction. L'Amphithéâtre de Morphologie in Paris is at the École nationale supérieure des beaux arts, a venue in which ‘des générations d'étudiants ont scruté des générations de corps nus’ (Libération, 30 March 1996). The production subsequently went to MC 93 Bobigny in early 1997. Gooderham and Wort's factory is a distillery plant in downtown Toronto, founded in 1832, which was once the largest distillery in the British Empire. Its period of dereliction began in 1990. 19 Paul Taylor, review of The Waste Land, dir. Deborah Warner, Independent, 16 December 1997, rpt. Theatre Record, 19 January 1998, p. 1613. 20 Lyn Gardner, review of The Waste Land, dir. Deborah Warner, Guardian, 16 December 1997, rpt. Theatre Record, 19 January 1998, p. 1611. 21 Gardner 1997. 22 See The Waste Land, l. 115–6 ‘I think we are in rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones' in T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 67. 23 Taylor 1997. For the phrase from The Waste Land, see Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 70. 24 John Gross, A Double Thread. A Childhood in Mile End – and beyond (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000). 25 John Gross, review of The Waste Land, dir. Deborah Warner, Sunday Telegraph, 28 December 1997, rpt. Theatre Record, 19 January 1998, p. 1614. 26 See The Waste Land ll. 264–5 ‘[…] where the walls/Of Magnus Martyr hold/Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’, in Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 73. 27 Gross 1997. 28 Gross 1997. 29 Gross 1997. 30 Michael Coveney, review of The Waste Land, dir. Deborah Warner, Daily Mail, 15 December 1997, rpt. Theatre Record, 19 January 1998, p. 1611. 31 Susannah Clapp, review of The Waste Land, dir. Deborah Warner, Observer, 21 December 1997, rpt. Theatre Record, 19 January 1998, p. 1612. 32 Clapp 1997. 33 Clapp 1997. 34 Robert Gore-Langton, review of The Waste Land, dir. Deborah Warner, Daily Express, 2 January 1998, rpt. Theatre Record, 19 January 1998, p. 1615. 35 Gardner 1997. 36 The archived LIFT website for The Tower Project at www.liftfest.org.uk/lift99/tower.html includes a quotation from Kate Kellaway's review in The Observer: ‘I've hardly stopped talking about and even dreamt of the St Pancras Project, but I would not betray even one of its secrets…From the beginning it was extraordinary’ (Kellaway 1995). Last accessed 1 November 2005. 37 ‘Touched by an Angel’ by Gerard Raymond, 8 July 2003 available at: www.ibs.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/3660. Last accessed 1 November 2005. 38 Michael Pearson and Mike Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 27. 39 Camilo José Vergara, American Ruins (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999), pp. 29–30. The author is describing his visit to the disused Fireman's Insurance Headquarters at the Four Corners, Newark, USA. See also his The New American Ghetto (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995) for similar site-writing. 40 David Benedict, review of The Tower Project, dir. Deborah Warner, Independent, 18 June 1999, rpt Theatre Record, 3 August 1999, p. 892. 41 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 11. 42 Cousin ‘Exploring Theatre’, p. 234. 43 Philip Auslander deconstructs the notion of liveness by arguing that it is already mediated by technologies of recording and editing. See Philip Auslander, Liveness. Performances in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999). 44 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 31. 45 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 31. 46 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 116. 47 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 116. 48 See for example reviews by Susannah Clapp in Observer, 23 June 1999 and Carole Woddis in Herald, 30 June 1999 for references to the fax machine transmitting Paradise Lost. I describe my own discovery of something missed during the performance to highlight the way in which site-specific performances often rely on spectators reconstructing the performance event in its aftermath. 49 The ‘scene of the crime’ is one of the privileged metaphors employed by Pearson and Shanks in Theatre/Archaeology, 59–64, to describe the reconstructive and forensic processes site-specific performance often prompts in spectators. 50 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 31. 51 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 29. 52 Vergara, American Ruins, p. 31. 53 See Dominic Cavendish, review of The Tower Project, dir. Deborah Warner, Time Out, 23 June 1999, rpt. Theatre Record, 3 August 1999, p. 893. 54 Cavendish 1999. 55 In 2003, Warner took the Tower Project, under the new name of the Angel Project, to nine different sites in New York, and thus in its recent incarnation it became, literally, a meditation on American ruins. For the quotation from Warner, see Gerard Raymond's interview ‘Touched by an Angel’ from 8 July 2003 at: www.ibs.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm?int_news_id=3660. See also Don Shewey's review ‘Somebody's Watching: The Angel Project’, 1 August 2003 at: www.hotreview.org/articles/somebodyswatching.htm. Last accessed 1 November 2005.
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