ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: EXPERIENCING PLACE: DRAMATURGIES OF SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE Kelley Terese Holley, Doctor of Philosophy, 2022 Dissertation Directed By: Professor James M. Harding, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies This study examines the creative strategies that are employed in performance to construct, alter, and dramatize the audience?s experience of place. As such my dissertation asks, if site-specific performance, by definition, hinges on a legible and meaningful relationship between site and performance, how does the performance key the audience into this essential quality? Likewise, if ?place? is a never-ending project, how is a place changed in the aftermath of a site-specific performance? Using dramaturgy as a methodology, along with audience and practitioner interviews, I direct my study to the reception of site-specific performance across mediums, including theatre, visual art, audio dramas, and dance. I critically analyze the roles that race, gender, and class play in shaping the material and experiential aspects of a place through site-specific performance. Using the theoretical lenses of cultural geography and audience studies, I interrogate the interplay between time and place in audio performances on the New York City subway, weigh the potential for an ?authentic? experience of place through its supposedly ?authentic? cuisine, and attend to the ethics of spectatorship beyond the theatrical frame. These case studies serve to stress-test th e notion of ?site,? a valuable but under-theorized concept. As I tease out the theoretical distance between ?site? and ?place,? I not only ask ?how does an audience experience place in site-specific performance,? but also ?what is a ?site,? anyway?? EXPERIENCING PLACE: DRAMATURGIES OF SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE by Kelley Terese Holley Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2022 Advisory Committee: Professor James M. Harding, Chair Associate Professor Faedra Chatard Carpenter Professor Ronit Eisenbach Associate Professor Christina B. Hanhardt Professor Franklin J. Hildy ? Copyright by Kelley Terese Holley 2022 ii Dedication For Vinny and Satchel ?To Days to Come, All My Love to Long Ago.? iii Acknowledgements Before I started writing this dissertation, I often heard people say writing one is a lonely process. Writing during a global pandemic is perhaps even more lonely. One thing I feel grateful for is that despite being isolated, both physically and through solo work, I received a wealth of support and connection from my mentors, colleagues, cohort, friends, and loved ones. Each provided moments of inspiration, joy, laughter, and perseverance. Without this care, it would have been a very lonely time, indeed. First, I?d like to thank my present and former advisors, Dr. James Harding and Dr. Faedra Chatard Carpenter, who helped me to shape and grow this project over the last three years. As I look back on my early ruminations, I can see how much my writing, my research, and my thinking have developed through your thoughtful feedback and mentorship. I feel immensely lucky that I was able to work with both of you. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Frank Hildy, Dr. Christina Hanhardt, and Professor Ronit Eisenbach for your time and energy. Whether directly during the dissertation process, during the prospectus stage, or during course work, your scholarship and pedagogy have helped me develop as a scholar. Beyond my committee, I am grateful for the guidance of Dr. Esther Kim Lee, who helped shape this project in its infancy, and Dr. Caitlin Marshall, who helped illuminate grad school?s hidden curriculum. Thank you to Dr. Korey Rothman and Julie Randolph, for their support and for the gift of time. When I entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland, I found myself to be a member of a cohort of six. Together, the six of us had different approaches to research, different interests, and certainly different personalities. These differences have only served to make our cohort stronger and more collaborative. Together, we faced challenges and challenged each other. Thank you to Dr. Victoria Scrimer, Dr. Q-Mars Haeri, Dr. Allison Hedges, Dr. Jenna iv G erdsen, and Dr. Fraser Stevens. I am thankful for your friendship. Beyond my cohort, many of my fellow graduate students have greatly impacted my time at the University of Maryland. Specifically, I am grateful to Dr. Po-Hsien Chu for his collaboration and generous advice, and to Dr. Les Gray, for many things, but in particular an off-handed comment about the purpose of theory that has stuck to my bones and shaped the work that I do as a scholar. I have benefitted from a network of scholars who have provided feedback on this work, helping conference papers become chapters. I am grateful to the American Society for Theatre Research working group ?A Matter of Public Taste(s): Food, Performance, and Commensality,? which was led by Dr. Kristin Hunt and Dr. Joshua Abrams. This group was hugely influential in shaping my approach to food and site. I will always think back fondly to our food tour of Washington D.C. I?d also like to thank you members of the ASTR working group ?Echoes of Place: Repetition and Spectatorship in Site-Specific and Immersive Performance? for riveting and vital conversations about space, place, and site. Thank you to my co-convener, Dave Mancini, for allowing me to ask him ?No, but what actually is a site?? over and over again for two years straight. My scholar and practitioner colleagues also helped me as I connected with interview candidates. This work is indebted to their thoughtful introductions. Finally, I would like to thank my family. My mother, Lori Olson, has given me the essential ?must-go-on-ness? to arrive at this point, and I?m so grateful for her support and love. My mother-in-law, Dr. Melissa Wattenberg, has shown me deep care through her thoughtful questioning, meaningful discussions, and interdisciplinary connections. I am thankful for my dog Satchel, who served as my stenographer. But most of all, I am so grateful for the endless love and support of my husband, Vincent Ularich. His strength, humor, support, and kindness are the reason you are reading these words. v Table o f Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v Table of Figures ............................................................................................................................ vii Introduction: This Must Be the Place .............................................................................................. 1 Memorial Drive on/as Stage ........................................................................................................ 1 What is Site-Specific Performance? ............................................................................................ 5 Cultural Geography: An Introduction ....................................................................................... 13 The ?Problem? with Spectatorship ............................................................................................ 17 Dramaturgy as Critical Object and Methodology ..................................................................... 22 Overview of the Chapters .......................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 1: In Plain Site: Transparency, Misalignments, and Museums ........................................ 35 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 35 What is a Site? ........................................................................................................................... 51 How Does the Audience Experience a Place as a Site? ............................................................ 67 In the Museum ........................................................................................................................... 83 Chapter 2: Site-Seeing: Theatrical Framing and Spatial Delight in Baltimore ............................. 87 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 87 A Place of Pleasure, The Pleasure of Place ............................................................................. 101 Site-Unscene: Inside the Theatrical Frame .............................................................................. 109 Seeing and Being Seen in Site-Specific Theatre ..................................................................... 118 Invisible Theatre & Participation ............................................................................................ 123 Shouting ?Fire? in a Crowded Street Theatre .......................................................................... 130 Stage Combat ........................................................................................................................... 139 The Place Must Go On ............................................................................................................ 146 Chapter 3: Here and/or Now: Ordinary Time on the 7 Train ...................................................... 150 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 150 A Place in Time ....................................................................................................................... 163 Representations of Place, Representations of Time ................................................................ 171 The Spectacular Now: Presence and the Present Postdramatic Theatre .................................. 181 The Enduring Present: Ordinary Time During Extraordinary Time ....................................... 192 vi C hapter 4: Eating Place: Consumption and Aut henticity in Washington D.C. and Early Modern England ........................................................................................................................................ 198 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 198 Salt, Fat, Acid, Here: A Survey of Food and Place ................................................................. 208 The Gastronomical Library: The Folger Shakespeare Library as Site .................................... 217 One Fish, Two Fish, Pickled Fish, Puffin Fish: Extravagance, Lack, and the Embodied Spectator .................................................................................................................................. 219 How to Cook a Swan: Recipe Books and Cooking a Fantasy ................................................. 225 The Sucrovore?s Dilemma: Colonialist Consumption and Race ............................................. 233 A Moveable Feast: Experiencing Place on the Tongue ........................................................... 241 Consider the Orange: ?Preserving? Authenticity .................................................................... 248 Conclusion: Go Where You Wanna Go ...................................................................................... 253 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 253 Now and Then ......................................................................................................................... 255 Here and There ........................................................................................................................ 258 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 264 vii Table of Figures Figure 1: Almost Home by Do Ho Suh the ????????.?????????.56 Smithsonian Museum of American Art, March 2018 Figure 2: Details in Berlin Hub of Almost ????????.?????????.56 Home by Do Ho Suh at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, May 2018. Figure 3: Magritte, Ren?. Delusions of ????????.?????????.56 Grandeur II. 1948. Oil on Canvas. 39 1/8 ? 32 1/8 in. (99.2 ? 81.5 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Figure 4: The New York Hub, from the vantage point of the new route, in Almost ????????.?????????.90 Home by Do Ho Suh the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, May 2018. Figure 5: Damper Felts, The N Train, March ?????????????????199 2022. Figure 6: Hannah Woolley's Marmalade, in ?????????????????258 Process and Completed Figure 7: ?Site-Specific Performance? ?????????????????261 students power pose on the stage of the Dekelboum Concert Hall at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, while Barnes and Saenz De Viteri watch. 1 Introduction ?This Must Be the Place? Memorial Drive on/as Stage I squeezed between two strangers into the backseat of an old Toyota Corolla. It was a cold January night; we were all bundled in our warmest winter clothing. Two women were talking animatedly in the front seat. As one flipped through radio stations, the other merged onto Memorial Drive, a riverside highway that borders Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two women were actors, the passengers in the back seat were audience members watching a performance of MJ Halberstadt?s Triple Word Score. Performed in the front seat of a moving vehicle, Triple Word Score is one in a series of ?car plays? Halberstadt produced around the Greater Boston area. In Triple Word Score, the audience of three was taken along for the ride, so to speak. Harvard Square became the setting of the play?s action. In as much as the car was the ?site? of performance, so was Cambridge itself. In the middle of her sentence, the driver, Courtney, played by Rachel Belleman, quickly hit the breaks to avoid crashing into a BMW that had just cut us off. ?Fucking BMW drivers think they can do whatever they want,? she interjected, before returning to her line, all without missing a beat.1 It is this moment that has stuck with me for six years. This moment was one of utter delight, emerging from the near touching of performance and reality, a sudden blurring or slippage between the two in which they become, momentarily, indistinguishable. Rachel?s reaction was effortless, a verbal response like any that would have erupted from any driver in the situation, before continuing her thought. The line between Rachel and Courtney was unclear. In fact, it would have, perhaps, been more peculiar if she had not acknowledged the car at all. If she 1 Triple Word Score, Mini Prod, Cambridge, MA, January 26, 2016. 2 had not, a perceivable gap between the performance and its setting may have emerged. Acknowledging the outside world structures a unique relationship between performance and site wherein they do not simply co-exist, but are overlayed or intersect each other, peculiarly occupying the same interpretive frame. Site-specific performance has long been defined through the intimate relationship between place and art.2 Scholars like Mike Pearson and Fiona Wilkie suggest that the deep connection between art and place is a formal characteristic, central to its viability. Wilkie defines site-specific performance, distinct from site-sympathetic and site-generic performances, as ?performance specifically generated from/for one selected site.?3 This intimate relationship requires, in some regard, that the place is legible for the spectator. By this, I mean, that if the relationship with place is central to site-specific performance, it must be communicated to the audience in a way that allows them to perceive that relationship. Essentially, how place is experienced through site-specific performance depends on the performance dramaturgically constructs a sense of place for its audience. This experience may change the spectator?s experience of place going forward, offering new ways to make meaning in space. While the relationship between place and art may be essential to the genre, it is not without context. The way that place frames art, and vice versa, is ultimately unstable. Place is not a constant. It is in process and can be shaped and altered by the practices and actions that occur within it. Thinking of theatre more generally, space is one of its most indispensable qualities. Many have considered theatrical space in relation to architecture, scenography, and movement. In this 2 In this dissertation, I am using the term ?site-specific performance,? rather than ?site-specific theatre,? to speak broadly of a wider spectrum of performance types in which theatre is one of many. When I refer to site-specific theatre, it is because it is the specific medium of my analysis or case study. Throughout this dissertation, when I am referencing a text, I will engage the specific terminology (e.g., performance vs. theatre) that they employ. 3 Fiona Wilkie, "Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain." New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 2 (2002): 150. 3 dissertation, I turn toward the notion of site, in its conceptual, ethical, and aesthetic levels. Site is an essential means for examining an emerging dialogue between performance and place, as well as its aftereffects. Though no theatrical space is, in actuality, neutral, site structures a complex relationship with a place?s past in order to shape its future. David Harvey reminds us that, ?how we represent space and time in theory matters, because it affects how we and others interpret and then act with respect to the world.?4 The sentiment could be reconfigured to suggest how we represent space and time in site-specific performance matters. Site-specific performance participates in a vital artistic form of world-making which has meaningful ramifications on the material and political lives of those who are touched by that place. At the same time that this moment of Triple World Score relayed an experience of Boston ? in this case, the attitude so regularly associated with Massachusetts? drivers, the performance vehicle was also part of Boston. That means, that if we consider the ?slippage? between the performance and the real world in Triple Word Score, the same can be said for those who are outside of the car, who can easily misread the performance as belonging to the real world. From the street, or from the perspective of the BWM, it was indistinguishable from others on the road. As much as site-specific performance is about a place, it is also of that place. It transforms the world around it, whether by providing its audience with an enriched sense of place, a new spatiality, or by simply participating in the ongoing project that is place. Kim Solga argues that similar to how a site informs the reception of the art placed upon it, ?the labor of making and presenting that work impacts and changes the site in turn.?5 Site-specific performance?s impact is 4 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford [England]?; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1989), 205. 5 Kim Solga, Theory for Theatre Studies: Space, Theory for Theatre Studies (London?; New York: Methuen Drama, 2019), 79. 4 not limited to the confines of the performance, nor to the experience of the spectators. It can radically impact the future of a place. How does site-specific performance alter the perception and reality of place for spectators and non-spectators alike? What strategies do practitioners use to evoke a sense of place for the spectator? What potential for new spatial configurations and political realities is held within site- specific performance? In this dissertation, I examine the creative strategies employed in a performance to construct, alter, and dramatize the audience?s experience of place. Further, I consider the impact of site-specific performance upon a place in return. My research attends to the construction of a sense of place in performance through the fields of cultural geography and audience studies. Following cultural geographers like Doreen Massey and Tim Cresswell, ?place? is an ongoing process. Places move on and are not quite experienced as expected or remembered, but are encountered through the senses, nonetheless. Performances use sight, sound, touch, and taste to shape the spectator?s sense of a place. The perception of place created in site-specific performance can highlight or obscure the political and social reality of the people who live there. As place is always emerging, site-specific performance can make a lasting impact on how place is experienced in perpetuity. As spectators make meaning, they also are enacting political realities upon the places they encounter. In this introduction, I outline several of the many scholarly threads that I pull throughout the body of the dissertation. I begin with site-specific performance, surveying its broad application and use through definitional, taxonomical, and genealogical approaches. I do so in order to relay how site-specific performance has been understood and to illuminate the potential for critique. Then, I proceed to the theoretical frame of cultural geography, which, in many ways, has served as the underpinnings of site-specific performance?s engagement with place and space. 5 Here, I offer an introduction rather than a survey, as the scholarship contained within this area is analyzed and applied in depth throughout my case studies. I turn to spectatorship, illuminating the problems with audience studies, before considering dramaturgy as an object of study and as a promising methodology for analyzing audiences. I conclude with an overview of my chapters, identifying the themes, forms, and motifs that weave throughout the body of this work. What is Site-Specific Performance? Although, as I argue elsewhere in this dissertation, ?site? is an under-theorized concept in site-specific performance, site-specific performance, itself, is robustly discussed and studied by scholars and practitioners alike. However, what is meant by the term is not always clear. Understanding the landscape of site-specific performance theory is essential because, while there is much emphasis on definition, typology, and genealogy throughout this scholarship, little consensus has been reached. In my work, I approach site-specific performance as directly tying the work to the place in which it is performed. I am particularly interested in the ways in which such performance animates the features of place, because of its political and social efficacy. Here, I offer a brief survey of site-specificity through its genealogical origins and contemporary theorization. In doing so, I locate my work within the landscape of scholarship and practice. Defining and Classifying Site-Specific Performance Much of the theorization around site-specific performance has directly concerned with defining and classifying the genre. One approach offered by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks endeavors to craft an expansive definition, emphasizing the key and inseparable relationship between performance and place. Pearson and Shanks? approach acknowledges key features of 6 site-specific performance such as a dependence on a given location, while heavily emphasizing recognizing the complex and layered quality of place: Site-specific performances are conceived for, mounted within, and conditioned by the particulars of found spaces, existing social situations or locations, both used and disused ? They rely, for their conception and their interpretation, upon the complex coexistence, superimposition and interpenetration of a number of narratives and architectures, historical and contemporary, of two basic orders: that which is of the site, its fixtures and fittings, and that which is brought to the site, the performance and its scenography: of that which preexists the work and that which is of the work: of the past and of the present. They are inseparable from their sites, the only contexts within which they are intelligible. Performance recontextualises such sites: it is the latest occupation of a location at which other occupations ? their material traces and histories ? are still apparent: site is not just an interesting, and disinterested, backdrop...The multiple meanings and readings of performance and site intermingle, amending and compromising one another.6 The definition provided by Shanks and Pearson is capacious, yet it becomes inoperative as it overextends in an effort to contain a concept and genre that is already challenging to pin down. Pearson and Shanks identify site-specific performance as directly contending with the complexities of place. Pearson later describes this as a form of stratigraphy, in which the site- specific performance?s dramaturgy reflects the layers contained within the site.7 Their model approaches the concept of ?place,? as it reveals and navigates the intricacies of site as a cultural, historical, and political artifact while cementing a relationship with a particular location. Over the last few decades, attention has shifted from questions regarding the definition of site-specific performance to those concerning typology. This has allowed practitioners, though more often theorists, to home in site-specific performance?s connection to a specific location because they can distinguish it from other forms of performance that merely take place outside of a conventional theatre space. Scholars, most notably Wilkie, have worked to formalize categories 6 Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London?; New York: Routledge, 2001), 23. 7 Mike Pearson, Site-Specific Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 167. 7 of site-specific performance.8 Broadly conceived, there are roughly three categories: site-specific performance, site-generic performance, and site-responsive (or sympathetic) performance.9 Site-generic performance is a label applied to theatre that is performed in a generic setting: any airport, hotel room, or bank lobby will do. The content of site-generic performance fits the location in which it is performed but is not the specific place described in the text. For example, consider a production of Green Eyes by Tennessee Williams, a play set in a hotel room that is performed in an actual hotel room.10 Essentially, site-generic performances occupy what Marc Aug? has called ?non-places,? places of transition (and often of transportation) that do not easily lend themselves to specificity.11 Site-responsive is the least common term, but, perhaps, the most common of the three in terms of practice. It describes existing play texts that are staged with an eye to the unique, though largely irrelevant, spatial locations in which they are performed. For some, this category includes Shakespeare in the Park-style performances. Wilkie, however, considers performances like this to be simply outdoor stagings and classifies them outside the boundaries of the ?genus? of site-[blank] performances, all together.12 The shifting terminology and typology of site-specificity can be found throughout its history, which includes linked terms like Richard Schechner?s environmental theatre and the land art movement that was popular in the 1960s. Immersive theatre, another related category, is outside the aesthetic genus because it is less concerned with the particularities of the place in 8 Fiona Wilkie, ?Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain,? New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 2 (May 2002): 150, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X02000234. 9 Andy Field, ?Andy Field: What Is a ?site? for Theatre Anyway?,? The Guardian, January 16, 2009, sec. Stage, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2009/jan/16/site-theatre. 10 Joel Brown Globe Correspondent et al., ?In the Bedroom with Tennessee Williams?s ?Green Eyes? - The Boston Globe,? BostonGlobe.com, accessed February 10, 2022, https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2012/01/20/bedroom-with-tennessee-williams-green- eyes/v01Pv7zrfNxqsxncxGp1XL/story.html. 11 Marc Aug?, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 2nd English language ed (London?; New York: Verso, 2008). 12 Wilkie, ?Mapping the Terrain,? 149. 8 which it is performed. Instead, immersive theatre is defined as creating a world of the play that surrounds the spectator.13 A clear example of this type of performance is Sleep No More by the UK theatre company Punchdrunk, one of the most prominent producers of immersive performance. Sleep No More takes Macbeth and stages it through several floors of ?The McKittrick Hotel.? While the spectator is completely immersed within the performance space, and the play is staged outside of a traditional theatre space, it does not have the cultural layers that Pearson or Wilkie associate with site-specific performance, as the performance space is essentially a set. Certainly, a performance may be both immersive and site-specific. Environmental theatre and immersive performance distinguish themselves from site-specific performance through the emphasis on the spectator and their spatial relationship. In many ways, this preoccupation with typology has become a central feature within the theories of site-specific performance. Too, it provides the fodder for a frequent frustration between practitioners and scholars, in which practitioners often apply the term ?site-specific? to performances without discernment and scholars lament the further complications to the endeavor to answer what site-specific performance really is. Of course, there are many ways to for something to be ?site-specific performance.? The mere suggestion that categorization offers firm boundaries between the subgenres can easily dispense with the meaningful and broad theorization that has occurred regarding site-specificity. Rather than insisting upon a singular categorization system, I point toward the recurring interest in typology for the sake of recognizing a trend in the scholarship of site-specific performance. In the regular debates around 13 See for more on immersive performance: Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Macmillan International Higher Education, 2013); ?Immersive Theatre, Defined,? HowlRound Theatre Commons, accessed November 21, 2019, https://howlround.com/immersive-theatre-defined; Gareth White, ?On Immersive Theatre,? Theatre Research International 37, no. 3 (October 2012): 221?35, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883312000880. 9 site-specific performance and its kindred forms, most theory attends to the following two questions: how closely related are the performance and the location in which it is performed, and can the performance be staged elsewhere to a similar effect? The trend toward typology, best expressed in regularly addressing these two questions, illustrates two key ideas. The first is that ?site-specific? has been well attended to and theorized as a term. The second is that theorization is largely concerned with the literal space in which the performance is staged. Essentially, site-specific typology has asked how ?specific? to a site must a performance be in order to gain the label of site-specificity. Despite the attention paid to ?site- specificity,? less attention has been paid to the operative term ?site.? Typology becomes a trap that redirects attention from ?site? to ?specific,? in which ?site? is treated as if it were self- evident. This is a compelling trap, one that I, too, have fallen for. By shifting our attention back to site, I hope to illuminate what it offers in terms of structuring spatial practice and experience ? indeed, a spatial practice and experience that is arguably the foundational building block of theatre as such. While there are many ways to approach site, one way of understanding it is as a dramaturgical tool. Here, I propose that we view site less like a slice of geographic space, and more as a way of activating place. By this I mean to suggest that site is a form of spatial dramaturgy, a worldbuilding tool, that delimits and defines the usage of a place for the audience. In this capacity, site makes place vivid, illuminating its features for the sake of dramatic, aesthetic, or artistic purposes. In this definition, I point toward Miwon Kwon?s claim that site is a discursive vector.14 She likewise moves it away from site being a fixed location, to understand within the context of social and cultural phenomena. I discuss this approach to site greater depth 14 Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002), 29?30. 10 in Chapter 1. My approach to site-specific performance centers the spatial practices inherent in the performance genre. Consequently, I see site-specific performance as performance deeply invested in the particulars of specific places. However, unlike site-specificity is imagined under the typological model, my approach is not concerned with being here as much as it is offering the experience of there. A Brief Genealogy of Site-Specific Performance In 1969, artist Robert Barry famously proclaimed ?[his art] was made to suit the place in which it was installed. They cannot be moved without being destroyed.?15 Barry?s comment has echoed throughout site-specific practice and theory in the subsequent decades, investing in the context in which the art was received at the cost of its mobility. Site-specific performance has two predominant genealogical strands: site-specific visual art and environmental performance, which also contains Allan Kaprow?s happenings within its lineage. As Barry?s comment suggests, site-specific visual art historically privileged the physical and psychic qualities of the place as direct informants to the content of the work displayed there. Land art is a subsect of this category. Artist Robert Smithson wrote in 1967 that land art is concerned with ?the investigation of a specific site? and that it ?does not impose, but rather exposes the site.?16 Early site-specific visual art, including land art, is primarily considered the dimensions, textures, and environmental features of space. It subverted the expectation, held by critics like Michael Fried, that art should be independent of its contexts. Instead, it leans into 15 ?Four Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kosuth, Weiner,? Arts Magazine, 1969, 22, http://archive.org/details/sim_arts-magazine_1969-02_43_4. 16 Robert Smithson, ?Toward the Development of An Air Terminal Site,? in Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, ed. Jack D. Flam, The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 96. 11 them, it is ?formally determined or directed by it.?17 The intervening decades offered alternatives to the dependency on fixity, though many artists still centered on geographic location as a key characteristic. Art critic Miwon Kwon observes that site-specific art as institutional critique became increasingly popular, moving the genre away from merely the physical markers of space towards an engagement with its cultural and historical frames. Likewise, site-specific artists began to embrace mobility, moving beyond the formal fixity to a single location. In Chapter 1, I return to this genealogical strand in greater depth. I chart these movements here to recognize the turn towards mobility and the cultural registrars of place that have defined contemporary entries into site-specific visual art. These characteristics are particularly relevant to the case studies I examine throughout this text. From the perspective of theatre, site-specific performance is often placed in the lineage of environmental theatre and happenings. Though in its present form, site-specific performance is greatly concerned with specific locations, environmental theatre?s modus operandi was reorienting the spectator?s spatial relations with the performance. Environmental theatre looked to break free of the spatial arrangements maintained by conventionally staged theatre. As such, spectators found themselves sharing space with the performers, eliminating the popular Cartesian theatre model that provides the spectators and performers with a distinct and designated area. In 1968, Richard Schechner prosed six axioms of environmental theatre, in which he argued for a revised spatial relationship between the spectator and the performer.18 In these axioms, Schechner emphasizes the transactions contained within the theatrical space, the dynamic use of all available space, and a flexible and variable focus for the spectator. In this way, Schechner?s 17 Kwon, One Place after Another, 11. 18 Richard Schechner, ?6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre,? The Drama Review: TDR 12, no. 3 (1968): 41, https://doi.org/10.2307/1144353. 12 environmental theatre directly opposes the narrativizing function of the singular theatrical frame found in conventionally staged theatre.19 Environmental theatre, instead, invites the spectator to make their own meaning through a variety of potential frames.20 Schechner situates environmental theatre on a spectrum between traditionally staged performances and happenings. Happenings participated in the same institutional critique offered by site-specific visual art, moving to more accessible and unrestricted spaces. While some happenings occurred in created environment, others occurred in gallery spaces and apartments. Spectatorship was of primary importance to the event. Many of the artists who created happenings were concerned with altering the perspective of the spectator through ?the manipulation of space or the manipulation of spectators in specific environments.?21 One of the results of this is, as Mike Sell argues, that happenings ?enabled a radical individualization of art by empowering the spectator as an active maker of the art event.?22 Happenings approach space as an essential feature of their performance, but do so through and for the sake of the spectator. As site-specific performance has long defined itself through its particular relationship with the place in which it is performed, it may appear at first to sidestep the central concerns of its forerunners. Certainly, I am not the first to place site-specific performance within these histories. I do so here to illuminate qualities that belong to its predecessors. Reading site-specific performance in the linage of environmental theatre and happenings returns to it an emphasis on spectatorship, and particularly, the differing perspectives that emerge under altered spatial 19 See for instance Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1974). 20 Schechner, ?6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre,? 41. 21 Arnold Aronson, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography, Second edition (London?; New York: Methuen Drama, 2018), 115. 22 Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance & the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement, Theater--Theory/Text/Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 17. 13 configurations. Reexamining the genre?s varied genealogy offers room for critique and potential through its constitutive form. In particular, their focus on the experience and unique perspective of the spectator is particularly salient, because it centers on reception as the ?site? of experimentation. This pivot is useful to the work done in this dissertation, as I consider the reception of the place of performance through the work displayed upon it. Cultural Geography: An Introduction Though they serve two distinct theoretical functions, the terms space and place are often conflated. There are clear reasons as to why. Space and place are slippery concepts, refusing to be easily pinned down. Some have used them interchangeably. Others, like Michel de Certeau (in translation) have reversed their typical usage.23 Likewise, one of the most famous statements regarding in the philosophy of space/place is Henri Lefebvre?s proclamation ?(social) space is a (social) production.?24 Broadly, place can be variously used to connote a specific location, an epistemological foundation from which to understand the world, a philosophical concept, and a social construct. Place is largely conceived as diverging from space by attending to societal meaning, whereas space is frequently imagined as abstract, theoretical, and empty.25 For the humanistic geographers, who were the first to distinguish between the two terms, place is a meaningful segment of space and is discernable from space because of its meaning.26 However, 23 Michel de Certeau, ?Walking in the City,? in The Practice of Everyday Life. 1, trans. Stephen Rendall, 2. print (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 2013), 91?110. 24 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 33. print (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2013), 26. 25 Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman, eds., Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City, 21st Century Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 2?3. 26 Tim Cresswell, Geographic Thought a Critical Introduction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 112. 14 it is important to note that space, too, no matter how abstract it appears nor how distance it is held from place, is also a construct. For philosophers like Martin Heidegger and humanistic geographers like Yi-Fu Tuan, place emerges out of the wilderness. As such, it is human acts and material products that create a place where there was none before. This is central to his notion of dasein, which translates as being-in-the-world.27 Neither the world nor the people who occupy it can exist independently of one another. Heidegger imagines the building of a bridge.28 The bridge provides specificity to what he sees as the otherwise generalized natural landscape, earning it the status of place. For Heidegger, place begets space. He imagines the creation of the bridge as the place, with space forming relationally to the landmark. Tuan, similarly, situates human action as integral to the development of place.29 For each, place is a made meaningful through use. Place: Time, Movement, and Relational Geography While the general approach to place situates it as rich with cultural, political, and historical meaning, the nuances of approaches maintained by different disciplines, whether those be within geography, in related fields such as mathematics, or throughout the humanities, are innumerable. One of the major debates within the spatial turn has been whether place is static or an event, meaning that it has changed each time one returns to it. This debate is of particular relevancy to this project, as representing place in and experiencing place through site-specific work is hinged on how place is understood and what capacity it has for change. 27 Martin Heidegger, John Macquarrie, and Edward S. Robinson, Being and Time (New York: HarperPerennial/Modern Thought, 2008). 28 Martin Heidegger, ?Building Dwelling Thinking,? in Poetry, Language, Thought, 20. print (New York: Perennical Classics, 1971), 154. 29 Yi-Fu Tuan, ?Space and Place: The Humanistic Perspective,? in Philosophy in Geography, ed. Stephen Gale and Gunnar Olsson (Heidelberg: Springer Netherlands, 1979), 387?427. 15 Proponents of place as static mirror its common usage definition: place indicates a specific spot in space. This connotation was one of the three essential aspects of place argued by political geographer John Agnew. He identifies these as location, locale, and a sense of place. Here, location means a fixed set of coordinates, to which locale (broadly, social relations) and sense of place (here, the subjective experience) are subordinate.30 Yi-Fu Tuan even suggests that place is antithetical to movement, suggesting that its specific position within space is its defining quality. Tuan suggests, ?if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.?31 Of course, scholars in trajectory do not view location as the simple definition of place, reading it instead as a primary vector in its construction. One can see this in Agnew?s further consideration of locale and a sense of place, or Tuan?s theorization of place as a product of human action. An alternative approach to place suggests that rather than being a ?pause,? place is constructed through movement. In fact, place is always on the move. In this capacity, such an argument suggests that place is not only more than a mere location, but that it resists being fixed to a given location. This approach is popular amongst geographers like Doreen Massey and Nigel Thrift. Massey productively posits that place is an event. She presses this to the extreme suggesting that place is so much an event, that one can never be in the same place twice. Thrift theorizes the ?eventfulness? of place to illustrate that place is always in process and that time and place are intimately intertwined. 32 Massey and Thrift appear frequently throughout this project, as their investigation into movement, temporality, and place easily abut performance. 30 John A. Agnew, Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society (Taylor & Francis, 1987). 31 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, 7. print (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6. 32 N. J. Thrift, Spatial Formations, Theory, Culture & Society (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage, 1996) 296-7. 16 Performance is a regular metaphor and theoretical lens throughout cultural geography. For instance, Allan Pred utilizes models like Torsten H?gerstrand?s time-geography to suggest both that human action is ?a weaving dance through space-time,? in which the human body moves through place, and also argue that places are constructed through ?the unbroken flow of local events,? in which a place moves through time.33 In this model, place is a never-finished project invested in the cultural and social residue of its creation, which pushes it well beyond a location-centric function. Likewise, architectural historian Dell Upton refers to landscape as a ?scene,? which evokes the concept of time, that what is upon the land is here only for the passing moment, before the scene ends and the next begins.34 One approach that is particularly relevant to this project is relational geography, a strand of cultural geography that interprets place as much from how it relates to other places as from within. Perhaps most succinctly, Doreen Massey has suggested that places are constituted as much by their outside as their insides. Places are not islands unto themselves but are deeply invested in the interactions with other places. This is to say, movement between places is a key factor in the development of a place. While there is much to be said through this lens about the construction of places themselves, for my purposes, relational geographies are most useful in its privileging of connections between places. In this sense, the notion of topology is particularly helpful. Where topography is concerned with the specific geography of a discrete a place, topology shows places in relation to one another, a certain kind of connectedness that 33 Allan Pred, ?The Choreography of Existence: Comments on H?gerstrand?s Time-Geography and Its Usefulness,? Economic Geography 53, no. 2 (1977): 208, https://doi.org/10.2307/142726. Allan Pred, ?Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the Time- Geography of Becoming Places,? Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74, no. 2 (1984): 280. 34 Dell Upton, ?Seen, Unseen, and Scene,? in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, ed. Paul Erling Groth and Todd W. Bressi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 174?79. 17 understands places as bound up in each other. A topological map tells you not about the ground on which you stand, but the ground in relation to the world around it. The significance of a relational, or topological, approach to site-specific performance cannot be overstated. Relational geography offers a rich and complex spatiality that moves beyond place as a single location by seeing as part of a continuous whole, networked into other places. This theoretical framework is engaged regularly throughout my chapters. For instance, in Chapter 1, the framework supports my analysis of Do Ho Suh?s suitcase homes in Almost Home. In Chapter 4, relational geography becomes an essential framework to analyze food culture as a means to convey and develop a sense of place. Essentially, relational geography allows us to move beyond the fixation on fixed location so pronounced in site-specific performance by anticipating and inviting a more complex and robust sense of place. The ?Problem? with Spectatorship Theatre is often defined through its relationship to the audience. Herbert Blau argues that theatre begins with seeing ?that there is no theatre without separation,? emphasizing its inherently fractured nature between performers and audience (and those spectators, from each other.)35 But to Blau?s argument, I would add that there is no separation without space and with space we move into the conceptual realms of what we call ?a site.? Likewise, Peter Brook submits, ?A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.?36 There is much to question about Brook?s comment, particularly concerning site-specific performance and cultural geography, in which no 35 Herbert Blau, The Audience, Parallax?: Re-Visions of Culture and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 10. 36 Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 1. ed, A Touchstone Book (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1996), 11. 18 space is empty. But the point is that prior to the man?s walking and to that person being observed, there must be a space upon which to walk. To call that space ?a site? is to acknowledge, in contrast to Brook, that a space is never really empty. Brook?s favoring of the spectator?s gaze situates it as the originating act of performance. Beyond what happens on stage, performance is born out of the spectator observing the performer. Despite the primacy of spectatorship, research on the theatrical audience is still relatively underdeveloped. For instance, in 2022, the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts was published, the first entry into the publisher?s new series on Audience Research which claimed to be the first major companion in the area.37 One reason for this might be that ?the audience? is a tricky, paradoxical beast ?if only because the audience is constituted as an audience when they are congregate in the theatrical space. As much as we talk about ?the audience,? there is no singular audience for a performance. Each spectator who composes the entity has a unique set of interpretative lenses and biases that inform their experience. Furthermore, even these subject positions are unstable. Alice Rayner points out, ?The individual hears with varying capacities, from varying positions, from differing interests, from one moment to the next. Sometimes I hear you from my position as a woman, sometimes as a professor, sometimes as a mother, sometimes as the bourgeois.?38 Of course, beyond these roles that a spectator might receive the performance from, there are also the frames of gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality that shape and define the reception of a performance. But it is not a matter of coincidence that all of these frames refer to what scholars 37 Matthew Reason et al., ?The Paradox of Audiences,? in Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, by Matthew Reason et al., 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2022), 1, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003033226-1. 38 Alice Rayner, ?The Audience: Subjectivity, Community and the Ethics of Listening,? Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism VII, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 4. 19 and critics identify as ?positionality,? which, it should come as no surprise, is spatial concept and term. Though the audience comes together in a space for the performance, they quickly disperse from it as well, never to reassemble as a unit again. As such, researching the audience is notoriously hard. Professional theatres with a regular season of performances often think about ?their? audience as a fixed entity.39 This approach presumes that the audience is predictable and considers the demographics served by the theatre broadly. But it does not consider the nuances that emerge through the unique composition of an individual audience, and in many ways, takes the audience for granted. Unlike other mediums, such as television or film, industries that conduct regular surveys and collect audience data, there is little empirical research about theatre audiences. Consequently, the audience is regularly imagined as an ?it? rather than a ?they,? consolidating and ignoring the tensions and contradictions that emerge through its study. More scholars have, however, embraced the individuality of the spectator who asserts their agency within the performance. Jacques Ranci?re has argued against the supposed passivity of the spectator, asserting that instead, they are emancipated. He suggests that the spectator ?observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of places.?40 Emancipating the spectator elevates them to equal intelligence and situates them as agents within the co-production of meaning. In site- specific performance, this type of meaning-making is particularly relevant, because often the spectator has been to this site before (or will be again). They imbue the performance with their memories and hopes for that site. However, this type of analysis has difficulty considering the 39 Paul Kosidowski, ?Thinking Through the Audience,? Theatre Topics 13, no. 1 (2003): 85, https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2003.0010. 40 Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, 2021, 13. 20 audience as a whole. While it attends to the individuality of its constituent parts, it does not provide a methodological approach that would be needed to consider the audience on both a macro and micro scale. Helen Freshwater notes that attention to methodologies is particularly lacking within theatrical audience research.41 One common approach is to utilize reception or reader-response theory. This is one of the approaches taken by Susan Bennett in her seminal text Theatre Audiences. In particular, she employs theorists like Roland Barthes and Wolfgang Iser to attend to the individualized viewing experience of the spectator. Like Ranci?re, Bennett attends to the individual spectator, largely in the theoretical. Bennett recognizes that unlike reading a text, theatre is a far more symbiotically rich medium. She suggests that the ?director, actor, theatre building, lighting, seating, and so on ? intercede between the text and the reader.?42 This is particularly pronounced in site-specific performance where the relationship between the place and the art is displayed upon it is essential for the legibility of the work. If site intercedes between the performance and its reception, it suggests that interjection and interruption are valuable parts of the reception of a performance and the experience of a place. Another prominent strategy for audience analysis is a historical methodology that uses evidence, such as performance photos and reviews, to reconstruct the experience of the spectator.43 However, one potential pitfall for this methodology (applicable whether looking at historical or contemporary performances) is that one may conflate the experience of the critic 41 Helen Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, Theatre& (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK?; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 29. 42 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed (London?; New York: Routledge, 1997), 46. 43 Dani Snyder-Young and Matt Omasta, eds., ?Key Methodological Concepts in Spectatorship Research,? in Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change, Routledge Audience Research (Abingdon, Oxon?; New York: Routledge, 2022), 20?21. 21 with that of the entire audience.44 Beyond the fact that the individual reviewer cannot stand for the group of individuals that compose an audience, it also worth stating that there is a significant difference between that of a critic and that of an ordinary audience member. Likewise, the review is distanced from the audience?s in-the-moment response. The critic has taken time to reflect upon their initial reading, revise their opinion, and in some instances, forget. As such, reviews are useful tools but must be read with a healthy dose of skepticism. The Spectator?s Perspective Of course, while the term ?spectator? seemingly suggests that watching the performance is the primary means of receiving it, other senses play a valuable role in shaping the spectator?s perspective. This is particularly true for immersive and site-specific performances in which alternate senses like touch, taste, and smell are essential ways of creating meaning. These sensations can be evocative of feeling, memory, and a sense of place. For instance, Holly Maples, in her study of a site-specific heritage performance, drew ?the audience?s attention to an imagined embodied experience of the past using touch, taste, sight, and smell? and then evaluated their response through a mixed methodology that ranged from neuroscience-informed strategies to performance-based research.45 Many of the case studies discussed in this dissertation utilize senses beyond sight and hearing to relay a sense of place. The clearest example is Chapter 4, which considers how food is utilized to convey the experience of place for the spectators. 44 Richard Paul Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, Theatre and Performance Theory (Cambridge?; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 21. 45 Holly Maples, ?Touching Past Lives: The Limits of Evaluating Immersive Heritage Performance Audiences,? in Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change, ed. Dani Snyder-Young and Matt Omasta, Routledge Audience Research (Abingdon, Oxon?; New York: Routledge, 2022), 114. 22 Perception, and indeed, affect, are returning themes throughout the dissertation. In this sense, experiencing place is requires one to tap into its ?inventory of shimmers.?46 In many ways, the experience of being in place is hinged on our embodied experience, the ability to see the site as three-dimensional, a distinctly different theatrical world from the limited and flattened one that exists behind the proscenium. In their work, The Senses in Performance, Andr? Lepecki and Sally Banes remind us, ?any body in a performance situation (be it the bodies of the performers or the bodies of the audience) is an inexhaustible inventor of sensorial-perceptual potentials and becomings.?47 This approach recalls David Morris? expansion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty?s phenomenology of perspective in The Sense of Space, in which Morris suggests that perception arises from the interactions of the body and the world.48 Remarking on this, Robert Quillen Camp characterizes it as ?The body and the world are topographically continuous, and at the same time there is a fold between them that allows perception arise.?49 Perception is already a spatial activity, and place is already bound up in the act of spectatorship. Dramaturgy as Critical Object and Methodology A matter of vocabulary: the term dramaturgy is used frequently throughout this dissertation. While the term is complex, multifaceted, and ceaselessly debated, I will use the term to refer to not only the theory and practice of dramatic composition, but the interconnected strategies of performance that connect the performers, spectators, and site. Dramaturgy is a 46 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ?An Inventory of Shimmers,? in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 11. 47 Sally Banes and Andr? Lepecki, The Senses in Performance (New York; London: Routledge, 2007), 4, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=480053. 48 David Morris, The Sense of Space (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10594859. 49 Robert Quillen Camp, ?Quaint Devices: A Map of Headphone and Headset Plays?,? PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 43, no. 2 (May 6, 2021): 41, https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00560. 23 protean tool for performance analysis. In this project, dramaturgy is both an object of study and a methodology. Dramaturg Anne Fliotsos reminds us that the act of a dramaturgical investigation incorporates both the dramatic strategies that affect the spectator and the analytical tools that reveal them.50 As Melanie Beddie put it, ?Dramaturgy can be thought of as the midwife between theory and practice. It can provide a process for bringing ideas into a concrete form.?51 Dramaturgy as Critical Object Broadly, dramaturgy can refer to the creative strategies utilized within a performance. In this dissertation, I am particularly concerned with those strategies that are used to dramatize place. As such, here, I outline the ways in which dramaturgy has been spatialized. In a curated discussion about ethics in site-specific performance, Rand Harmon asserted the centrality of dramaturgy within the genre, noting that it has a particular resonance with spectatorship: ?What makes a site-based audience experience really visceral is that the dramaturgy intersects with the contexts of the site and the audience is actually immersed in, interfacing with, and reacting within the contexts that they understand they?re interpreting from the site.?52 Dramaturgy operates in the in-betweeness, linking performance, audience, and site through a set of creative practices. Many have observed a productive relationship between dramaturgy and space. For instance, Cathy Turner sees dramaturgy as architectural, as an approach to theatre and performance across genres and without implicit prioritization of the play text. She notes that both 50 Anne Fliotsos, ?From Script Analysis to Script Interpretation: Valorizing the Intuitive,? Theatre Topics 19, no. 2 (2009): 154, https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.0.0070. 51 Melanie Beddie, ?So What Is This Thing Called the Dramaturg?,? RealTime, December 2005, 4. 52 Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez, ?Ethics and Site-Based Theatre: A Curated Discussion,? Theatre History Studies 38, no. 1 (2019): 169, https://doi.org/10.1353/ths.2019.0010. 24 dramaturgy and architecture relate to the structural elements of world-building.53 For Turner, architecture is not solely a physical, spatialized design, but a connection between the physical, social and aesthetic space. Intimately connecting this to the text of plays, Turner bridges the gap between the physicality of space and the thematic space of plays. Her approach productively ties textual and performance space to the materiality and spatiality of a site. Mike Pearson offers stratigraphy as an alternative model for a similar effect. Stratigraphy, for Pearson, is a model of dramaturgy that views the site and performance as both composed of layers.54 For Pearson, the site?s layers include its history, culture, politics, and common usage, among others. The dramaturgical layers consist of text, physical action, soundtrack, and scenography. Pearson suggests that the layers in one vector mediate the other strata.55 Indeed, the mirrored structure between site and performance productively recognizes the ways in which the layers of each mediate the other. Site and performance are intimately bound up in the understanding and interpretation of the other. Heidi Taylor suggests that site-specific performance leaves its audience with choices that reflect a dramaturgy that is concerned with ?what acts to perform in what order and rhythm.?56 For Taylor, this approach considers the audience?s spatiality, which requires them to make choices about how to be a spectator in this unconventional space, as well as makes space to embrace the inevitable accidents and contradictions that emerge in site-specific work. Though she does not explicitly address it, Taylor?s concern for accidents recalls the notion of slippage 53 Cathy Turner, Dramaturgy and Architecture: Theatre, Utopia and the Built Environment. (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) 20. 54 Pearson, Site-Specific Performance, 167. 55 Ibid., 168. 56 Heidi Gilpin, quoted in Heidi Taylor, ?Deep Dramaturgy: Excavating the Architecture of the Site-Specific Performance,? Canadian Theatre Review, no. 119 (Summer 2004): 17. 25 that is common throughout the genre. It also unconsciously, but unmistakably, intertwines place and time, the performance space and what happens there. Dramaturgy as Methodology Amending Eugenio Barba?s deep dramaturgy which sees dramaturgy referring to every action and effect, Peter Eckersall suggests that dramaturgy also ?expresses an attitude or belief system about the context surrounding theatre?s production and reception.?57 In this capacity, dramaturgy can be a means for understanding the performance?s reception by its spectators. Dramaturgical analysis serves as my primary methodology for this dissertation, as it presents a productive, versatile means of analysis through its multifaceted attention. Utilizing dramaturgy as a methodology renders accessible the tensions among site-specific performance, place, and spectator that this dissertation centers. Dramaturgy?s multivalent application considers the intricacies and functions of performative elements that include performance analysis, audience reception, and community engagement. Serving as a means of engaging both theory and practice, dramaturgy stages a natural dialogue between performance and scholarship. Dramaturgy often serves to build connections between various elements of the content of a performance, including its text, form and embodied acts, and context. As a critical methodology, dramaturgical analysis provides a robust set of tools to analyze both practice and scholarship. Textual analysis is a fundamental tool of dramaturgical analysis, allowing for close readings of primary and secondary materials. Akin to close reading, 57 Peter Eckersall, ?Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on ?The Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project,?? Theatre Research International 31, no. 3 (October 2006): 284, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883306002240. 26 dramaturgical analysis of play scripts emphasizes the internal composition of the performance and its dramatic tactics while situating it within a contextual frame. Dramaturgy is a compelling methodology for audience research. In this approach, dramaturgy understands the audience as a complex, transient entity whose members are co- participants in the performance. Attending to the spectator, Milan Zvada proposes an interactive dramaturgy as a means of investigating their relationship with artists and their work.58 Zvada distinguishes interactive dramaturgy from one-way dramaturgy which values dramatic texts as the priority of dramaturgical practice. Zvada purposes that the energies of concentration, attention, and spatial awareness replace a performance?s reliance on dialogue. This work appreciates that the audience is a living organism, with a unique response that is ultimately variable. Similarly, Martine Kei Green-Rogers suggests that one of the capabilities of dramaturgy is to archive the audience.59 In this capacity, dramaturgy attends to the other ephemeral aspect of a performance: the group gathered in the audience to watch it, who will never collect in the same way again. The dramaturg has long been imagined to be a stand-in for the audience, essentially serving as their advocate.60 This idea largely stems from the perspective of mounting a theatrical production, in which the dramaturg stands in for the anticipated audience and collaborates with the production team on their behalf. In this capacity, advocacy means considering the 58 Milan Zvada, ?Dramaturgy as a Way of Looking into the Spectator?s Aesthetic Experience,? in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2015), 202?7. 59 Dani Snyder-Young and Martine Kei Green-Rogers, ?Public Facing Dramaturgy as Audience Research: An Interview with Martine Kei Green-Rogers,? in Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change, ed. Dani Snyder-Young and Matt Omasta, Routledge Audience Research (Abingdon, Oxon?; New York: Routledge, 2022), 143. 60 Michael M Chemers, Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). 27 interpretation and reception of the audience.61 Though the idea is widespread, it is not without its opponents. For instance, Katherine Profeta suggests that this advocacy is best seen as ?a fruitless task? because ?one cannot really advocate for an unknown, irreducibly diverse, impromptu future collective.?62 Profeta?s comment recalls the numerous difficulties that emerge when studying an audience: there is no ?audience,? there are merely individual spectators whose opinions can never be fully accounted for nor anticipated. With this in mind, one might see the dramaturg as the audience?s advocate serving, as Faedra Chatard Carpenter formulates, offering ?an awareness of interpretative possibilities versus interpretive absolutes.?63 Thus, dramaturgy contains a robust set of analytical approaches to recognize the shifting interpretative possibilities of performance as it coalesces tentative connections with the shifting environment in which it is shaped and received. Dramaturgical practice resists a desire to firmly resolve theoretical conflicts. It embraces a radical space of potentiality that allows for interplay between the layers of performance and its context. Dramaturgy offers a way to interpret the effects of the spectating practices and analyze the complex reception of an audience without seeking a definitive interpretative answer. It allows for a consideration of the abstracted experience within a specific, real context. Through this approach, I hope to avoid the pitfalls of previous audience research models that ?discursively produc[e] the audience the critic would like to imagine rather than accurately reflecting the complexity and diversity of collective and individual response.?64 61 Scott R Irelan, Anne Fletcher, and Julie Felise Dubiner, The Process of Dramaturgy A Handbook. (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Incorporated, 2010), 71, http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6452709. 62 Katherine Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance, Studies in Dance History (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 88. 63 Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014) 13. 64 Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, 8?9. 28 Rather than focusing on the hypothetical audience from the perspective of production, I suggest that the same lens can be directed towards the reception of performance, moving from inside to outside the production process. In this position, I read the interpretative possibilities alongside interviews and reviews to incorporate the experience of other spectators. I conducted numerous interviews with spectators and practitioners (or curators) for each of my case studies. Additionally, I count myself among the audience for these performances, as I have seen all the case studies discussed in this dissertation first-hand, except for Liu Bolin?s live painting at the Hirshhorn Gala, featured in Chapter 1. I have seen this piece in its photographic form. For me, seeing each performance (or installation) was essential in order to effectively analyze the audience?s reception of the work. As such, I work between available and definitive (individual) interpretations. Of course, this methodology does have its limits. My own attestation to the interpretative possibilities is from my own positionality as a white American woman, informed by the cultural frames that accompany that position. Though I have endeavored to consider the reception of these performances from outside of my own position, my ability to do so is ultimately limited and there are undoubtedly gaps in my analysis. Likewise, as noted in the section on spectatorship, studying the audience is a notoriously difficult endeavor because it is difficult to capture and represent the complexities of perspectives and voices that are contained within ?the audience.? My sampling of both spectators and practitioners was imperfect, limited to those who I could identify and would speak with me. Largely, this sampling came after the fact as all, but two performances occurred before my dissertation research began. This means that I caught only those who had seen the performances previously, rather than capturing their initial reactions (or indeed, more interviewees). As much as possible, I worked to include a broad range of 29 demographics in my samples, attending to age, gender, race, and experience with theatre. Ultimately, the receptive analysis I offer is provisional, operating through a model that sees ?dramaturgy as a process of being undecided and, by virtue of the fact of creative indecision, of being in a relational state of intercession.?65 Overview of the Chapters Across this dissertation, I consider the numerous ways in which the experience of place is dramaturgically constructed for the benefit of the spectator. I have intentionally selected case studies from a broad range of artistic mediums, including theatre, dance, and visual arts. I have elected for this eclectic mix because site-specificity, as a genre, has emerged as an interdisciplinary category. This is evident when looking at its genealogies. As such, incorporating different mediums became an essential feature in my study because it allowed me to stress-test the capabilities of site and better interrogate how it dramatizes the experience of place for the spectator. While my mediums vary, I have confined my case studies to cities within the Northeast United States. These are Washington D.C., Baltimore, New York, and, briefly, Boston. Though there are numerous reasons for doing so, one particularly salient reason is to limit the geographic scope of the places which I discuss. Though the case studies may resemble performances that have occurred beyond this region, for the sake of my analysis here, limiting the geographic scope allows me to work from a common foundation. Place is a complex spatial conceit that is layered and ever-changing. To represent or render it legible to the spectator, a performance must contend with place as a multifaceted object that is experienced differently depending on one?s position. 65 Eckersall, ?Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice,? 284. 30 Therefore, while each case study is concerned with examining how place is dramaturgically experienced in site-specific performance, they do so through critiquing and challenging the racial, gendered, and class dynamics that shape the material and experiential aspects of a given place. In Chapter 1, entitled ?In Plain Site: Transparency, Misalignments, and Museums,? One way to answer the question ?what is a site? is to examine the model that the genre originally pushed against. By returning to one of the genealogical origins of site-specificity, visual art, I consider the place from which ?site? was first distinguished: the museum. Utilizing two examples of visual art that mark a palpable return of site-specificity to the retheorized museum space, this chapter both maps the landscape of site-specificity and critiques it by asking, what is ?site? in site-specificity? Through a close reading of the history and theorization of site- specificity, I suggest that ?site? is an undertheorized term that is often conflated with ?place.? In this chapter, I offer a provisional approach to ?site? that suggests it is a way of experiencing a place. Rather than being synonymous with place, my approach locates site between art and place. Through my case studies, Almost Home by Do Ho Suh and Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn Museum by Liu Bolin, I identify two dramaturgical means through which site, in its dramaturgical function to animate the relationship between place and art, becomes legible to the spectator. These two strategies, transparency and misalignment, concurrently mark and unmark the site. Such, site is simultaneously distinguished from and a part of place. I argue that this is an essential component of site, for if site is not distinguished and identified as a site it becomes illegible. As such, spectatorship is a vital component of activating ?site.? In Chapter 2, ?Site-Seeing: Theatrical Framing and Spatial Delight in Baltimore,? I theorize the notion of ?spatial delight? in order to analyze the ethics of the slipping theatrical 31 frame in site-specific performance and their long-term effect on a place. In this chapter, I utilize Promenade: Baltimore by Single Carrot Theatre, a play in which the spectators sit on a bus as it winds through the streets of Baltimore. I build off Doreen Massey?s brief comment on spatial delight, in which she locates it as a pleasure derived from the simultaneous heterogeneity of place. I apply that delight to the simultaneous heterogeneity of performance and place. However, where there is delight there is also abrasion. Here, I consider the position of the ?unintended audience? ? the pedestrians on the street who observe the players and the audience on the bus. At the same time, they are watched by the play?s intended audience. The unintended audience is both interpolated into the performance by the spectators on the bus (being placed within the theatrical frame) and witnessing the performance on the street and the intrusion of the bus without context (as they are not always able to see the theatrical frame). This matter reminds us how significant the legibility of a site is within the performance. For the spectators on the bus, the occasionally indistinct relationship between the art and the place causes joy. The illegibility of that same relationship, the inability to see the site, can render these moments destabilizing, frightening, or even painful for the unintended audience. I consider how site-specific performance utilizes place for the benefit of art, for the pleasure of its spectators, with little consideration for those who are caught in its wake or the ways in which the mere presence of spectators can interrupt and destabilize their lives. In Chapter 3, ?Here and/or Now: Ordinary Time on the 7 Train,? I consider how site- specific performance operates at the intersection of place and time for the purposes of typifying a place. My analysis focuses on The Subway Plays by This is Not a Theatre Company, a collection of three ?podplays? that are designed to be listened to along particular routes of the New York City subway. Since the plays are recorded, time in a place is approached through the assumption 32 that there is an ordinary form of it. By this, I mean that the plays operate under the hypothesis that the places that are the subject of their drama, will largely remain the same and that any change that happens will be ultimately so incremental that it will be unnoticeable. I utilize this dramaturgical facet to analyze the intertwined theoretical history of place and time and to apply pressure to the relationship between the two in site-specific performance. Through this conflict, I examine how The Subway Plays exploit their own strained (and strange) temporality as a recorded performance that can take place any when in order to give the spectators a glimpse at place in, supposedly, its most authentic form. The Subway Plays also reveal site-specific performance?s ideological fixation with the now. Numerous works in the genre privilege the present, attending to it as a way of pleasurably experiencing place. In this capacity, I extend the conversation about spatial delight from Chapter 2, looking instead to how being in the present is imagined as a desirable goal. As such ordinary time not only reveals the interconnected relationship between place and time in site-specific work, but also asks the spectator to favor the present. Juxtaposing Washington D.C. with Early Modern England, Third Rail Project?s Confection thematically ruminates on how we eat in a place. In Chapter 4, ?Eating Place: Consumption and Authenticity in Washington D.C. and Early Modern England,? I argue Confection offers its audience a sense of place for Early Modern England through a gustatory dramaturgy. The play explores how eating (and one?s relationship to food, broadly) differs dramatically depending on class, race, and gender. As such, though food may represent a place, it is a complex and multifaceted symbol. Confection considers numerous approaches by animating archival material housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library, the location of the performance. 33 Using recipe books, illustrations, and ledgers, among other records, Confection crafts a robust sense of place for the audience through the complex landscape of food. However, the supposed authenticity of the archive is unstable, as is the relationship between food and place. Third Rail Projects? use the archive to implicitly authenticate its engagement with food. Consequently, in many spectators expressed that they ?felt like they were there? when they had their first bite of food during the performance. I utilize Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker?s concept of metamodernism to argue that authenticity is a performance category, that audiences may perceive something as authentic while knowing it is indeed not. This challenge to the perception of authenticity is particularly salient as it rattles the tenant of ?being there? that is so foundational to site-specific performance. Several themes are threaded throughout the dissertation, weaving the case studies together. Chapters 1 and 4 share an interest in staging sites that aren?t there, whether those be Doh Ho Suh gesturing towards his absent homes through his fabric recreations, or Third Rail Projects? purposefully recalling and establishing a sense of Early Modern England for their spectators in Washington D.C. Likewise, Chapter 4 extends Chapter 3?s discussion of how time is essential in constructing the experience of place. Chapters 2 and 3 share several formal qualities and emphasize people-watching with the aim of grounding the spectator in the present moment, raising ethical questions about site-specific spectatorship. I highlight the shared connections between the chapters here for the sake of illustrating that the questions and concerns raised in each chapter are widely applicable within the genre of site-specific performance, regardless of their form or aesthetics. Concluding, I attend to site-specific performance as it passes across three ?sites.? I used these three sites to return to many of the themes that emerge throughout the dissertation, 34 including interpolating pedestrians to be within the theatrical frame, relational geography in site- specific performance, and being in the present. As my case study, I consider the work of Monica Bill Barnes & Company, a dance company based out of New York City. The first ?site? is The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, where, in 2019, Barnes held a master?s class with my students in the site-specific performance course. Here, she workshopped material with our students that would later appear in the company?s show Days Go By, which premiered in the fall. The second ?site? is Brookfield Place, where Days Go By was performed. I return to the choreography practiced in the Clarice for the sake of analyzing site-specific performance on- and off-site. The last ?site? is again Brookfield Place, now the site of Monica Bill Barnes & Company?s 2021 digital performance It?s 3:07 Again, a choose-your-own style dance performance. These three ?sites? offer the opportunity to share the same performance across two sites (examples one and two) and share a site across two performances (examples two and three). This discussion is invaluable for my conclusion because it helps illuminate the ways in which performance and art are intimately intertwined within site, but experiencing place is not limited by geography or material practice. As I conclude, I work to open the potential for site as it animates qualities of place, challenges spatiality, and offers new avenues of dramaturgical practices. By networking these sites together, we return to the two central questions of this dissertation: what is a site, and how does the audience experience place through site-specific performance? 35 Chapter 1 ?In Plain Site: Transparency, Misalignments, and Museums? Introduction Site-specificity has long grappled with the notion of ?specificity.? Much has been made of that nominal term, as scholars have theorized it in relation to site-generic and immersive performance. Less, however, has been made of the word ?site.? However rich and generative the concept of site may be, in theoretical terms, scholars and practitioners alike have had trouble pinpointing it. Many of the stalwart texts of the field avoid the issue of ?site? all together, happily resting on the notion of place. Latching onto a similar issue, art critic Miwon Kwon offers that rather than a genre of art, perhaps site-specificity is a ?problem-idea.?1 I suggest that it is not only site-specificity that is the problem-idea, but site too. To untangle the problem-idea, I revisit a genealogical site of site-specificity: the museum. What kind of place is a museum? In some respects, this is a question that has long plagued museum studies. One can easily turn to Edwin H. Colbert?s 1961 keynote address at the Seventh Mountain-Plains Museum Conference, in which he asks a similar question, what is a museum. Emphatically, Colbert answers, a place for the preservation and interpretation of the objects contained within its walls.2 Colbert?s approach to museums extends its historic function from its inception in the Enlightenment and development in the 19th century.3 In this capacity, the museum was a place constructed around imperialism, consolidating power through the creation of cultural capital and its wielding of authority, acting as an extension of government 1 Kwon, One Place after Another, 2. 2 Edwin H. Colbert, ?What Is a Museum?,? Curator: The Museum Journal 4, no. 2 (April 1961): 139, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.1961.tb01110.x. 3 Susan Bennett, Theatre & Museums (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 9. 36 power.4 More recent answers, controversially, situate the museum in relation to decolonization efforts, offering the museum as a social space. In 2019, the International Council of Museums proposed an extended definition which suggested that the modern museums are ?democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures?they are participatory and transparent...?5 While many decried this definition, arguing that it was an ?ideological manifesto? that, despite its length, was ultimately ?too narrow? and ?does not acknowledge that many museums are subject to the power of the purse,? the two definitions, Colbert?s and that proposed by ICOM, represent two significant understandings of the place of a museum.6 One suggests that the museum is ultimately a neutral space, emphasizing the objects contained within as its primary purpose. The second sees it as a complex place, replete with social, political, and cultural vectors, that frame what is experienced in its walls. ?What kind of place is a museum? is also a question at the heart of early site-specific art. Almost literally, site-specificity emerged out of the museum. In the 1960s, as site-specific art was developing as a form, artists structured a meaningful spatial relationship between their art and where it was situated that was largely beyond the walls of the museum.7 At the advent of minimalism and site-specific art, the museum was imagined as a neutral space. The museum 4 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics., 2013, 23, http://kcl.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=1487028. 5 ?ICOM Announces the Alternative Museum Definition That Will Be Subject to a Vote,? International Council of Museums, accessed February 7, 2022, https://icom.museum/en/news/icom-announces-the-alternative-museum- definition-that-will-be-subject-to-a-vote/. 6 Vincent Noce, ?What Exactly Is a Museum? Icom Comes to Blows over New Definition,? The Art Newspaper - International art news and events, August 19, 2019, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/08/19/what- exactly-is-a-museum-icom-comes-to-blows-over-new-definition; Brenda Salguero, ?Defining the Museum: Struggling with a New Identity,? Curator: The Museum Journal 63, no. 4 (2020): 591, https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12383; John Fraser, ?A Discomforting Definition of Museum,? Curator: The Museum Journal 62, no. 4 (2019): 502, https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12345. 7 Fiona Wilkie, ?The Production of ?Site?: Site-Specific Theatre,? in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama, ed. Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst, Blackwell Concise Companions to Literature and Culture (Malden, MA?; Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2008), 90. 37 served as an organizational frame for the display of art but was not perceived as in dialogue with it, not a true part of its reception. Whatever type of place a museum was, it was not a site. Site-specificity is traditionally understood as artwork that is created for a definite landscape. In 1969, artist Robert Barry famously stated in an interview ?[his art] was made to suit the place in which it was installed. They cannot be moved without being destroyed.?8 Likewise, nearly twenty years later, Richard Serra argued, ?It is a site-specific work and as such not to be relocated. To remove the work is to destroy the work.?9 In the more than fifty years since many have agreed with Barry, arguing that physical context is a critical formal characteristic of site-specific art. Site is integral and inseparable from the artwork. The modern art gallery was seen as the antithesis of site: a white cube, suggestive of its crisp white, ?neutral? walls. In this capacity, the gallery is situated as a vessel for the display of art, not a site that is situated within a dialogue. It is this ideological approach that site-specific artists ultimately rejected. Born out of minimalism, site-specificity intervened by investing in the context and moment in which the spectator encountered the art. Erika Suderburg proposes, ?Site- specific derives from the delineation and examination of the site of the gallery in relation to space unconfined by the gallery and in relation to the spectator.?10 In her influential study of site- specific visual art, Kwon suggests in its earliest form site-specific was ?formally determined or directed by? fidelity to the tangible reality, the physical location for which it was constructed.11 It is through this logic that Barry made his proclamation. 8 Robert Barry in Arthur R. Rose (pseud.), ?Four Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kosuth, Weiner,? Arts Magazine (February 1969): 22. 9 Richard Serra, letter to Donald Thalacker dated January 1, 1985, as published in Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk, eds., The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 38. 10 Erika Suderburg, ed., Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4. 11 Kwon, One Place after Another, 11. 38 In the decades after its original departure, site-specific theory has grown tremendously, and many have challenged the foundational remarks of Barry and Richard Serra. In those intervening decades, ?site-specific? has been used in visual art to discuss work that considers less the literal, physical space in which it is constructed, and more cultural, social, and political ideologies that underly it.12 As such, Kwon suggests that site-specific visual art grew increasingly nomadic, less concerned with a physical specificity of site and more the site?s specific ideological underpinnings. In many ways, site-specific performance blends these two approaches, in which the performance is built for a specific literal location, but that location is not selected for its physical attributes alone. Instead, like site-specific art, site-specific performance has built a meaningful relationship between the art and the cultural, social, and political features of a location. However, unlike site-specific art, which has embraced mobility head-on, site-specific performance has maintained an invested interest in the specificity of being on-site, in which the play is directly connected to the physical space it is performed in. For instance, Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks suggest in their definition that ?[Site-specific performances] are inseparable from their sites, the only contexts within which they are intelligible.?13 Fiona Wilkie offers that site-specific performance is a ?performance specifically generated from/for one selected site.?14 Where site- specific art has long been seen as mobile, site-specific performance has held back, highlighting the operative word ?specific? as a tether. What can site-specific visual art offer its performance-based cousin? By returning to the museum, I intend to interrogate the foundational myths of site-specificity in order to theorize an 12 Kwon, 19. 13 Pearson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, 23. 14 Fiona Wilkie, "Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain." New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 2 (2002): 150. 39 approach to site, itself. Reading site-specific performance and art in dialogue productively offers what the other lacks. Site-specific performance can learn much from visual arts uprooting of site, whereas interpreting site-specific visual art through a performance lens productively revisits Michael Fried?s infamous critique of minimalism?s ?theatricality.?15 While visual art and performance have employed different rubrics in their determination of site-specificity, less attention has been paid to what a site actually is. Like the museum which is considered to be either a blank space, or a complex place, site has been utilized to mean a physical space or a multifaceted place. Yet both fail to attend to the term directly. My return to the museum offers the opportunity to interrogate the notion of site, in the space that was deemed to be ?not? it. The Problem with ?Site? ?Site,? itself, is an undertheorized notion. In site-specific theory, ?site? is perceived as rubbing definitionally and theoretically against the notion of ?place.? When asking ?What is a Site?? in his 2019 book Making Site-Specific Theatre and Performance, Phil Smith turns towards the likes of Doreen Massey and Michel de Certeau to focus his answer on ?place? instead.16 Similarly, discussing site-specificity in his survey of place in human geography, Tim Cresswell observes, ?The word ?site? is a little misleading here as it seems to imply merely ?location.? What we are really talking about, however, is place.?17 Cresswell?s comment not only demonstrates site-specific art?s theoretical lean towards place, but it also points toward a lack of theorization of site, read here only as ?location.? From a literary studies perspective, a site is ?a nongeographic 15 Michael Fried, ?Art and Objecthood,? ARTFORUM 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 21. 16 Phil Smith, Making Site-Specific Theatre and Performance: A Handbook?: A Handbook. (London: Macmillan Education UK, 2018). 17 Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction (Hoboken, UNITED KINGDOM: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014), 152, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umdcp/detail.action?docID=1780033. 40 ?space,? or place, where identity or meaning is formed or determined.?18 Abutting place (or space), site has little of its own theoretical power. Distinguishing site from place may at first appear to be a matter of semantics. However, one reason to do so is that it moves us away from a definition of site-specificity that is born out of a taxonomy of ?specificity.? This move allows us to attend to site (or indeed, place) as the critical object of a performance. As we finally turn to site, we can see that, colloquially, it shares many qualities with place, as both can communicate a specific location. In its most prevalent usages, site is either the location of a specified thing or the scene of a specified activity. Thinking of the former, we might mean the site of an event, the site of a building, etc. For the latter, one can think of a picnic site, meaning this is an area that has been designated for the activity of picnicking. Happily, the OED supports these definitions.19 With this in mind, perhaps site is always already ?specific,? rendering ?site-specific? a hapless tautology. Rather than being space, site can be distinguished as space-time in relation to an event. In either usage, there?s a temporal quality inherent: the site where something happened or was located, the site where a pre- determined activity will commence. In this usage, site is prescriptive, calling forth its use through time. There are many ways to conceive of ?site? within site-specific performance. As mentioned, site has been used to mean the physical attributes of a place, an approach heavily engaged in the early days of site-specific visual art. Another way situates site through its intangible qualities: the political, cultural, and social features that are often theorized as place. 18 Ross C Murfin and Supryia M Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 2018, 1210, https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=36FF80D3-8865-4C45-83C6-8F70CEE385CF. 19 "site, n.". OED Online. March 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.proxy- um.researchport.umd.edu/view/Entry/180472?rskey=GAD6wf&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed March 3, 2022). 41 One of the primary approaches to site that emerges in this chapter is in which ?site? is a means of activating and critiquing place. In this capacity, site is a form of spatial dramaturgy that delimits and defines the usage of a place for the audience. If site is ultimately a spatial fiction, it instead offers a distinct experience of place, leaning into its connotation as for a specified activity or event. In this capacity, site offers a specified usage for a place, highlighting specific features, and limiting the scope for the sake of a critical or narrative meaning. In order to theorize ?site? as spatial dramaturgy, in this chapter, I situate my analysis of two site-specific works, Almost Home by Do Ho Suh and Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn by Liu Bolin, along with my interrogation of site-specificity, in the very place in which they are displayed.20 I argue that the museum, as a place, is central to analyzing site- specific art. What is at stake as well in ignoring the centrality of the museum in works like Suh?s and Liu?s is a recentering of the museum?s supposed neutrality. Instead, both offer a complex look at site, in dialogue with the museum and places elsewhere, that offer a unique configuration of spatiality to the spectator. Case Study: Almost Home Almost Home was an exhibit featuring the work of visual artist Do Ho Suh. It was open from March 16 to August 5, 2018. At the center of the exhibit were three connected ?hubs,? the life-sized replicas of the hallways of three of Suh?s former homes. Each was constructed in a single color family of a diaphanous, sheer fabric: New York in a bright red and muted pink, Berlin is a mossy green, and Seoul is a bold blue. Suh is a visual artist who was born in Seoul 20 In this chapter, when using the artist?s full name, I follow the naming order each artist uses in the West, Do Ho Suh and Liu Bolin. When referring to them exclusively by their family name, they are Suh and Liu. 42 and moved to the United States at the age of 29. As an adult, he lived in Berlin and now spends his time between the UK, the United States, and Korea. For Suh, where he lives has often been physically distanced from ?home.? Suh?s art offers him the opportunity to form new spatial relationships with his (former) homes. Figure 1: Almost Home by Do Ho Suh the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, March 2018. Photo by the author. Suh crafted a detailed recreation of the homes out of translucent fabric in 1:1 scale. Museum visitors walk through the life-sized halls as if they were passing through the ?real? space. I walked through an apartment with ghostly pink halls, admiring the intricate stitching on the ?Certificate of Inspection Visits? that was hung/embroidered on the wall. I passed a fabricated door-latch, complete with screws and the company?s insignia. A whole variety of everyday household items were similarly flawlessly rendered in fabric: radiators embossed with intricate floral designs and light switches flicked to the on position, corded phones, and microwaves. A translucent fabric fuse box that matched its twin in the New York apartment, complete with detailed operating instructions as if this fuse box, too, could be used. The most unusual feature of Suh?s installation was the hallway itself. As museum visitors walked down the hallway, they passed seamlessly from his New York apartment to his former home in Berlin 43 before finally reaching his childhood home in Seoul. The three homes became a single passage, collapsing the geographic space between them. Figure 2: Details in Berlin Hub of Almost Home by Do Ho Suh at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, May 2018. Photo by the author. Each home is handstitched using an artisan sewing technique that is common in South Korea.21 The homes are essentially reversible, as they are sewn twice, from the inside and outside.22 The fabric was selected for its transparent quality, but also because it is a Korean summer fabric. Suh?s colors choices, likewise, evoke Korea. Almost Home?s curator Sarah Newman reflected on the emotional impact these colors made on spectators who recognized them: ?There was there were a lot of tears.?23 Suh purposefully plays with memory, both the memories of his spectators and his own. The homes are built through memory. Suh does use 3-D technology, photographs, and measurements to construct the ?hubs,? but he regularly asserts they are imperfect, though how unlikely this might seem.24 Suh begins with the question, ?how much 21 ?Do Ho Suh?s Almost Home: In Eternal Pursuit of Capturing Transience,? The Artling, accessed February 1, 2022, https://theartling.com/en/artzine/do-ho-suh-almost-home-in-eternal-pursuit-of-capturing-transience/. 22 Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, 2019, 219, https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755697533?locatt=label:secondary_bloomsburyCollections. 23 Interview with Sarah Newman, December 16, 2019. 24 ?Do Ho Suh?s Sheer Fabric Sculptures,? Smithsonian Institution, accessed March 24, 2022, https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/snapshot/do-ho-suhs-sheer-fabric-sculptures. Eva Respini and Ruth Erickson, When Home Won?t Let You Stay: Migration Through Contemporary Art (Yale University Press, 2019), 70. 44 space do I carry along with myself from one country to the other and from the past to the present??25 His question dislodges space from its physical exactness, and returns ?home? to a space of lived experience. Suh?s work is primed to reevaluate ?site,? as the places contained within the work are already referential. His home in Seoul was built by his father and was directly modeled on parts of Changdeokgung Palace, an example of traditional Korean architecture. The palace is constructed from waxed rice paper and wood which allows it to be porous, in dialogue with the landscape. These qualities are mirrored in Suh?s version rendered in sheet fabric. Art scholar Miwon Kwon noted that the Korean hub in Almost Home, which is based off Suh?s family home, which was, in turn, based off Changdeokgung Palace (which was based on 19th ?civilian houses?) is a replica of a replica of a replica.26 The foundation of an authentic place is already off-kilter, allowing for a productive interrogation of how place is transformed into memory and experience. Likewise, the idea of home is also a replica of a replica of a replica, if one considers each new home as rebuilding the experience of the ones before it. Suh?s oeuvre is filled with images of homes. He draws homes with legs (Spread from sketchbook, 1998-2000), homes that are eating other homes (Fallen Star, 2011), homes inside other homes (Perfect Home-I, 2003), homes exploding into piles of thread (Blueprint, 2014). In sculpture, he has perched a home precariously teetering off a UC San Diego engineering building (Fallen Star, 2012), and crashed a Hanok-style Korean house between buildings and on bridges in London (Bridging Home, London, 2018). Despite Suh?s regular and longstanding rumination on home, he is not yet sure what ?home? means to him, but instead imagines it something 25 Do-Ho Suh et al., Do Ho Suh: Drawings (Munich?; New York: DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2014), 136. 26 Miwon Kwon, ?The Other Otherness: The Art of Do-Ho Suh,? Do-Ho Suh (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2002), 25 n. 19. 45 inherently unfixed and evolving.27 His transparent homes extend his rumination from the concept of home to his homes. Almost Home is just one exhibit in a long line of translucent homes that Suh has recreated. He has also created ?suitcase homes? for residences including those in London, Hong Kong, and Providence, Rhode Island. 28 By ?suitcase home,? Suh means that he can pack up his homes and take them with him when he leaves: ?I take the site-specific piece out of its site, fold and pack it in a suitcase, and expose it in another larger and unrelated location. That specificity becomes highly translatable and transportable?I could carry my home with me wherever I go, like a snail that carries a shell.?29 The image of a suitcase home is particularly evocative. In its form, it harkens back to Marcel Duchamp?s Bo?te-en-valise (1935-41), a suitcase that?s contents seem to expand beyond its casing. In the case of Almost Home, it?s also practical. When set up, the lightweight fabric is stretched across a stainless-steel frame in order to keep its shape. However, when not on display, the ?suitcase homes? fold flat. Transforming his homes into fabric replicas, Suh offers an alternate experience of place, in which taking place refers not to an event, but means taking a place with you. Many have written about Suh?s ?suitcase homes? through a lens of memory, temporality, and nostalgia. Critics have considered how his works engage the emotional attachments we have for places in our past and debated whether his work indulges in nostalgia or rebukes it.30 In some 27 Jennifer Sauer, ?How Artist Do Ho Suh Fully Reimagines the Idea of Home,? CR Fashion Book, May 22, 2020, https://www.crfashionbook.com/mens/a32626813/do-ho-suh-fully-artist-interview-home-korea/. 28 ?A Suitcase Home: Sarah Newman on Do Ho Suh | Smithsonian American Art Museum,? accessed January 30, 2022, https://americanart.si.edu/blog/eye-level/2018/10/57586/suitcase-home-sarah-newman-do-ho-suh. 29 Deane Madsen, ??Almost Home? by Do Ho Suh Opens at Smithsonian American Art Museum,? Architectural Record (blog), March 16, 2018, https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/13300-almost-home-by-do-ho-suh- opens-at-smithsonian-american-art-museum. 30 ?Do Ho Suh?s Almost Home?; ?Do Ho Suh on Display at Smithsonian Museum | Abitare,? accessed February 1, 2022, https://www.abitare.it/en/research/reviews/2018/05/16/do-ho-suh-on-display-smithsonian-museum/; ?Do Ho Suh Recreates Front Door of His Childhood Home in London Exhibition About Memories and Marginality,? COBO Social, January 8, 2021, https://www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/do-ho-suh-lehmann-maupin-2020/; ?Do Ho Suh?s Ethereal ?Homes? Depict Isolation,? Washington City Paper, March 29, 2018, 46 ways, this tendency leans into Suh?s own aims with the project. Suh has characterized his work as ?devices to evoke emotion, memory, and sensation.?31 Contained within these three responses, Suh invites his spectators to reconsider the intimacy of our lived environments. Beyond his engagement with the intimacy of the domesticity, Suh pulls back from strict temporality by spatializing time through his art: ?I see life as a passageway, with no fixed beginning or destination. We tend to focus on the destination all the time and forget about the in-between spaces.?32 This comment is particularly applicable to Almost Home as it joins together three hallways, creating a physical, singular passageway through Suh?s life. In interviews, Suh regularly displays a deep fascination with space and place as theoretical and artistic underpinnings. It is here where my interest in Do Ho Suh?s work lies. Rather than attend to his considerations of memory and the home, I turn toward his unique spatial practices as a means of illuminating the inherent tensions within site-specificity. Case Study: Hiding in Washington, DC No. 1 ? Hirshhorn Museum On June 15, 2019, visual artist Liu Bolin used paint to camouflage himself in front of Delusions of Grandeur II, a 1948 painting by Ren? Magritte. The painting exemplifies Magritte?s abstract style. A bright blue sky with a smattering of puffy white clouds is filled with blue cubes, breaking any sense of realism. A small hot-air balloon, the same color as the sky, sails through almost unnoticed. In the foreground, a woman?s naked, headless, and armless torso sits on a stone wall. Peculiarly, the torso is broken into three parts, each smaller than the last, http://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/186567/do-ho-suh-almost-home-at-the-smithsonian-american-art- museum-reviewed/. 31 Sauer, ?How Artist Do Ho Suh Fully Reimagines the Idea of Home.? 32 ??Almost Home?: Do Ho Suh?s New Work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. ? ArtRadarJournal.Com,? accessed February 1, 2022, https://artradarjournal.com/almost-home-do-ho-suhs-new- work-at-the-smithsonian-american-art-museum-washington-d-c/. 47 taking the form of a Russian nesting doll. Next to the torso is a lit candle in an ornate, gold candle holder. The painting belongs in the collection held by the Hirshhorn Museum, the contemporary art branch of the Smithsonian located on the National Mall. The painting was on display as part of an exhibit entitled ?MANIFESTO: ART X AGENCY? that ran in the museum between that date and January 31, 2021. Liu painted live during a Gala event that opened the exhibit, ?seamlessly? blending himself into the bright blue folds of Magritte?s sky. His ?disappearance? into the painting was then photographed, now entitled Hiding in Washington, DC No. 1 ? Hirshhorn Museum. Figure 3: Magritte, Ren?. Delusions of Grandeur II. 1948. Oil on Canvas. 39 1/8 ? 32 1/8 in. (99.2 ? 81.5 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Colloquially known as the ?Invisible Man,? Liu has created numerous illusionary portraits. Since 2010, Liu has hidden in plain sight as part of a series called Hiding in the City. Hiding in Washington, DC No. 1 ? Hirshhorn Museum is in, some regards, unusual as most of his works involve Liu camouflaged in urban environments and landscapes. Beginning in his native China, Liu hid in front of the Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall of China, and the Bird?s Nest Stadium, constructed for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Since then, Liu has painted himself into landscapes, scenes, and paintings across the world. He has blended into the Pyramid 48 at the Louvre, disappeared into the intersection at Ground Zero, and vanished into ordinary grocery store shelves filled with puffed snack foods. Liu performs what Laura Levin calls urban mimicry, an art form that ?embraces a total mirroring of self and place.?33 As he mimics the landscape in which he is found, spectators might do a double-take to locate the ?invisible man.? This is a power dynamic that is clearest in his work in China. There, his work silently protests the political images put forth by the Chinese government. Liu?s work began after the 2005 governmental eviction and later destruction of his studio. The neighborhood, Suo Jia Cun, was largely populated by artists. Liu believes it was destroyed because the government ?did not want artists working and living together.?34 The space once occupied by the neighborhood was subsequently used in preparation for the Olympic Games.35 This served as an inciting incident for Liu and became the material for some of his first work in the series. Liu hid in front of the ruins of his neighborhood, in a manicured garden, created for the games, and in front of a mural of Olympic mascots. As Levin observes, ?By ?hiding? in these scenes, Bolin embodies the displacement of citizens in the wake of China?s rapid urbanization, in the shadow of its supersized performances of modernity.?36 Liu?s silent protest emphasizes the difference between the image that China projects and how it treats its people. His photos present a means of measuring that distance. Liu is highly critically of the Chinese government?s authoritarianism: ?I choose to camouflage my body into the environment so that people will pay more attention to the 33 L. Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage and the Art of Blending In (London, UNITED KINGDOM: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014), 143, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umdcp/detail.action?docID=1765643. 34 Liu Bolin, ?Liu Bolin | Speaker | TED,? accessed March 8, 2022, https://www.ted.com/speakers/liu_bolin. 35 David Rosenberg, ?Can You Find the Artist Hidden in This Photograph?,? Slate, May 23, 2013, https://slate.com/culture/2013/05/liu-bolin-hiding-in-the-city-uses-invisibility-as-a-visible-protest-movement- photos.html. 36 Levin, Performing Ground, 144. 49 background's social property by erasing the meaning of my body as an individual.?37 Liu wears a Chinese military outfit, a grey-green jumpsuit, as the base canvas for all his work in his Hiding in the City series. This choice further underscores political erasure, returning it to its most common form: military service. Certainly, a sleek, tight bodysuit would better help him disappear. But Liu?s point is clear: in a military uniform, the individual has already disappeared. Given that Liu?s work purposefully plays with the unseen human body, it is noteworthy that Hiding in Washington, DC No. 1 ? Hirshhorn Museum was designed to be seen. Liu was hired to do a live painting at the Hirshhorn Museum?s first annual ball. The ball included Liu in its advertisement as an attraction, a form of entertainment even, that would occur throughout the night. In this sense, Liu is even less invisible- one might even say, intentionally visible. Chapter Overview Placing Suh and Liu?s work together creates a productive dialogue about the way that site is experienced, particularly in relation to the museum. The examples bear a striking comparison because they are both works by Asian artists making art within the diaspora that is subsequently displayed within the halls of the Smithsonian. Certainly, in this regard, they are not alone. There are plenty of Asian and Asian-American artists featured in museums across the United States, many of whom make site-specific art. Likewise, of course, Korean and Chinese art should not be conflated as if Asian culture is monolithic. However, the similar trajectories shared by Suh and Liu offer a useful point of comparison by grounding the artists in some semblance of an allied spatial experience that is transported and exhibited in the national museum of the United States. 37 Mito Habe-Evans, ?Chinese Artist Attempts To Blend In ... Literally,? NPR, April 6, 2011, sec. Daily Picture Show, https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2011/04/06/134666588/chinese-artist-attempts-to-blend-in-literally. 50 The two works share a number of salient qualities, including their use of transparency, the reception through the artist?s body, and their ruminations on specific places. Both Almost Home and Hiding in Washington, DC No. 1 ? Hirshhorn Museum exemplify what Yasushi Nagata has described as a trend within Asian art to center geography and mobility.38 This chapter asks two fundamental questions. First, what is a site? This question is essential in order to address the other two questions. As mentioned previously, the question itself is also under-examined in site-specific theory. In addressing this question, I offer a provisional approach to ?site? that interprets it as a dramaturgical tool. I do so through a close reading of scholarly, artistic, and colloquial uses of the term. Next, I ask, how does the audience experience a place as a site? Here, I turn towards the strategies that deploy and render a site as legible for a spectator. In particular, I consider transparency and misalignment as two ways in which a site is marked. In this section, I consider what effect demarcation has on a spectator?s experience of place and site-specificity. Lastly, I return to the museum in order to evaluate the efficacy of the term and reconsider the museum as the originating ?site? of the artistic genre. These three questions are pivotal to all the work that this dissertation does. I concentrate them here in order to contemplate one approach in-depth. Returning to the foundational conditions and underpinnings of site-specific performance, I mean neither to reinstate them, as if they were legitimate, nor refute them, as if they still held an unwavering grip. Instead, I offer an alternate reading of the history of site-specific performance in order to illuminate new trajectories for its use and study. Reading site-specific theory, and its critique, against the grain, offers an opportunity to revisit the principles that have long been characteristic of site-specific art 38 Yasushi Nagata, ?Crossing the Sea: The Ishinha Theater Company?s Geographical Trail,? in Transnational Performance, Identity and Mobility in Asia, ed. Ivy I.-Chu Chang and Iris H. Tuan, 1st ed. 2018 (Singapore: Springer Singapore?: Imprint: Palgrave Pivot, 2018), 55, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7107-2. 51 and revise their limiting function. Essentially, this becomes a stress test for the transformation of ?site? from an overly broad and unapplicable term to a fertile, and operatable, analytical lens. In doing so, a brief word of caution. Here, it is easy to accidentally conflate ?site-specific? and ?site.? In returning to site-specific theory, I suggest that it is a fertile ground to analyze ?site? as an operative term, because inherent in this theory is an approach to ?site.? I argue for an approach to ?site? that operates by structuring a dramatic experience of space. I suggest that ?site? is only a meaningful term when it?s activated for the spectator. What is a Site? There are several genealogical origins for site-specific performance, including happenings and environmental performance.39 One of the most prominent origins, however, is in the realm of visual art, in particular the emergence of minimalist art.40 Famously, Michael Fried scathingly characterized the minimalist art as an assumed ?theatricality.?41 Fried argues that ?art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre,? mainly through the inclusion of an audience and temporality.42 In particular, his dismissive claim is concerned about the ways in which minimalist art is primed to be received by a spectator in a given set of circumstances. Minimalist art, like site-specific art, draws attention to the conditions in which it is viewed and experienced. In this, it situates art as a temporal event, rather than a timeless experience. Fried desires to maintain what Kwon has called art that is ?instantaneously perceived in a visual 39 Stephen Hodge and Cathy Turner, ?Site: Between Ground and Groundless,? in Histories and Practices of Live Art, ed. Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein, 2012, 94, http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4008182. 40 Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation (London?; New York: Routledge, 2000); Kwon, One Place after Another. 41 Fried, ?Art and Objecthood,? 21. 42 Ibid., emphasis in original. 52 epiphany by a disembodied eye.?43 For Fried, minimalist art?s consideration of the place and time in which it is displayed moves it towards theatre, an art inherently concerned with similar conditions. Responding to Fried?s critique Nick Kaye notes, ?Minimalism?s site-specificity can be said to begin in sculpture yet reveal itself in performance [?]?44 This is to say, that site- specificity is inherently theatrical. Fried?s remarks have been well critiqued, particularly for their partiality towards an all- too-familiar anti-theatricality. Instead of rebuking Fried?s comments in defense of theatre, like Kaye, I move to read the comments as an insightful remark about the conditions of site- specificity. Part of considering the space and time in which an artwork is encountered (the here and now) is understanding the bodily presence of a spectator in relation to a real place.45 In this gesture, the location in which the art is encountered is transformed from its perception as a neutral space, as it was seen under modernist art, to a full, real place. Certainly, the realness of the place was always there, the museum is ultimately not a blank slate. But it is only in relation to the art in which the place as the frame, becomes legible. Constructing the place to be received in a certain manner, we can see the site as an analytical lens emerge. Claire Bishop helpfully draws a connection between installation art and site-specific art.46 She suggests that in the 1960s both were strategies in the same aesthetic project: presupposing a viewing subject who sees the art in the space from their particular, ephemeral vantage point. As such, the art was no longer conceived as a self-contained object but began to encroach on an event. Site, for both installation and ?-specific? art, insists on first-hand experience, to be in the location with the art, and to perceive them in relation to one another. Installation art offers a 43 Kwon, One Place after Another, 11. 44 Kaye, Site-Specific Art, 14. 45 Kwon, One Place after Another, 11. 46 Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005), 10. 53 critique of the gallery as a site by ?reconfiguring not just institutional space but the space of objecthood as well.?47 In this capacity, site offers not only means of seeing art within space but also simultaneously critiques the place and shapes how it is viewed by the spectator. This insight lays the foundation for my approach. However, it is unlike many of the ways ?site? has been utilized in site-specific performance. A Study in Site Though ?site? is an undertheorized concept within ?site-specificity,? some scholars have directly or implicitly addressed its meaning within their work. To say otherwise would be disingenuous. However, when site is addressed directly, it often is so intertwined with the concept of place that it does not stand apart as a coherent term. Alternatively, site is used simply to refer to the place in which the performance occurs, or the art is displayed. In returning to how site has been used, I endeavor to knit together an approach to site that works with, rather than against, the rich theoretical and practical body of work on site-specificity. After all, if site offers nothing that place does not already offer in a much more widely engaged and richer capacity, why not substitute ?place-based? for ?site-specific?? Artists like Barry and Serra utilize site to refer primarily to the physical location in which the art was constructed and displayed. Serra argues, ?Site-specific works deal with the environmental components of given places. The scale, size, and location of site-specific works are determined by the topography of the site, whether it be urban or landscape or architectural enclosure.?48 Serra?s use imbues a location with the power to physically shape art but does not 47 Suderburg, Space, Site, Intervention, 4. 48 Richard Serra, ?Tilted Arc Destroyed,? Art in America 77, no. 5 (May 1989): 34?47. 54 go beyond its material impact. Robert Smithson offers one of the first uses of ?site? as an artistic term.49 As part of the land art movement, one of the genealogical forebearers to site-specificity Smithson used site to refer to the original, intended locations of his art.50 He uses ?nonsite? to refer to the art taken out of its intended space and placed in the supposedly neutral context of a gallery. Smithson?s use of site suggests that it refers to a specific physical location, but also that the location is intimately connected with the artwork. The physical location is imbued with contextual meaning that is relayed in the experience of spectatorship. It is lost in the ?neutral? gallery space. In this early usage, location is a privileged condition of site. Smithson?s use also evidences the ways in which site is always already specific. Influential site-specific performance theorists and practitioners Mike Pearson and Cliff McLucas? use the term ?host,? which extends the visual artists? emphasis on the location of the performance while adding nuance through the introduction of intangible social layers.51 In Pearson and McLucas? triumvirate of site-specific performance ? host, ghost, and witness ? the host is essentially an analog for the physical site: ?The site itself became an active component in the creation of performative meaning, rather than a neutral space of exposition or scenic backdrop for dramatic action: ?It?s the ?host? which does have personality, history, character, narrative written into it.??52 Substituting ?host? for ?site? in some ways side-steps and, in other ways, complicates the pursuit of identifying a function for the term. For Pearson and McLucas, the host is not inactive, but a richly complicated environment. Later, Pearson authored another 49 Aronson, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography, 178. 50 Suderburg, Space, Site, Intervention, 4. 51 There is an extended discussion of these topics with McLucas in Kaye, Site-Specific Art 125-9. This initial discussion is elaborated upon in Mike Pearson, Site-Specific Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 37. 52 Mike Pearson, ?Haunted House: Staging ?The Persians? with the British Army,? in Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, ed. A. Birch and J. Tompkins (London, UNITED KINGDOM: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012), 70, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umdcp/detail.action?docID=1058315. 55 piece (without McLucas) in which he suggested a division between ?those (narratives and architectures) which pre-exist the work ? of the host ? and those which are OF the work ? the ghost.?53 The host includes what is physical present, but also the social and cultural qualities more frequently associated with ?place.? In 2010, writing without McLucas, Pearson asserts an ?expanded notion of site? through a citation of arts writer Claire Doherty. He quotes Doherty, ?reimagining place as a situation, a set of circumstances, geographical location, historical narrative, group of people or social agency.?54 Curiously, site does not appear in his sampling of Doherty?s text, nor does she directly engage it within the original material.55 Inadequately expanding his own claim, Pearson?s ?expanded notion of site? appears merely to be ?place? under a new guise. Other theorists evade the definitional question altogether. For instance, Joanna Tompkins writes, ?Rather than defining ?place?, ?space?, or ?site? here, I suggest just three critical contexts for ?place?.?56 Later, she writes the two terms together ?place/site,? again suggesting inherent interchangeability.57 Tompkins suggests that landing on a definitive use for the terms is ?dangerous,? but ultimately falls into the same fallacy: site is sidestepped in favor of place. Nick Kaye suggests a version of site that is far more slippery, an evolving condition rather than a solidified state: ?the site functions as a text perpetually in the process of being written and being read.?58 Yet still, Kaye?s ?site? has much in common with ?place.? Both are simultaneously processes and products of space, heavily intertwined within intangible conditions 53 Mike Pearson, ?Special Worlds, Secret Maps: A Poetics of Performance,? in Staging Wales: Welsh Theatre 1979- 1997, ed. Anna-Marie Taylor (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 96. 54 Pearson, Site-Specific Performance, 16. 55 Claire Doherty, Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog publ, 2004), 11. 56 Joanne Tompkins and Anna Birch, Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 4, http://site.ebrary.com/id/10621839. 57 Tompkins and Birch, 8. 58 Kaye, Site-Specific Art, 183. 56 of politics, society, and culture. Kaye?s use of site, however, participates in a ?working over? of place, meaning that site is a condition of place.59 Likewise, art writer Jane Rendell sees site as in process, and offers a variety of types: ?material, emotional, political, and conceptual [sites] of the artwork?s construction, exhibition and documentation, as well as those remembered, dreamed and imagined by the artist, critic, and other viewers.?60 Here, Rendell suggests site as a meaningful spatial encounter with the art, whether or not those spaces are real. Consequently, site retains a connotation of space as it transitions into the metaphorical, offering an architectural response to art. One implication of Rendell?s construction is that site is always spatial, but not always material. Not only does she delve into the rich complexities of place, in her engagement with space?s affective and political layers, but teases out the effects of spatiality across distance. Rendell?s more nuanced engagement in some ways resembles the metaphorical use frequently deployed by practitioners. Artists have used the term ?site? to refer to a whole host of options beyond space. In this capacity, ?site? refers to symbolic spatialization: film becomes a site, as does the internet, the body of the artist, and the body of the spectator. In this capacity, we see ?site? less as a synonym to place and more as a metaphor for location. Equally, scholars like Bertie Ferdman pull on Rendell?s other thread, suggesting a relational experience of site. Ferdman argues ?The ?site? of a performance today is not only its location, but also its construction (the way it has been redesigned and repurposed), its historical legacies, its temporal framework, and its unintended destinations (in terms of audience engagement and intervention).?61 Ferdman locates her work as moving beyond site-specificity, 59 Kaye, 14. 60 Rendell, Site-Writing, 1. 61 Bertie Ferdman, Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific, Theater in the Americas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 24. 57 suggesting instead the term ?off site? suggesting that ?a performance can belong to a site while simultaneously working in reaction to it or against it.?62 ?Off site? is ultimately about the relationship to, and striking independence from, site. Ferdman?s approach helpfully offers a relational spatial experience, but, in some ways, reinforces the conflation of place and site. She does not use the word ?place? in her definition, it does share many of its features: historical legacies, social construction, a material location with immaterial layers. Influential site-specific art theorist Miwon Kwon recognizes the historical categorization of site, meaning physical space, or site, meaning the social conditions. Kwon compelling offers a third model, in which site is a discursive condition. Kwon argues, ?Furthermore, unlike in the previous models, this site is not defined as a precondition. Rather, it is generated by the work (often as ?content?), and then verified by its convergence with an existing discursive formation.?63 This is a model also employed by theatre theorist Susan Haedicke, in which she suggests ??site? refers to locational circumstances augmented by spatio-politico-cultural discourse.?64 A discursive site is most useful for my purposes. This model helps to situate site apart from the physical characteristics (location) and the social characteristics (place). More significantly, it recognizes that site is formed in relation to the work. In this capacity, this site is most unlike Pearson and McLucas? ?host? in which it is not what is already located (or found in) the place of performance but emerges through discourse. Kim Solga is one of the few scholars to directly, rather than implicitly, consider what is meant by site. She suggests, ??Site? here might be defined as a performance space that is in no 62 Ferdman, Off Sites, 25. 63 Kwon, One Place after Another, 26. 64 Susan Haedicke, ?Beyond Site-Specificity: Environmental Heterocosms on the Street,? in Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, ed. A. Birch and J. Tompkins (London, UNITED KINGDOM: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012), 104, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umdcp/detail.action?docID=1058315. 58 way incidental: it is not just a display space, not just a creation-plus-display space, but a fully constitutive part of the performance, one that helps determine the final shape of the work.?65 Solga moves beyond the physical space in a gesture that ties ?site? implicitly to the meaning of ?site-specificity.? In this turn, site becomes meaningful through its relationship to the art. Without the art, without the mutual navigating of performance and space, what would site be? Situating ?site? as dependent upon the art on it may move it away from place but it arguably also impugns ?specificity? as tautological. In this capacity, site is always already specific because it can only emerge through its relationship with the art, which, of course, was constructed with that location in mind. We are thus left with a chicken and egg question: which comes first, the ?site? or the ?specificity?? In this capacity, site is distinctly different from place: place exists before and beyond the art that occupies it. Cathy Turner and Stephen Hodge, likewise, suggest that the relationship between site and art is a fundamental characteristic of site-specific art, but pivot to center destabilization as its primary feature. They articulate two forms of site-specific performance: groundless and grounded. Where the grounded trajectory of site-specific destabilizes the ?conventions of viewing proposed by a gallery,? whereas the groundless category destabilizes the cultural perceptions of space.66 Through this lens, they contend that ??site?, or ?place,? is both questioned and, potentially, transformed.?67 The authors simultaneously acknowledge and reinforce the intimate relationship between the two terms, while applying pressure on their solidity. For Turner and Hodge, the potential transformation of site is the result of its relationship with the art. 65 Solga, Theory for Theatre Studies, 79. 66 Hodge and Turner, ?Site: Between Ground and Groundless,? 93. 67 Ibid. 59 I reimagine the critique and transformation that they identify as part of ?site,? rather than ?site- specificity.? What is the Site? One approach to addressing the question of ?what is a site? is to identify the site in site- specific art. Though on the surface, the answer might seem self-evident, the task is not as straightforward as it may appear. In a conversation with Lisa G. Corrin, Suh referred to his ?suitcase homes,? like those that appear in Almost Home, as ?transportable-site-specificity.?68 As Jane Rendell notes, the inherent spatial tension of Suh?s? work is between the supposed transformation of each home for each new display location or that ?despite its changing geography, home continues to refer back to the same origin.?69 In Rendell?s construction, its status as ?transportable? has a variety of possible effects on potential on its spatial situation. Suh?s formulation of ?transportable site-specificity? is instantly intriguing, since it upsets the fundamental principles of site-specific art and performance. It has been long held, as seen in Barry?s well-known proclamation, that site and the art constructed for it are ultimately inseparable. Suh?s comment troubles this imperative, but how it does so is not inherently clear. What is transported, and what, oh, what, does Suh mean by ?site?? At first glance, it appears that there are two potential contenders for ?site.? One option is that when Suh says ?site? he means the place in which the suitcase homes are displayed, usually in a gallery or a museum. In the case of Almost Home, this is the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This candidate as the ?site? seems to recognize the inherent properties of ?site? by its 68 Lisa G. Corrin, ?The Perfect Home: A Conversation with Do-Ho Suh?, Do-Ho Suh (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2002), 27. 69 Rendell, Site-Writing, 214. 60 colloquial definition that understands it through a specific set of actions and uses. Under this construction, the museum is a site, as in ?the purpose of this place is to display art.? In that sense, Suh certainly fulfills the purpose of the ?site.? However, there are some considerable failings of this formulation. To begin with, returning to Suh?s own phrase, nothing about the site is being transported. If one imagines ?transportation? as referring to the art being transported to the site, that broadens the scope beyond practical use. In that case, what art displayed in a museum isn?t ?transportable-site-specificity?? Another problem is that it immediately rejects the long-held characteristic about site-specificity which suggests that the art is constructed with the site in mind. Almost Home is, arguably, not ?about? the museum in which it is staged. Though the suitcase homes engage the museum space, they are ?about? the notion of home. A second nominee for Almost Home?s ?site(s)? are the real homes after which the art is modeled. If Suh?s sites are his previous homes, the intimate connection between the art and the site is restored. However, just as the museum did not fulfill all the criteria of ?site? as specified by site-specific art, this solution is likewise incomplete. The clearest example is the distance between the art and the site. The ?suitcase homes? originated from Suh?s homes but were never installed there. The distance between the actual homes (site) and the suitcase homes on display (art) certainly negates the claims by Barry, Pearson, and others, that site and art are inseparable: to move the art is to destroy it. Let?s briefly put this concern aside. After all, site-specific visual art has experienced a mobile turn. Similarly, one could interpret the claim of ?inseparability? as referring to their referential relationship, not physical proximity. What concerns me more about this use of ?site? is how quickly it becomes synonymous with ?place.? Suh?s claim ?I take the site-specific piece out of its site?? is fundamentally bound upon in a relational spatiality. Inherent in this statement is that the art is relative to the site, though 61 spatially distinct and distanced. In this sense, Suh?s sentiment teases out the relationality innate to ?site-specificity? as an artistic category. The form has long understood an intimate relationship between site and performance/art. Suh?s comment reflects a deep challenge to site-specific art: what?s more important, the relationship between the site and the art, or the proximity? Suh?s comment extends this relationship over distance, suggesting that the relationship is about content rather than proximity. A relationship remains, though the scale changes. However, is the art in that relationship ultimately concerned with a distant site or place? If one substitutes ?place? into Suh?s phrase, it becomes clear how intertwined the theories of place and term site have become. If ?site? refers to these places, site serves only as a stand-in for a richer set of theoretical and experiential frameworks that emerges from ?place.? And like the previous formation of the museum as the site, this configuration transforms Suh?s work into simply being about place. The same can be said about lots of artwork. Landscape paintings, for instance, are definitely ?about? place, but are not considered site-specific, because they are not situated in that place. Again, ?site? becomes an overly broad and inoperable term. The same question posed toward Liu?s work would seemingly yield a more apparent answer. Liu?s work does not straddle two different places, so the site of Liu?s work appears to be self-evident. In the instance of Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn, the site appears to be in the title itself ? the Hirshhorn Museum. However, there are alternative choices. What if the site, as location, was conceived more broadly? Again, we can turn to the title and suggest D.C. Or perhaps the site is missing from the title completely and is Delusions of Grandeur II, the painting against which Liu camouflages his body? Or is site in Liu?s case his own body, as artists have suggested before him? In each of these approaches, like with Almost Home, site is presumed to be a stable condition. Whether site is cast as material or metaphorical, the 62 underlying assumption in these questions suggests that site is ultimately a singular and locatable space. In these instances, site and place are nearly interchangeably, because both are imagined to be here, the location of the art. An Approach to Site What if site, however, is not inherently singular nor locatable? What if site is not the painting, the museum, or Liu?s body, but the created in the space between them? In this, I propose site is not a different means of characterizing physical (or metaphorical) space, but instead a dramaturgical conceit to structure a specific relationship with place. In this sense, the relationship between place and site is an essential one. Rather than being synonyms, or theoretical cousins that both sketch the spatial qualities of culture, politics, and history, site is a condition of place. By this, I mean that site serves to illuminate the particularities of place essential for the relationship between art and place. Site is the intermediary condition that links art and place. In this capacity, I extend Turner and Hodges claim that ??site?, or ?place,? is both questioned and, potentially, transformed,? revising it so that it is site that questions and (potentially) transforms place.70 The difference that emerges between my reading and Turner and Hodge?s is that site is held simultaneously as a process and a product. Site-specificity is inevitably concerned with both. ?If we accept the proposition that a site-specific work is being created for a particular locale, then the notion of process is inherent in the piece,? Arnoldson reminds us.71 Seeing site as a process helpfully illuminates the lens it puts on a place, while also retaining its essential 70 Hodge and Turner, ?Site: Between Ground and Groundless,? 93. 71 Aronson, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography, 174. 63 connection to the art. Essentially, as a process, site structures art and place in relation to one another. Here, site continues its foundational and characteristic connection with the art placed on it, as suggested by Kim Solga. Leaning into this approach, we can briefly return to site?s colloquial usage. Colloquially, ?site? is directly tied to the activity or event that occurs/ed there. This is to say, a location is not a picnic site without its defined use being picnicking. Without the activity, it is place in which many activities can and do occur. The label of ?picnic? and ?site? are not only didactic but fundamentally shape of the place is seen and experienced. What I am suggesting here is that a site does not exist until it is intentionally shaped, meaning that the place where the site ?is? redefined and transformed relationally. A place is not a ?site? until it is tied to a specific purpose. Another way of imagining this is as an archeological site. The place where the dig will occur is distinguished by the action that takes place there, transforming it into a site. As the archeologists uncover sedimentary layers, they reveal the place in new ways. This metaphor productively recalls Michael Shanks and Mike Pearson?s use of archeology within the context of theatre, in which ?archaeology entertains no final and definitive account of the past as it was, but fosters multivocal and multiple accounts: a creative but none the less critical attention and response to the interests, needs, and desires of different constituencies (those people, groups or communities who have or express interest in the material past).?72 For Pearson and Shanks, archeology challenges the singular and definitive temporality of a place. Likewise, an archeological site excavates the multiple (and often historical) purposes place, while transforming it through use. 72 Pearson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, xvii. 64 In order for something to be perceived as a site, it must be marked as such. Without a marker, communicating that the site is indeed a site, the special purpose (whether that is in its use for an activity or the location of an event) is unintelligible. Sites involve a strategy of demarcation, of shifting the landscape from the unannounced, expansive place, to the particular and limited ?site.? In colloquial terms, this can be seen through historical markers (?Site of the Boston Massacre?) or other types of signage (?Picnic site up ahead,? an announcement of the ?future site? of a building, the demarcation of an ongoing archaeological site). Sites must be demarcated in some capacity; else they are indistinguishable from the rest of the place. Without the sign, it?s not a historical site, it?s merely a cobblestone sidewalk in Boston. Without the explicit invitation to picnickers, it is merely another area of the park. Without the archaeologists, it is merely continuous place. The demarcation, however, is not permanent and is not always visible. The site is part of the whole of a place, meaning that one can imagine the picnic area as part of, and not separate from, the park. Since a site is a narrative construct, it is impermanent. It can be moved, transformed, shifted, applied, unapplied, as the narrative needs of place present themselves. The site of the Boston Massacre is a prime example because, despite the original intention of even designating a spot was to ?leave no room for doubt in the future? as to the ?precise spot where the first blood in the Revolutionary struggle was shed,? the site has been moved twice, both times for the sake of traffic patterns.73 While site is seemingly bound up in the particularities of a location (?grounded, fixed, actual?), it is in actually an interpretative framework (?ungrounded, 73 The Bostonian Society. Proceedings of the Bostonian Society at the Annual Meeting, January 10, 1882. Old State House Order of Directors, 1883, 16-17. 65 fluid, virtual?), deployed to highlight the specific features of a place in order to narratively engage it.74 In site-specific art, the function of the term greatly surpasses its colloquial usage. Site presents a means of identifying, critiquing, and transforming the use of place through its relationship with the art. Where Hodge and Turner offered two trajectories of site-specific performance, ?groundless? and ?grounded,? my approach to site folds together those approaches.75 In this model, site simultaneously destabilizes viewing conventions and the cultural perceptions of place. As argued in Fried?s critique, site has the potential to situate the spectator and the art within a given context, while also asking them to revisit the spatial relationship and its effects. As a spatial dramaturgy, site negotiates and reinvigorates the spectator?s spatial logic in order to highlight the intimate relationship between a place and an activity, event, or action. Like in its colloquial usage, site is not pre-existing, but emerges as a spatial condition that highlights the particular features, uses, and histories of a place that are in dialogue with the art. As such, in site-specific theatre, site is not merely where the performance is staged, but a means of elevating, exaggerating, and troubling the elements of place that are relevant to the performance. One of the difficulties in evidencing this approach to site is that because it?s an interpretative approach, and that the conditions of site vary so greatly, there is little that one can point to and say, ?That is the site.? The approach to site that I have outlined here suggests that site is neither the place in which the art (or performance) is displayed nor the place in which it is constructed in response. Likewise, site is not something found in the artwork itself. Instead, I suggest that site is found between the art and the place, as a spatial experience that emerges from 74 Kwon, One Place after Another, 29?30. 75 Hodge and Turner, ?Site: Between Ground and Groundless,? 93. 66 the unique relationship that delimits, accentuates, critiques, and transforms the features of place in response to the art. Let us return to our earlier question regarding Suh and Liu?s work. What is the site in their site-specific art? In Suh?s work, the site is not the Smithsonian, nor his homes, but the ways in which the spectator understands the Smithsonian and his homes through the ?suitcase homes.? In Liu?s performance, the site is not the Smithsonian, the painting, or even his body, but the spatialized experience created between the three. As another example, borrowing from another chapter, in This is Not a Theatre Company?s Subway Plays, a spectator listens to ?podplays? on specifically defined routes on the New York City Subway. Here, the site is not New York City, nor the generalized location of the subway system. The site is the particular spatial experience of the subway car that emerges only when the spectator is listening to the podplays. In this instance, site delimits the place of New York to what is relevant for the performance. Site animates certain features, availing them for critique through the podplays. This approach to site positions it as a dramatic tool, a spatial dramaturgy that can be implemented to various effects on the spectator. Situating site as involved with both viewing strategies and spatial experiences, the term has its clearest meaning when it is considered in relation to spectatorship. If site is not an actuality, but instead a lens through which a spectator views a place, it essentially is an interpretative frame that dramatically shapes the experience and meaning of place. Site is only activated for the benefit of the spectator. In the next section, I turn to the strategies that allow the spectator to ?see? the site, meaning the artistic and dramatic practices that permit a place to be interpreted as a site. 67 How Does the Audience Experience a Place as a Site? If a site is a dramaturgical tool that allows the spectator to experience a place through a certain lens for a dramatic effect, it is important to consider how the condition of site is applied and becomes legible for the audience. There are, of course, numerous ways this can be achieved and to artificially limit them for the sake of categorization would be foolhardy. One could say that there are as many ways to render a site legible as there are functions of site. In this section, I return to my two case studies, Almost Home and Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn, in order to consider how site is simultaneously marked and unmarked within a performance. In particular, I examine the ways in which transparency and misalignment simultaneously strategically reveal and obscure the lens of site. The Illusion of Transparency As a strategy to demarcate site, transparency is a particularly salient tool, as it allows for the markings to be simultaneously seen and unseen. The interplay between the transparent layers and what they revealed behind them marks the site and visually illustrates the interaction between art and place. Unlike signs that clearly denote a site and clearly suggest its usage, the condition of transparency can be ignored as needed by the spectator. This means that while transparency might directly mark the site, it may do so silently, simultaneously distinguishing the site and situating it within the landscape of place, as merely part of it. As such, transparency highlights the many ambiguities of site, including the desire for it to be seen, the necessity for it to be perceived, and the hope that marker is disregarded. After all, if site is a device to animate the conditions of place, it must not ultimately obscure those qualities for the spectator. 68 Transparency, or perhaps more aptly, translucency, is a key characteristic of both Doh Ho Suh and Liu Bolin?s work. In Almost Home and Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn, the supposed transparency of the artworks is one of their most noticeable features. In particular, for Liu, known colloquially as the ?Invisible Man,? transparency is a central condition of his artistic practice. However, calling him the ?Invisible Man? is at best a misnomer, and more often, misunderstands (or misrepresents) the role transparency plays in Liu?s art. How much he ?disappears? into the scenery heavily varies from photo to photo, depending on a number of factors such as how textured or detailed the background is. In more complex images, such as in front of shelves of stuffed toys (Made in China, 2012), the illusion is more successful. The spectator?s eye is distracted, the details are easier to imitate, and Liu seems to fade into the scene. The less complex image, the less successful the illusion. In fact, Liu is often readily visible. For instance, in Road Block (2007), Liu sits on a paved street against a black and yellow barricade. His body is painted to match the black and yellow stripes, but the smooth barricade and texture of the cloth of his jacket simply do not blend in an illusionary manner. However, the question of how ?invisible? he is in each photograph is ultimately beside the point. ?Invisibility? is not the goal. Instead, Liu places his body as a critique of the landscape, and how it has rendered the individual ?invisible.? In this capacity, Liu does not seek success in his ?invisible man? routine, if success means replicating the damage done on the individual by removing them from the landscape. Liu?s art stakes out the power differential between the individual and the landscape. He sees his work as ?draw[ing] people's attention to the relationship between the grand scale of cultural development and the role of a single individual.?76 In order to achieve this, Liu aims instead of transparency at translucency, in which 76 Habe-Evans, ?Chinese Artist Attempts To Blend In ... Literally.? 69 his body serves to be simultaneously seen and unseen. ?From my perspective, the meaning of human beings has been constantly annihilated in modern society. In the rapidly developing course, while living environment is improving, people are effacing themselves; what a great contradiction! I choose to hide in different backgrounds because each one has its own significance.?77 The interplay created by Liu asks the spectator to examine what is beneath the surface and what lives have been disrupted or destroyed for its sake. Such an interplay requires that ?invisibility? is never fully achieved. In a sense, transparency offers an illusionistic sense of a place, that is simultaneously mediated and received as if it were unmediated. It is this illusionistic sense of place that turns place into site. Henri Lefebvre argues that the ?illusion of transparency? is one of the fundamental means of concealing that ?(social) space is a (social) product.?78 Lefebvre suggests that under the illusion of transparency, design serves as a mediator, obscuring the constructed- ness of space, while retaining the perception that it is ?innocent, free of traps or secret places.?79 In relation to the illusion of transparency, Lefebvre offers the illusion of opacity, suggesting that the double illusions work in tandem to reinforce, ?embod[y] and nourish the other.?80 In the same capacity, site operates under a similar double illusion, in which the suggestion of transparency hides the mechanics that transform and condition place to be received by a spectator of site-specific work. When looking through a transparent layer, the spectator is given the impression that what they see is unmediated, that it is being experienced as if it were in its natural form. The transparent layer, however, is indeed mediation. The illusion of transparency reminds us that both site and place are deeply invested in a mythology of their own naturalness. 77 Rosenberg, ?Can You Find the Artist Hidden in This Photograph?? 78 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 27. 79 Lefebvre, 28. 80 Ibid., 30. 70 Site-specific practitioners resemble those that Lefebvre casts as ?space-oriented artists,? who tend to work with materials that ?resist or evade his efforts.?81 By strategically utilizing ?site?s? pseudo-transparency, practitioners destabilize the certainty of place by revealing its evasive tendencies. It is precisely this interplay between seen and unseen, visible and invisible, transparent and non-transparent (rather than opaque), that I feature here as a strategy to make a site legible to the spectator. In order for ?site? to be a meaningful organizational and dramatic tool, it is not a hidden condition, but intelligible for the spectator. Yet when approaching site as a lens, it can easily disrupt the seemingly seamless relationship between place and art. As such, a site?s transparency functions to structure the relationship between place and art, while simultaneously obscuring its own functionality. The concept of ?site? is something to see, when convenient, and to not see, when it is not. Essentially, a ?site? is something that must be named in some capacity, made explicit. And then, that explicit marking, the defining qualities that say this spatial configuration is indeed intended for this explicit relationship, becomes less pronounced. The picnic site becomes part of the park, the Boston Massacre site becomes part of Boston, the performance site becomes part of a place again. It is distinguished from the whole, and yet part of it too. Perhaps it is this exact relationship with a pseudo-transparency that has so long plagued site-specificity and rendered ?site? and ?place? interchangeable terminology. As I discuss transparency as a strategy of site, I want to briefly pause in order to discuss the relationship between the transparent conditions of the art (that is, ?-specific?) and the site itself. Though it may seem like I am conflating the two, I work to illuminate how transparency in the art participates in the formation of the site as a dramatic device. The translucency of the art 81 LeFebvre, 30. 71 allows the visual commingling of art and place within the same glance. The same relationship as being constructed through and regarding ?site.? Discussing his use of sheer fabric to convey the ephemerality of memory in Almost Home, Suh quipped, ?I needed something to render this nothingness.?82 I, too, need something to render this ?nothingness.? Since the approach to ?site? I am offering is intangible, the transparency of art is an apt metaphor for the same quality in the analytic of site. Rather than conflating the two, discussing the strategic use of transparency provides a means to discuss its theoretical counterpart. Transparency has long been a condition associated with site, though is less regularly discussed. Consider, for instance, Mike Pearson and Cliff McLucas? triad of the host, ghost, and witness. ?Host? has long played a stand-in for site, which is ?haunted? by a translucent ?ghost,? the performance.83 Almost Home appears to fit this model well, in which the ?suitcase homes? are the ghost and the Smithsonian takes on the role of the ghost. What I am suggesting, however, ultimately presses on these roles, transforming the translucent quality from one belonging exclusively to the art alone into a condition that structures the spatial experience between the ?ghost,? ?host,? and ?witness.? If the Invisible Man is not intended to be invisible, the oscillation of his translucency productively demonstrates how Liu?s body (or the bodies within his artwork) is a necessary sight for the purposes of an interplay between his art and a place. If Liu were indeed ?invisible,? the photo would lack a critical focus: all that would be seen is the place behind him, uncritiqued, untransformed, through lack of his visible presence. Liu asserts that it is not his intention to 82 Smithsonian Magazine and Glenn Dixon, ?How This Globetrotting Artist Redefines Home and Hearth,? Smithsonian Magazine, accessed March 24, 2022, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian- institution/how-globetrotting-artist-redefines-home-and-hearth-180968711/. 83 Cliff McLucas, ?Ten Feet and Three Quarters of an Inch of Theatre,? in Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation, ed. Nick Kaye (London?; New York: Routledge, 2000), 128. 72 become invisible. Instead, he suggests, ?I do not melt into the environment; on the contrary, I believe that I am encroached by the environment.?84 His transparent status asks the spectator to see his body in relation to the place, and ultimately, as part of the place. However, Liu?s comment reveals the inherent (political, spatial, visual) tensions in his art. His body ?dissolves? into the place for the purposes of his critique, but it is the place that consumes him. Vitally, this suggests a contentious relationship with place. Place, as a political entity, is so willing to make him, and others who are disenfranchised, invisible. However, his body visually distorts place. The relationship between his body and the place transforms it and leads the spectator into his political or social commentary about the site. Rather than disappearing, Meiqin Wang has argued that Liu?s work reveals: ?His purpose of performance is to reveal the disparate urban spaces of Beijing where mainstream discourses are carried out and various social groups are disempowered.?85 The oscillation of transparency plays an essential role in the efficacy of Liu?s art, both in terms of its form and its content. Of course, invisibility is a central political concern of Liu?s work. Invisibility is not a desirable outcome; instead, it is a consequence of a ravenous and unjust political system. Liu?s urban camouflage literalizes the process that occurs metaphorically when those who occupy a landscape are overlooked and dehumanized. Liu?s work began when his own status as a migrant left him without a home, after the unexpected demolition of his studio. Though he typically uses his own body as his canvas, he has also worked with unemployed workers and other migrants who have been displaced.86 Their transparency invites spectators to consider the power dynamics that undergird and construct the places that their bodies disappear into. As Maaike Bleeker 84 Liu Bolin, Self-Published catalogue, 2008, 8. 85 Meiqin Wang, Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art, Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies, #13 (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 178. 86 Wang, 172. 73 reminds us, ?it is invisibility rather than visibility that equals power in the field of vision.? 87 Liu critiques and subverts a place?s power by rendering bodies transparent. He simultaneously situates them in and as the landscape. By creating a site, the places that he critiques are received through his transparent body. His body serves as an essential piece of mediation, a site through which place is ultimately understood. Unlike Liu?s work, Suh?s bears no suggestion that it is ?invisible.? The sheer fabric, however, likewise marks the site for the spectator, while reminding them of its ephemerality. Through Almost Home, the spectator sees several places: the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as Suh?s homes in Berlin, New York, and Seoul. Almost Home uses transparency to stage these places in relation to one another. The three hallways of the three homes are linked to create a singular hallway that allows the spectator who walks it to travel through three continents and across one museum floor. The translucency of the installation means that the museum space is always visible to the spectator, but so are the other homes, and all the other spectators. In this capacity, Almost Home is a layered composition. Each home is a unique color (Blue for Korea, Green for Germany, Pink for the United States), but seen together, the layered colors become a murkier mix, an apt metaphor for the challenges to their spatial integrity. Where once their spaces were distinct, Suh upends their foundations. He craftily arranges a new spatial configuration that is bound more in discourse and affect than geography. The installation invites an ?interspatial movement? between each home.88 In Almost Home, Suh achieves what critic Lee Weng Choy has termed re-siting, a resistance to ?belonging to one time 87 Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking, Performance Interventions (Basingstoke [England]?; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 99. 88 Respini and Erickson, When Home Won?t Let You Stay, 70. 74 or place.?89 For curators Eva Respini and Ruth Erikson, this is achieved through the translucent fabrics ability to re-spatialize the homes, moving the walls from the category of what is to what was: ?The fabric?s translucency is haunting, as though this physical manifestation could fade as much as Suh?s own memories of his various homes.?90 The translucent walls simultaneously call the places forth and call into question their spatial practices. Significantly, Suh names transparency as a crucial part of his aesthetic approach. For him, transparency is not only valuable for staging the fragility or ephemerality of the suitcase homes, but also for capturing and conveying the spatial aesthetics of Korea: It?s all windows and doors- and the way you configure those walls. You can reconfigure the space in different ways. And the material of the windows and doors is all semi-transparent rice paper, so there?s a sense that architecture is very porous. There?s a sense of permeability, versus, well?opaqueness?It was made clearer when I came here and lived in American buildings. The way you relate yourselves to the rest of the world is distinctively different.91 The ?suitcase home?s? transparency is both a means of revealing the site and applying an alternative spatial sensibility through a site. As a transparent structure, Almost Home rebukes the limits of a geography that would separate the structures across the world, while constructing each space through a distinctly Korean spatial aesthetic. As such, the spectator sees his New York home as it is interpreted through Suh?s own aesthetic interpretations of space. Transparency is both the subject and form of his work: ?There is no way you can make something that is 89 Lee Weng Choy, ?Citing and Re-Siting,? Art Journal 60, no. 2 (June 2001): 24?26, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2001.10792061. I am indebted to Joan Kee?s thoughtful reading of this text in ?Some Thoughts on the Practice of Oscillation,? Third Text 17, no. 2 (June 2003): 141?50, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820309664. 90 Respini and Erickson, When Home Won?t Let You Stay, 70. 91 Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer, eds., ?Social Structures and Shared Autobiographies: Do-Ho Suh,? in Conversations on Sculpture (Hamilton (N.J.): isc press, 2007), 273?74. 75 transparent without physical substance, so I am borrowing material that renders the idea of transparency.?92 Suh identifies one of his strategies as ?borrow[ing] landscape,? a Korean concept that he situates as essential to building an environment. Borrowing landscape is inherently concerned with ?ambiguous space? and blurry boundaries.93 The notion can be easily observed in Almost Home, where its transparent walls borrow from the landscape to overcome an artificial divide between outside and inside. However, the concept of the installation extends the metaphor further by taking the notion of borrowing landscape literally in order to unfix the homes from their geographic determinism. ?Borrowing? is a particularly interesting term for Suh?s work because it implies a temporariness as if acknowledging that the suitcase homes are not the homes themselves, but the houses in ghost form. In this capacity, transparency reveals the site through borrowed spatial practices, structuring the relationship between the art and the places (no matter how far off they are). Essentially, like the layered transparency found in viewing the rooms through each other, Almost Home offers a similar experience of site in which the museum is viewed through other places. In my first viewing of Almost Home, I was struck by how very transportive the experience of walking through Suh?s homes felt, how it gave me a sense of ?being there.? In an early version of this writing, I wrote: I have twice been to 348 West 22nd Street in New York City. The first visit was on a warm April night in 2016. On a meandering walk, I unknowingly passed the address?s tall stoop with its painted red brick fa?ade that was so characteristic of the buildings in the neighborhood. My second visit to the address was more remarkable: my visit to the New York address happened in Washington DC. 348 West 22nd Street now stood in the 1st Floor West Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, an installation piece by the Korean-American artist Do Ho Suh. 92 Harper and Moyer, 272?73. 93 Ibid., 274. 76 I share this to reflect on how persuasive the impossible spatial situation was. I knew that I had not been there twice, but once inside Suh?s houses, the complex and ambiguous site of Almost Home structured a spatial experience that implored me to feel like geography mattered less, that space could be unfixed, that I could be in the presence of Suh?s absent homes without ever leaving the Smithsonian. Jane Rendell writes about a similar experience with Suh?s work, specifically 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, the New York ?hub? of Almost Home. She comments, ?As I address the impossible position in which 348 West 22nd? places me, I realize I am right between the outside of the inside wall of Suh?s apartment and the outside wall of the Serpentine Gallery.?94 Rendell?s comment reveals a dislocating sensation of layered spatial situations. Likewise, one local critic observed, ?Visitors are encouraged to explore the space, by walking inside and along these hallways as he once did, experiencing his memories of home and connecting them with theirs.?95 The critic?s remarks illustrate how persuasive the spatial experience is by conflating the halls of the exhibit with the halls Suh walked in his homes. According to Almost Home curator Sarah Newman, spectators regularly remarked that they felt like they were part of the exhibit, in those spaces.96 For the spectator, transparency concurrently marks a site, invests in a set of spatial practices, and obscures the original demarcation. In effect, transparency pushes ?place? off-balance, inviting the spectator to experience the impossible. 94 Rendell, Site-Writing, 219. 95 ?Do Ho Suh?s Almost Home.? Emphasis is mine. 96 Interview with Sarah Newman, December 16, 2019. 77 Misalignments, Failures, and the Limits of Site Like transparency visually distinguishes site, another way that site can be marked is through misalignment. Here, I turn towards moments of critical ?failures? in order to consider how sites that are askew can be recognized and experienced by the spectator. By failure, I look to the moments in which the illusion of transparency was ineffective, not necessarily because a site was seen, as discussed above, but because the seams of a site were all too visible. In this discussion, I work to apply pressure on and evaluate the aesthetic and theoretical limits of site. At the Hirshhorn, three assistants camouflaged Liu Bolin into an enlarged reproduction of Delusions of Grandeur II that was mounted as a ?Step and Repeat? for their fundraising ball. Liu was painted live as part of the gala?s entertainment, matching its theme of the surreal. Looking at the photographic remains of the event, in the form of Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn, the disappearance uses the same technique as Liu?s other work. Liu is wearing his military jumpsuit, painted blue and white, with a cloud over his chest, to match the sky, and brown and tan across his right side and through his pants, to match the woman?s torso. This work is not one of his most ?transparent.? Despite the thoughtful attention paid to match his body to the painting, he is readily visible, standing on a brown stool painted to match her torso. I do not qualify Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn as a failure, and it is not the ?failure? of his visibility in relation to the work that I wish to discuss. Instead, I wish to turn from Liu?s photo to other photographs from the gala. While Liu?s work is best known in the form of photographs, many critics have rightly called it a performance (or, performance art).97 It is in 97 See for instance: Wang, Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art; ?Hirshhorn To Present First Annual HIRSHHORN BALL, June 15, 2019,? Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian (blog), accessed March 22, 2022, https://hirshhorn.si.edu/news/press-release/hirshhorn-to-present-first-annual-hirshhorn-ball-june-15- 2019/; ?Liu Bolin: The Invisible Man - The Atlantic,? accessed March 8, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/11/liu-bolin-the-invisible-man/100623/. 78 this form that we can stress-test ?site.? If, as I have suggested, site is dramaturgically formed in the relationship between the art and the place, what happens when the spectator looks from the wrong perspective? What happens when the illusion is ineffective, when the seams of site are visible? At the gala, spectators saw Liu and the work that would become Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn from different vantage points, both as a work-in-progress and as perspective art from the wrong perspective. In another version of what could be called Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn was published by Capitol File, Washington D.C.?s ?premiere luxury? magazine that profiled the gala for their pages. In this version, Liu stands in the same spot before Delusions of Grandeur II.98 His skin and clothing are painted, as they are in the official photograph. However, there are three significant differences between the photographs. In this version, his eyes are open, the crop of the photo is much tighter, and most importantly, the lighting is completely different. Instead of the crisp white light in the official photograph, this version is transformed by the lights of the ball. The sky is somber under the dark party lights. The white women?s nude torso is bathed in moody pinks. Notably, Liu?s own shadow falls across her torso, casting a dark purple detailed but distorted silhouette across the body. The same shadow can be seen in another photo from the event, this time of the work-in- process.99 Liu stands in place on his stool while casting his eyes over the crowd. One of his assistants refreshes his paintbrush at the corner of the reproduction of the Magritte painting. Another photo matches the official photo more closely ? Liu is standing in place, his eyes closed, 98 ?Hirshhorn Celebrates Surreal Fashion at Its First Annual Art-Themed Ball,? accessed March 22, 2022, http://capitolfile.com/hirshhorn-celebrates-fashion-at-art-ball. 99 @amy_bower_bahr. ?Surrealism + DC expression. Hirshhorn Ball. What. A. Night.? Instagram, June 16, 2019. https://www.instagram.com/p/BywgHM5hsuT/. 79 there are no party lights nor shadows ? but the camera angle is off.100 The result is that the illusion is misaligned and contorted. The slight change in perspective evinces the art?s artifice and reminds the spectator that it is an illusion they are supposed to be seeing. In another photo, Liu standing in position yet posing with Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu.101 Her presence disrupts not only the illusion, but intercepts the meaning given to the relationship between art and place. Each modification ? from the shadow to the additional bodies in the frame to the adjusted angle ? tests the limits of site. Certainly, no spectator at the Hirshhorn Ball believed that Liu?s performance was naturally occurring. The interruptions that expose the artifice of site are in some ways part of the experience of site-specific performance. Site-specific practitioners have long acknowledged that interference and disruption frequently accompany site-specific performance.102 Incidents like the shadow or the off-kilter framing trouble the notion of site because they emphatically gesture to the site. Like transparency, misalignment is a strategy in demarcating site. Unlike transparency, which defines the borders of a site before allowing it to dissolve into the background, these misalignments ensure that the site maintains visibility. Essentially, misalignments, like those discussed above, put pressure on site because, rather than allowing it to serve as an intermediary to structure a relationship between place and art, it turns site into a ?trialectic.?103 Site becomes 100 @marygcorpus. ?Thrilled to have had the opportunity to assist @liubolin with a live performance at #HirshhornBall where @kyartcow @_nomu.nomu_ and I camouflaged him into a Rene Magritte painting. Thanks to Liu and everyone at the Hirshhorn for this opportunity!? Instagram, June 16, 2019. https://www.instagram.com/p/ByxfeM_AR1J/. 101 @theeliklein. ?#LiuBolin performing @Hirshhorn, thank you @MelissaWChiu and everyone else at #HirshhornMuseum.? Instagram, June 15, 2019. https://www.instagram.com/p/BywSHlulQM4/. 102 Pearson, Site-Specific Performance, 16?17. 103 Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1996). 80 evident. If this is indeed a ?failure,? it is because it pulls focus from the relationship between art and place. It does not achieve its dramaturgical aims. The shadow of Liu?s body disrupts the possibility of an illusion by bringing the realities of place into a sharper focus. The lights, the party, the spectators are not incidental to place, but part of it (understanding that ?place? is always in progress.) Liu?s ?disappearance? into Delusions of Grandeur II seemingly is designed for the photo, not for the ball. However, at the ball, the shadow transforms Liu?s work in unanticipated ways. On the left side of the shadow, one can clearly make out Liu?s detailed silhouette. The right side is far murkier. The edges of the shadow blend with the curves of the woman?s torso. It is not immediately clear where the shadow ends and Magritte?s begins. While he does not disappear into the painting, the art and place are still in dialogue, even if the site is apparent. Given that disruptions are inevitable and expected in site-specific performance, does an ever-present site demonstrate the limits of its dramaturgical use? Site-specific performances must be nimble, as they often are forced to change. Halfway through the exhibit of Almost Home, the Smithsonian made a sizeable change that impacted the spectatorial experience. Initially, spectators were able to walk through the entire hallway of Suh?s three homes, entering New York and exiting in Seoul. This was subsequently changed, so that spectators entered through the Korean hub, walked through Germany, and merely peered into New York, before turning around and exiting the way they came. I experienced both pathways ?through? Almost Home. During my second visit, with the altered pathway, a docent informed me that the change was due to the New York section being the oldest and most fragile. Almost Home?s curator Sarah Newman had a slightly different reason.104 She attributed the 104 Interview with Sarah Newman, December 16, 2019. 81 change to the fact that the New York hub was owned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). During the early weeks of the exhibit, there were numerous incidents of spectators touching the art. They grabbed the doorknobs, twisted the valve on the radiator. Because of this, LACMA required the Smithsonian to change the path through the exhibit. The other two hubs, Berlin and Seoul, are owned by Suh, which allowed the Smithsonian to have more flexibility in keeping them open to spectators. Figure 4: The New York Hub, from the vantage point of the new route, in Almost Home by Do Ho Suh the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, May 2018. Photo by the author. Newman attributes the spectators? impulse to two factors. First, she notes that Smithsonian museums are often hands-on museums, which actively invite the spectator to touch the exhibits. Secondly, she suggests that the desire to touch the exhibit is a testament to the power of the art. Newman?s comment illustrates the efficacy of Almost Home?s transportive spatial logics, in which the spectator wants to engage with the features as if they were real. Where the cause of the change might be attributed to transparency, the change, in effect, creates a visible misalignment. 82 By changing the path, the site of Almost Home is made irreparably apparent to the spectator. Previously, the spectator was subject to the spatial logic of site, a transportive effect that allowed place to be seen through the art. Now, the spectator is concerned with the spatial logic of the exhibit itself. The site, made visible, asks them to think about the fragility of the art. It distracts from the abstract effects of space by making it consider the real effects of their current space. The logistics of the exhibit have the potential to overwhelm, though not exhaust, the site?s dramaturgical capabilities. Seeing the seams of a site, however, does not necessarily mean that its critiques are ineffective. It simply reorients the position of the spectator regarding its clearly defined boundaries and adjusted aims. What can productively emerge in between transparency and a visible misalignment? A frequently discussed characteristic of site-specific performance is its propensity to ?slip.?105 This term refers to the lack of clarity about what belongs to the art and what belongs to the place. The reverse of this is referred to as frictions or abrasions. I discuss this matter in great depth in my chapter on Promenade: Baltimore and the theatrical frame. I return to these two terms here to briefly sketch their relevancy in terms of revealing a site. One way of imagining slips and frictions is by seeing them as instances in which the site was too invisible or visible. Where hypervisibility may cause friction between the art and place, an unmarked site creates uncertainty about the limits of either art or place. Both have consequences in terms of the site-specific art?s dramaturgical aims and political impact. Experiencing a place as a site is ultimately a contentious and complex endeavor. Rather than restrict its possibilities, I move to hold space for site?s inevitable ambiguities, its ?failures? and contradictions. Site, after all, is a loose baggy monster. 105 See Kaye, Site-Specific Art, 215 and Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins, editors. Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 1. 83 In the Museum After sketching an approach to site through the last two sections, by way of a conclusion, I return to the museum as the ?site? of ?site-specificity.? By staging this chapter in relation to the museum, my hope has been to reexamine the origins of site-specificity in a new light, applying pressure on its fundamental characteristics in order to ask, what use does site have as a term within site-specific performance theory? Ending in the museum, I now ask, what is the efficacy of ?site?? How does site emerge through the museum, not despite it? It is easy to imagine a version of my critique and its return to the museum asking a version of the question, ?is a museum a site after all?? This question is easily answered: yes. Of course, a museum can be a site. Over the more than half-century since the minimalist art movement, scholars have argued that greater attention must be paid to museum spaces. The museum may no longer be viewed as a neutral space, but the ?white cube? is still an all too ubiquitous gallery aesthetic. Brian O?Doherty laments ?We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first. (A clich? of the ages is to ejaculate over the space on entering a gallery.)?106 O?Doherty?s critique is useful because it returns us to a fundamental objection to the museum in the first place: do the museum?s white walls privilege the art displayed upon them or overwhelm it? Renowned museum planner Gail Dexter Lord asserted that museums are ?emphatically three-dimensional spaces,? noting that ?contemporary artists creating site-specific works are the ones who have drawn our attention to the multiple meanings and complex identities of these spaces and places.?107 Lord?s comment suggests that a nuanced understanding of a museum space emerged through site-specific art, not despite it. 106 Brian O?Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, 1st book ed (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986), 14. 107 Gail Dexter Lord, ?The Importance of Space and Place,? Curator: The Museum Journal 48, no. 1 (2005): 23, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2005.tb00146.x. 84 Suh and Liu?s works can be situated in the category of site-specific art Lord refers to, one that returned to the museum to extend to it the possibility of being a site. Miwon Kwon refers to this sub-genre as ?institutional critique.? She argues that the white cube ?was perceived not solely in terms of basic dimensions and proportion but as an institutional disguise, a normative exhibition convention serving an ideological function.?108 Artists of this genre understand that the museum is not neutral. Instead, it serves as an ideological frame that determines the reception of the art in its halls and on its walls. There is a paradox within, however. As these artists give the museum space nuance through their site-specific art and critique its ideological mechanisms, those same mechanisms still determine the reception of their art. If site structures the relationship between art and place, the relationship is, of course, bilateral. While the audience might travel the halls of Do Ho Suh?s former homes in Almost Home, the museum is never out of sight. The ghostly quality of the exhibit, sewn out of translucent fabric, means that the museum can always be seen behind the walls. As such, there is no experiencing Suh?s work without also experiencing the museum. However, in a sense, there is a dueling issue of transparency: where the transparency renders the museum always visible, the museum, once seen as a neutral space, works to obscure its own interpretative frame. In this double play for what is ultimately visible (or perhaps the most invisible), transparency simultaneously reveals and unveils the relationship between site and place, and object and visitor. The museum effect in an interpretative frame that is most prominently addressed by Valerie Casey in her discussion of the relationship between museum visitors and exhibit objects.109 Casey suggests that objects in a museum become meaningful simply by being in the 108 Kwon, One Place after Another, 13. 109 Valerie Casey, ?Staging Meaning: Performance in the Modern Museum,? TDR 49, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 78?95. 85 museum. For Casey, the museum effect comes from both the unstated institutional authority of the museum itself (given by the object?s mere inclusion in the museum), as well as more explicitly stated authority, such as through the curation and contextual information (info text) that accompanies the exhibit. In this regard, Casey suggests that the museum effect renders the authority of the museum visible to the visitor. However, there are two separate dynamics at play here. While the museum effect does certainly offer the spectator a semblance of authority, the museum effect ultimately renders such authority to be invisible, essentially serving as a transparent frame. It is under this context that we return to Hiding in Washington D.C. No. 1- Hirshhorn. Unlike his expected modus operandi, Liu is at the Hirshhorn ball to be seen. Is this an instance of a misaligned site? Or is it the transparency of the museum effect that effectively obscures a site?s seams? Liu?s performance is at the behest of the museum, for the sake of their benefit ball. Rather than an overtly political statement, like most of his other works, this work evidences the authority and prestige of the museum. Here, we can see a bilateral form of the museum effect manifesting through site, in which the museum and Liu are each giving each other clout, lending each other some of their authority. The site-specific work is ?inherently? meaningful because it is in a museum, and the space of a museum is ?made meaningful? through site-specific art. Perhaps the question is less if a museum can be a site (meaning location for place-based art), and more, has a museum been a site (meaning a dramaturgical tool) this entire time? In asking this question, I seem to come full circle. But rather than doing so for the sake of a tidy conclusion, I intend to leave these matters unresolved, to sit in the ambiguities and contradictions that site offers. Situating site as an inherently complex, yet protean dramaturgical tool offers a means of deeply investing in the spatiality of performance, which is, in itself, 86 complex and endlessly diverse. But, in identifying that there is something at work there, we can begin to question its effects on the spectator?s experience of a place and strategize its dramaturgical uses. To conceive of site as more than a synonym to place is an important conceptual leap in evaluating its reception and political efficacy as a world-shaping art. 87 Chapter 2 ?Site-Seeing: Theatrical Framing and Spatial Delight in Baltimore? Introduction ?You are bound to miss something to the right, especially when you want to see it all?,? cautions a voice in my ear.1 In Baltimore, I sit on a Johns Hopkins bus as part of the audience of Single Carrot Theatre?s Promenade: Baltimore. Each audience member dons a pair of headphones to hear oral histories, dramatic monologues, poetry, and music that convey Baltimore?s character, while actors perform scenes of everyday life on the streets of the city. Promenade: Baltimore exemplifies an increasingly popular configuration of site-specific performance in which ?site? is utilized as an immersive condition. Rather than occurring in a secluded location or a designated performance space, the performance takes place in public with all the variables that it invites. The bus navigates the city streets, rendering the border between performance and place as nebulous. It is initially unclear who might belong to the production and who is simply a resident going about their day. Residents are continuously dramaturgically situated as ?part? of the show long after the cast has become familiar to the spectator. During my viewings of Promenade: Baltimore, there were several serendipitous moments in which the audio narration correlated to the residential activity outside of the bus, engulfing it within the theatrical frame. In one notable instance, through our headphones, we heard a Baltimorean describe the practice of stoop-sitting while outside a woman was sitting on her stoop. The collision of the performance and the city caused a ripple of delight, a happy accident that brings this woman into the performance. The audience interprets her as they might have interpreted an actor sweeping a stoop. Both seem to belong to the city, attached to its 1 Promenade Baltimore, Single Carrot Theatre and Stereo AKT, Performance, June 2, 2017. 88 architecture by the stoop. Both are described by the soundtrack; both are seen from the vantage point of the bus. Yet, one is a performer, and the other is unsuspectingly turned into a performance object by the sudden gaze of an audience. Promenade: Baltimore asks the audience to attend to the city as if it were part of the performance. Questions about the boundaries of the theatrical are particularly salient within site- specific performance: the theatrical conceits are often unfamiliar rendering such boundaries unclear. Much has been made about the blurring effect of site-specific performance, often referred to as slippage, in which site and place appear indistinguishable. Theatre theorist Joanne Tompkins identifies slippage as a significant trope of the genre that ?complicates simple definitions of the genre, let alone the form as a whole.?2 Nick Kaye argues that slippage is an inherent condition of site-specific performance, suggesting ?site-specificity arises precisely in uncertainties over the borders and limits of work and site.?3 Slippage is a term that has been used to gesture toward the qualities of performance and site that are often mistaken for one another, blurring the ?real? with the ?fictional? to create a porous, layered field for the audience to interpret. These works, among others, helpfully outline the ways in which site and performance are in constant negotiation: slippery at times, though occasionally full of friction and abrasions.4 After all, site-specific performance is ultimately the navigation between the performance possibilities and the realities of place. Spatial Delight 2 Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins, editors. Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 1. 3 Kaye, Site-Specific Art, 215. 4 See Ferdman, Off Sites.Alison Oddey and Christine White, Modes of Spectating, 1. publ (Bristol: Intellect, 2009); Daniel Schulze, Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Make It Real, Methuen Drama Engage (London; New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017). 89 I locate pleasure as a central dynamic in the experience of place. As an affect, delight illuminates the link between viewing strategies, the distribution of power, and the never-ending project that is place. Doreen Massey nearly titled her 2004 book For Space, ?spatial delight,? a term she briefly outlines in the book?s introduction.5 She shares a story of her young self, spinning a globe, stopping it with her finger, and imagining what was happening there at that moment. For Massey, ?spatial delight? refers to a unique pleasure that arises from the contemporaneous heterogeneity of the planet. Delight emerges from seeing the city as separate while being within it. Likewise, theatre spectators feel pleasure sitting in the audience, spatially distinct from the performance area, looking on. It is not simply that these two forms of pleasure merely resemble each other, but in site-specific performance, they are the same. In site-specific performance, the spectatorial vision of performance is part and parcel of the visual consumption of place. In site-specific performance, the audience experiences pleasure from seeing performance and place, both as distinct entities and as a united image. Spectators of site-specific performance often find a form of spatial delight in the messy intersections of the ?site? and ?performance? (There?s a lot of meaning held in the terminological hyphen, the specific, or the space). Spatial delight emerges in the decipherable overlay between performance and place, forming a single image out of the distinct parts. The spectator delights in the convergence, the insider knowledge of being able to see the two things aligned. This peculiar performance effect might initially seem like an aesthetic concern, a desired outcome for the spectator. However, this stages an important interplay between the aesthetic and political consequences of site-specific performance. To derive pleasure from place is a question of power, boundaries, and objectification. In so much as this chapter is about the pleasure of place, it is also 5 Doreen B. Massey, For Space (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE, 2005) 14. 90 about the harm perpetrated against those who find themselves bound up in the theatrical frame. Deriving pleasure from place is inherently political. Here, we can return to Massey?s critique of spatial delight. Massey ultimately moved away from ?spatial delight? when she recognized that finding pleasure in contemporaneousness of space benefits from, but does not necessarily grapple with, the inherently uneven power dynamic.6 It is here that I recast Massey?s spatial delight as a spectatorial practice: spectators delight at the collision of place and performance, the contemporaneity of heterogeneous actions occupying a single place. My usage of spatial delight uses Massey?s theorization as a starting point to examine the convergence and overlay of performance and place, one on top of another. In this, performance and place serve as her contemporaneous heterogeneous spaces, offering two visible layers of spatial practice. For, like Massey, there is a sense of pleasure that emerges from the contemporaneity of space, and like Massey, this joy must be understood through the unevenness of the power dynamic through which it emerges. I extend Massey?s theorization to include the murky affective response from this layering in performance. For the spectator, witnessing this dual spatial practice offers a complex affect that occupies the ambiguous folds between delight and discomfort. Often, where there is delight, there is also discomfort. Where there is pain, there may be pleasure. Further, where Massey theorizes spatial delight as unidirectional, I read it both ways. This allows me to analyze how spatial delight is imagined from two different vantage points. Some sense of those differing vantage points emerges in the work of scholars like Sarah Ahmed. She reminds us, for example that ?the experience of delight involves a loving orientation 6 Massey, For Space 14. 91 toward the object, just as the experience of love registers with us as delightful.?7 While the orientation may be one of love, that does not detract from the power dynamics that enable the experience of delight, nor does it address the harm that often accompanies it. As I have drafted this work, I have focused on delight as a plausible affective response, based on interviews, reviews, and other accounts. I would be remiss to exclude my own response of delight. In this chapter, however, not all in the intended audience find the interplay between place and performance to be delightful. Nor do all who are caught by the performance unaware find it disconcerting. Audiences are not monoliths, neither are their responses. When considering other types of reception, I have strived to avoid a false binary, in which delight is placed in opposition to pain. Such a binary would erase the complexity of responses. Where some find delight in the interplay between performance and the world, others find anger, grief, embarrassment, and discomfort. In this chapter, I refer to these as abrasions, as a nod to the friction experienced in the collision of place and performance. Similarly, the response types do not simply correspond to the roles of the intended or unintended audience. This is to say, delighting in the performance or experiencing it as abrasive was not limited to one spectator group. Many in the unintended audience delighted in the magic of an unexpected performance at their door. There is a certain sense of serendipity at play: the endless choreography of the city bumping into the unbounded performance. The joy of happenstance. Spectators and performers often imagine site-specific performance in a way that resembles how Massey characterized spatial delight: she was an eager onlooker, separate and outside of place. In site-specific performance, this boundary is more perceived than real. That is to say, while site-specific performance is inherently of a site, meaning that it has an intimate and 7 Sara Ahmed, ?Happy Objects,? in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) 32. 92 entangled relationship with the place in which it is performed, many who participate in site- specific performance fail to imagine their impact on the site. Understanding place as an ongoing project, rather than a completed entity, the participants in site-specific performance are making place while simultaneously representing and experiencing it. As much as they see, they are also seen. They are not simply viewers, but participants in the project of place. While site-specific performance characteristically engages the question of place as central to its dramaturgy, this has been largely conceived from the perspective of the intended audience. For the locals, site-specific performance can be a disruptive force, altering the standard rhythms of life. The bus in Promenade: Baltimore was not unnoticed. Single Carrot Theatre rented a Johns Hopkins University shuttle for the performance. Given the contentious relationship and history the University has within Baltimore, the shuttle is not a welcome sight on streets outside its normal routes. In this capacity, the site-specific performance drudges up the past, not only for the intended audience, as a means of putting performance and location in dialogue, but for an unintended audience as well. Consider, too, the woman sitting on her stoop in Promenade: Baltimore. It is easy to place her within the theatrical frame, imaging her as a representative of the city in this theatrical world. Transformed into an object of performance through the spectator?s gaze, she is no longer a subject in the city. Here, site-specific performance is not only disruptive but invasive and exploitative, bringing audiences in to see the private lives of private citizens on full display. In this way, the viewing practices best resemble those engaged on tourism buses (another way of experiencing place for the sake of pleasure). This woman has not been offered the opportunity to consent to be a part of the performance. This moment, serendipitous from the perspective of the intended audience might be better described as unlucky. After all, this is a matter of perspective. 93 Perhaps, for this anonymous woman, this moment was invasive, strange, and startling, the furthest thing from delight. However, that is not to say that deriving pleasure from this configuration only can be found for the intended audience. The unintended audience, meaning the bystanders, often derive pleasure from the interfacing of performance and city too. To suggest otherwise limits the effects of pleasure and the ability to define place exclusively to those in positions of power. In this chapter, I am thoughtful about how easy it is to reduce this matter to a simple dichotomy in which the spectator holds power and therefore may experience delight, while those seen do not and, instead, experiences discomfort (or worse). Collapsing the complex relationship into a dichotomy also oversimplifies who has power and flattens the spectator experience. Again, I will remind you that both parties are seeing and being seen. In the act of seeing, there is power. In a sense, this chapter considers the impact of a theatrical scopic regime or aesthetic logic on site-specific performance, in which the regime offers a means of both interpreting and influencing place. Martin Jay coined the term scopic regime to describe the social processes behind how and why we look. Dominic Johnson suggests that scopic regimes ?naturalise the fiction of politically neutral vision.?8 The act of seeing is not neutral nor passive, but a world- shaping political act. In the case of site-specific performance, the spectator recognizes neither the ways in which their gaze is trained to interpret performance, nor the political motivation behind such vision. Consequently, I suggest that the theatrical frame offers a specific how and why to determine the type of gaze held by the intended audience. Maaike Bleeker, discussing the role of visuality in the theatre, spatializes the scopic regime in her term ?focalization,? which describes the physical relationship between the seer and the seen. Peculiarly, focalization is particularly 8 Dominic Johnson, Theatre and The Visual (Macmillan International Higher Education, 2012). 94 salient for site-specific performance as ?The spectator is invited to ?step inside? and to take up a position as represented within the work and to see as if from there.?9 The spectator not only witnesses the performance, but they are also actively participating in the ongoing place that is the city. The Event The confluence of performance and city directs our attention to the notion of ?the event.? The overlay of performance and city understands each as composed of moving variables, never to be repeated. Though the performance and the city might come together again, the unique circumstances under which they did for the spectator will not. Though all theatrical performance is ultimately unrepeatable, the difference here is that while a site-specific performance can be reperformed, the site of the city itself is an uncontrollable variable. Focusing on the performance event highlights the ?shifting and unrepeatable constellations created by people, places, and things.?10 In a sense, the overlay of performance upon a site is the ultimate ?you had to be there? moment, never to be so synchronized again. The contemporaneous quality of spatial delight is a joy in being in the only one to see the city this way. When I speak of ?events,? I speak not just of the temporal intersection of different agents (e.g., the performers, the intended audience, and the unintended audience), but how those overlapping qualities are viewed by spectators, whether they belong to the intended or unintended audiences. The relationship between seeing and being seen is largely viewed as a fundamental feature of the ?theatrical event.?11 The theatrical event is a complex notion that 9 Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking, Performance Interventions (Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 28. 10 Dorita Hannah, Event Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde, 2019, 8. 11 Bleeker 2. 95 suggests the process of framing the given context of time and place for a performance.12 Unique conditions, such as a defined length of time, specified venue, and specific groupings of participants partition the performance as distinct from reality. Hans van Maanen argues that theatrical events have four sets of frames.13 The communicative frame allows for a shared perception by the participants. The organizational frame determines the physical requirements of the event, including location and time. The institutional frame guides the participants? understandings of the event through previous patterns and engagement. Finally, the societal frame contextualizes the theatrical event in relation to the world. In the case of Promenade: Baltimore, the framing described by van Maanen is ultimately unclear for many of the people witnessing the event. For instance, the pedestrians are not privy to the organizational frame, which van Maanen clarifies as only meaningful to the participants: the performers and the (intended) audience. Rather, the type of theatrical event in my case studies better resembles the broad definition offered by Temple Hauptfleisch. Like van Maanen, Hauptfleisch includes a provision for spatial and temporal context, however, his better resembles the influence that site and performance have upon the other: ?the venue and context shape the performance event as much as the ?creators? do.?14 Can ?context? be extended to include the people who occupy the site outside of the performance? Intriguingly, he also includes ?life events? as constitutive of theatrical events. This gesture pushes the term closer to performance studies, as he cites Erving Goffman and others who write about the performance of everyday life. 12 See: Vicki Ann Cremona et al., Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (Rodopi, 2004); Willmar Sauter, The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception, 2000; Tomas Pernecky, ed., Approaches and Methods in Event Studies, Routledge Advances in Event Research Series (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016). 13 Hans van Maanen, ?How Contexts Frame Theatrical Events,? in Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames, ed. Vicki Ann Cremona et al. (Rodopi, 2004) 243-6. 14 Temple Hauptfleisch, ?Eventification,? in Approaches and Methods in Event Studies, ed. Tomas Pernecky, Routledge Advances in Event Research Series (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016). 96 This conception makes space for the infusion of ?place? into the conditions of a theatrical event. In site-specific performance, the theatrical event becomes intertwined with the eventfulness of place. Non-representative theory (NRT), a sect of Human geography, offers a useful theorization of the ?eventfulness? of place. A collective term that encompasses a set of theories, non-representative theory has largely been developed by Nigel Thrift and takes a post- structuralist position towards space while rejecting the concept of place as a completed project, a ?text? with an ascribed meaning that is simply awaiting interpretation. Thrift bemoans, ?we cannot extract a representation of the world because we are slap bang in the middle of it, co- constructing it with numerous humans and non-human others for numerous ends.?15 Rather, NRT centralizes the notion that place is always in the process of becoming and emphasizes moments of creativity and surprise in the unfolding of the world.16 In this context, ?the event? becomes a key concept for NRT.17 Focusing on events emphasizes that place is an unfinished work, furthering the inseparable and essential relationship between time and place, but also offers the opportunity to analyze the scale of change. The building, though long past the competition of its construction, still bends in the winds of time; it?s still an event even if the temporal scale exceeds the horizon. My usage of non-representative theory benefits from its construction of place as relational and affective events. Thrift argues that affect is a relational product of action between two bodies. He contends that ?The world is made up of billions of happy or unhappy encounters, encounters which describe a ?mindful connected physicalism? consisting of multitudinous paths 15 N. J. Thrift, Spatial Formations, Theory, Culture & Society (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage, 1996) 296-7. 16 Tim Cresswell, Geographic Thought a Critical Introduction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) 228. 17Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison, eds., Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography (Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010) 19. 97 which intersect.?18 In this chapter, those ?happy or unhappy encounters? are situated as a form of spatial delight or abrasions, in which the encounter is between the performance and the city. His phrasing suggests a lilt of the Austinian ?felicitous? and ?infelicitous? performatives. Many scholars have noticed the overlap between performatives and NRT, suggesting that both participate in the ongoing project of worldmaking, in which meaning arises in the moment.19 NRT acts against the supposed divide between the world and its meaning. Instead, it locates meaning in the ongoing enactment of the world. For my purposes, NRT then becomes a useful lens for moving beyond the city represented in performance, to the colliding event of the performance and the city. NRT collapses the ??real? and ?the really made up,?? suggesting that representation is presentational, having ultimately an impact upon that resembles the real in its effect.20 Cast as ?presentations,? representations enact the world, rather than a code to be interpreted for its pre-existing meaning. As such, we are reminded that site-specific performance contributes to place-making, rather than simply witnessing it. Critics of NRT have argued that its attention to affects like delight and surprise has allowed it to fall into a na?ve romanticism and that it ultimately fails to contend with existing power structures.21 Many have argued that it offers asocial implications.22 Proponents of NRT counter these assertions by arguing that by focusing on ?the event,? NRT offers a means of thinking about the on-going formation of social conditions.23 Whether or not NRT is na?ve, for 18 Nigel Thrift, ?Steps to an Ecology of Place,? Human Geography Today, 1999, 295?322. 19 See Dewsbury, J. D. (2000) Performativity and the event: enacting a philosophy of difference. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18, 473?496. Nash, C. (2000) Performativity in practice: some recent work in cultural geography. Progress in Human Geography, 24, 653?664. Thrift, Spatial Formations. Anderson and Harrison, Taking-Place. 20 Anderson and Harrison 9. 21 Cresswell, Geographic Thought 232. 22 Nash, Performativity in Practice 657. 23 Anderson and Harrison, Taking-Place 22. 98 my purposes, its emphasis on pleasure found in the world animated in the intersection of event and place bears a striking resemblance to the pleasure found in spatial delight. Similarly, the affect offered in spatial delight could equally be cast as na?ve, substituting a more substantive response with an emotive one. The desire to experience place through pleasure is compelling, but pleasure casts dubious effects upon the place itself. Being Seen in Baltimore The dynamic of being seen (whether by the intended audience or the untended) depends heavily on the existing socio-political facets of place. Baltimore has a population of approximately 600,000.24 Demographically, Baltimore?s population is 62% Black and 30% white.25 Among the unique ways that socio-politics have shaped its landscape is that Baltimore?s neighborhood switch on a dime, meaning that where there might be an affluent community occupying upscale brownstones on one block, the next might contain abandoned buildings. Promenade: Baltimore recognizes this quality immediately, as it declares, Baltimore is a patchwork city: a ?silky smooth neighborhood? next to a ?grungy burlap one,? a ?tuille neighborhood? next to a crushed velvet neighborhood next to a ?regular old cotton neighborhood.? 26 According to members of the production, while most of its audiences were from Baltimore, the performance took many of them into neighborhoods for the first time.27 While I am critical of the largely spectatorial practices at play in Promenade: Baltimore, that is not to say that the production team behaved in an unethical or unthinking manner. 24 ?U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Baltimore City, Maryland; United States,? accessed September 14, 2021, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/baltimorecitymaryland,US/PST045219. 25 ?U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts.? 26 Promenade Baltimore, Single Carrot Theatre and Stereo AKT, Performance, June 2, 2017. 27 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 99 Promenade: Baltimore centers questions of segregation, racism, and politics within its performance. The devisors conducted more than 40 oral histories, which the audience hears throughout the performance, as a means of hearing directly from Baltimore?s diverse population. Performers, too, attempted to notify passersby about what was happening whenever they were able. Similarly, the producers received permission to perform from the various owners of porches, stoops, and sidewalks around the city. However, because their backdrop is the city, failure is ultimately inevitable: they could never capture every passerby, they could never get permission from every person the bus passed. At some point, the actor must run to their next scene. At some point, the city is so much in motion that it is impossible to predict who will be in view at any given time. Knowing that a performance was occurring, the residents of the homes performed in front of were inside, leaving an ?empty? stage. However, in sight of the spectators on the bus were the neighbors, the pedestrians, the drivers who could never be properly informed. Site-specific performances like Promenade: Baltimore are ultimately bound to fail because like performances, places are events. It is here that I situate my point of inquiry, resisting the urge to determine is ?good? and ?bad? practice. Instead, I turn to shaping the experience of place through performances like these (for there are many) that are ethically dubious. For me, spatial delight helps make sense of the ways in which critics are quick to dismiss the uncertainty that abounds in these works. Regarding Promenade: Baltimore, one critic remarked, ?Promenade isn?t a people zoo? before going on to cite that the production received permission to use spaces around the city.28 Dealing with the messy issues that arise from the commingling of performance and the real world evokes a tension between pleasure and anxiety, that many would like to wish away without interrogation. 28 Patricia Mitchell, ?Review: ?Promenade: Baltimore? at Single Carrot Theatre,? DC Metro Theater Arts, June 7, 2017, https://dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2017/06/07/review-promenade-baltimore-single-carrot-theatre/. 100 As such, in this chapter, I work to illuminate what is unsettled, dubious, and fraught yet experienced as joyful, pleasurable, and delightful in site-specific performance. That is not to say that spatial delight is uncomplex, as if it was a simple affect. In a sense, spectatorship as spatial delight resembles what Claire Bishop identifies as the participatory arts ability ?to elicit perverse, disturbing and pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew.?29 Spatial delight arises from tension, as an affect that reveals the political and aesthetic ambiguities that emerge in site-specific spectatorship. Chapter Overview On face value, Promenade: Baltimore stages scenes that could easily be moments of everyday life as part of its aim to celebrate the city. However, one of the inadvertent consequences of this model is that the real pedestrians who occupy the streets of Baltimore are faced with the destabilizing experience of a performance on their block. Where the intended audience might find delight in the pedestrians? presence because it allows them to see and celebrate the ?real? city, the residents find themselves thrust into the theatrical frame. Beyond the invasiveness of the intended audience?s gaze, the residents become an unintended audience who witness the performance without the benefit of the theatrical frame to contextualize it. Without this clarity, there is the potential for frustration, pain, and even danger. In paying attention to spatial delight, the complexity of site moves from production to reception, reminding us that the spectators are active participants in the ongoing project of place. Through audience and 29 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London; New York: Verso Books, 2012) 284. 101 performer interviews, I tease out the space between pleasure and pain as it relates to the spectatorial ethics of site-specific performance. In this chapter, I begin by surveying the relationship between place and pleasure, with attention to how it applies to Baltimore. Then, I turn to the construct of the theatrical frame, considering how its explicit absence leaves the pedestrians vulnerable to its implicit interpretative strategies. Next, I consider reciprocal vision in site-specific performance in order to evaluate the power dynamics of such performance. After, I consider the experience of those in the unintended audience who are unable to see the theatrical frame and how the performance structures a form of participation in the performance. Here, I address the dangers, both real and perceived, that emerge through the lack of explicit boundary between the theatrical world and the city. I conclude by considering the lingering effects that site-specific performances like Promenade: Baltimore have on the places in which they are performed, for both the intended and unintended audiences. A Place of Pleasure, The Pleasure of Place Pleasure is a defining condition of how people move through space and construct the boundaries of place. The tourist is a prime example, a contemporary form of the fl?neur. Charles Baudelaire?s fl?neur, we recall, finds pleasure in seeing the crowded streets. Moving like a privileged tourist, the fl?neur derives pleasure from the interlinking of vision and perceived separation. Indeed, the fl?neur, according to Baudelaire, is a man ?at the centre of the world, and yet hidden from the world.?30 Traversing the streets of Paris, he can pass through any scene 30 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays /, 2nd ed. (London:, 1995), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015034524937 9. 102 unobserved, all the while gazing upon the other, ?an ?I? with an insatiable appetite for the ?non- I.??31 Walter Benjamin typifies the fl?neur?s view of the city as the ?gaze of an alienated man,? illustrating his overlooked lack of identification with the crowd.32 However, despite his distance from the crowd, the fl?neur finds pleasure in sights of along his stroll. Klaus van den Berg describes walking the street as ?sharp[ing] their skills to manage their visual pleasures.?33 Walking the city allows the fl?neur to place with the scale of visual intimacy: contemplating privately, while observing the public as discrete and other. In this sense, the fl?neur is a position of privilege, balancing both power and invisibility, leading many to speculate about whether the figure must be inherently white and male.34 We are reminded that the relationship between place and pleasure is rarely intended for everyone. Certainly, white people have historically utilized pleasure as a motivation in their shaping of place and how people move through it. While the aim of Promenade: Baltimore is to pay tribute to the city of Baltimore, its mechanism recalls both the wandering fl?neur and the binocular-wearing tourist. Like these two figures, the spectator might expect to see the city ?as it truly is.? Though the spectators on the bus are less able than Baudelaire?s fl?neur to absentmindedly stroll, the play anticipates that these passengers will wield a similar ability to see the city as it is, without being observed. The bus appears to be untethered from any existing route. It is truly mobile as if mimicking the fl?neur?s stroll. In this capacity, the performance offers a pleasurable experience of Baltimore its 31 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 9. 32 Walter Benjamin and Rolf Tiedemann, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1999) 10. 33 Klaus van den Berg, ?Staging a Vanishing Community: Daniel Libeskind?s Scenography in the Berlin Jewish Museum,? in Performance and the City, ed. D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga, Performance Interventions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 229. 34 ?Strolling with a Question: Is It Possible to Be a Black Fl?neur?,? Independent Social Research Foundation (blog), May 21, 2021, https://www.isrf.org/2021/05/21/strolling-with-a-question-is-it-possible-to-be-a-black-flaneur/. ?The Peril of Black Mobility,? GOOD, March 29, 2016, https://www.good.is/features/issue-36-flanerie. Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, 2017. 103 own mobility. Via the bus, the intended audience carves its way through neighborhood after neighborhood, noting its changing landscape but forgetting its own presence. Promenade: Baltimore prompts us to ask: is site-specific performance just another form of tourism? The tourist is a particularly powerful figure within the urban landscape. The prospect of tourism has caused city councils to level neighborhoods and cut off access points to desirable areas. John Urry situates tourism as a fundamentally wealthy preoccupation, arguing that it emerged when the upper class obtained the cultural capital that allowed them to discriminate between different types of landscapes. With this development, tourists were able to travel for leisure and pleasure. Consumption of a place landed firmly in the realm of the visual. He argues, ?tourism is fundamentally concerned with visually consuming the physical and built environment and in many cases, the permanent residents who are its inhabitants.? 35 This idea echoes through Promenade: Baltimore, the bus better resembles a tour bus that allows the spectator to feast on the visual pleasures available outside of the window under the guise of celebrating the ?true? Baltimore. Urry theorizes the ?tourist?s gaze,? an extractive and exploitative tool that renders the residents as objects for the tourist?s pleasure.36 In this capacity, the tourist gaze not only resembles but is largely indistinguishable from the spectatorial gaze out of the bus. Each offers the delight of visually consuming what is outside the window. The distance between ethical and unethical viewing makes little difference in the ways in which the pursuit of pleasure shapes a place. Embracing its tour bus-like quality, the performance neglects the bus?s utilitarian function. The performance does not directly contend with the politics of public transportation nor 35 John Urry, Consuming Places, International Library of Sociology (London; New York: Routledge, 1995) 124. 36 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze?:Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies / (London?;, 1990), 123, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015054098481. 104 the university shuttle that assumes its role in the performance. It even ignores the everyday experience of riding the bus: spectators entered through the rear door, and there is no pretense of stopping. Instead, the performance?s fictional frame suggests that its riders are the first riders on a newly restored route. In this sense, the predominantly white spectators of Promenade: Baltimore assume the role of invested guests upon a celebratory ride. In Baltimore, the average income amongst bus users is the lowest across all categories of public transportation.37 Further, as the average Baltimorean bus rider is an African American woman, questions of class, race, gender, and power cannot be ignored.38 There is a stark difference between those who ride a bus for the sake of tourism or site-specific performance and those who ride public transportation out of necessity. Pleasure and Place, Mobility and Race in Baltimore Historically, pleasure has had a distinct bent towards mobility, but only when it benefits those in power. In Baltimore, the dichotomy between mobility and immobility in relation to pleasure can be seen in a comparison of the so-called ?Highway to Nowhere? and the wealthy neighborhood of Guilford. In Promenade: Baltimore, the performance bus traverses these neighborhoods (or just nearly), cutting across Baltimore?s economic and racial lines with an ease unafforded to many residents. Here I will utilize consider both examples in-depth, as they provide valuable insight into the intersection between pleasure, place, and race in Baltimore. In each instance, the extension or limitations of mobility is for the sake of creating a pleasurable 37 Maryland Department of Transportation and Maryland Transit Authority, ?Media Guide? (White Paper, Maryland Transit Authority, 2017), 17. This statement excludes MobilityLink users. The average MobilityLink user?s income is below that of the average bus user, typically between $10,000 and $20,000. MobilityLink?s annual ridership is also more than 74,000,000 less than the ridership of the bus system. Though this certainly raises questions of access and mobility, these are outside the scope of this investigation. 38 Ibid. 105 place for white Baltimoreans. These examples are particularly relevant to my case study because they identify the simultaneous endeavor and critique that Promenade: Baltimore is tangled in. The ?Highway to Nowhere? is a short segment of a US-40 that bisects the neighborhoods of Harlem Park and Heritage Crossing. The six-lane stretch of highway runs only 1.39 miles, the remnant of an early 1970s project to bring tourists directly to the harbor. The project leveled 971 houses, 62 businesses, and a school, and displaced approximately 1,500 residents in the predominantly Black Franklin-Mulberry corridor.39 Residents received only $5,000 in compensation ? an amount far less than their properties were worth that left residents unable to buy property elsewhere.40 The project was championed in the 1940s by Robert Moses, the infamous urban planner known as ?The Power Broker? who shaped New York and Long Island, through his use of highways.41 Endorsing the expressway, Moses argued that the project would eliminate so-called slums that were ?a disgrace to the community.?42 Unsurprisingly, these houses were not ?slums,? but well-kept row homes that, as one resident remembered, ?was like a Norman Rockwell painting.?43 The racism of Moses? sentiment is clear: these homes are suitable to be razed because they belong to the Black community. There are echoes of Moses throughout the history of the project, which eventually was defunded in 1981 after years of inactivity. At one stage of the planning, there were two possible routes for the highway: through the Franklin-Mulberry corridor or a historic graveyard; 39 David Collins, ?Leaders Vow to Get Rid of Baltimore?s ?Highway to Nowhere,?? WBAL, May 17, 2021, https://www.wbaltv.com/article/bill-to-get-rid-of-baltimore-highway-to-nowhere/36449651. 40 Laurie Willis, ?Road to Remembrance?; Reunion: Former Childhood Pals Whose Neighborhoods Were Broken up by the I-170 Project Plan to Recall Old Times in a Gathering Today.: [FINAL Edition],? The Sun, October 25, 2003, sec. TELEGRAPH. 41 David Harvey, ?The Right to the City,? Reading Marx?s Capital with David Harvey, https://davidharvey.org/media/righttothecity.pdf. 42 ?The Franklin Expressway As Planned By Moses,? The Sun (1837-1995); Oct 15, 1944; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Sun pg. SM1 43 Collins, ?Leaders Vow to Get Rid of Baltimore?s ?Highway to Nowhere.?? 106 essentially a choice ?to disrupt live Blacks or dead whites.?44 Later, legislators passed a bill that prohibited the city from floating bonds for a project that touched the homes of the ?back-to-the- city professionals.?45 If ?slums? is coded here as Black, ?back-to-the-city professionals? is clearly coded as white. It is not surprising that the project bent to the whims of white Baltimoreans, because, of course, the project was always designed with white people in mind. One notable feature of the Highway to Nowhere, even in its incomplete state, is that there are no exits into the adjacent Black communities. Essentially, the highway is designed for the pleasure of white tourists visiting Baltimore and to limit the mobility of Black residents. Guilford is a majority white neighborhood with an average median income double that of the rest of the Baltimore.46 It sits kitty-corner to Johns Hopkins University and falls within the ?White L.? Guilford is a planned community that employed a racial covenant when it opened in 1913, restricting residents from selling their property to Black buyers. When it comes to urban planning, the neighborhood utilizes an ?arsenal of exclusion,? meaning that the roads intentionally funnel traffic through the neighborhood in one direction, west to east.47 This means that one can only enter the neighborhood from the side abutting Johns Hopkins, limiting access to the neighborhood.48 The traffic pattern was designed to prevent people from Waverly, a majority Black community to the east, from entering Guilford. A stone wall borders Guilford on 44 David R. BoldtWashington Post Staff Writer, ?Freeway Building Once Was Simple: Road Building Once Was Easy Freeway Troubles Around the Nation,? The Washington Post, Times Herald (1959-1973), August 31, 1969, sec. CITY LIFE Obituaries/Weather. 45 Aileen Canzian, ?None Spoke for Blacks Uprooted by Highway,? The Sun (1837-1995), June 2, 1980. 46 ?Guilford Neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland (MD), 21218, 21210 Subdivision Profile - Real Estate, Apartments, Condos, Homes, Community, Population, Jobs, Income, Streets,? accessed January 15, 2022, http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Guilford-Baltimore-MD.html. 47 Laura Kurgan, ?The Arsenal of Exclusion/Inclusion: INTERBORO, Editor Actar Press, 2013,? Journal of Architectural Education 66, no. 1 (September 28, 2012): 45?46, https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2012.714909. 48 Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson / Published Fall 2014, ?Roland Park: One of America?s First Garden Suburbs, and Built for Whites Only,? The Hub, September 10, 2014, https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2014/fall/roland-park-papers- archives/. 107 the east, further cementing the neighborhood?s politics of exclusion by restricting pedestrian access.49 Guilford exemplifies how pleasure can be derived from a place when ?place? is imagined as a fortress, protecting the interests (and pleasures) of those who live there by limiting who can move through it. Marxist Geographer David Harvey uses Guilford as a case study in his 1996 work Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference. Specifically, Harvey discusses a 1994 double-murder in the neighborhood, in which an elderly white couple was killed by their grandson. Before the culprit was discovered, The Baltimore Sun used the crime to stoke racial tension, assuming the victims were killed in a home invasion. The newspaper argued that access to Guilford must be further restricted for the safety of residents. Harvey uses this incident to argue his notion of place as a ?permanence,? in which places are social constructs that invest in fixity in order to ?be secured against the uncontrolled vectors of spatiality.?50 Where Harvey focuses on the fixity of place under global capitalism, I suggest that the desire for place as a permanence also illustrates a relationship between desire and place that operates on a principle of immobility. In Guilford, the residents experience the place as pleasurable when it is ?safe,? ?secure,? and ?exclusive,? meaning that the place is pleasurable by virtue of the limitations placed on mobility. In Promenade: Baltimore, in what was surely an unusual sight for the residents, the performance bus exercises its privileged mobility by touring Guilford. The limitations placed on accessing the neighborhood evidently do not extend to theatre. Unlike other areas toured during the production, Guilford does not contain vacant row homes in disrepair, but large, single-family 49 ?Tear Down That Wall,? accessed February 9, 2021, https://www.ansonasaka.com/2020/10/tear-down-that- wall.html. 50 David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) 292. 108 houses. The bus pauses in front of a large brick home. Outside, a Black performer, Dominic Gladden, has assumed the role of a gardener, while an older white actor, Michael Salconi, as the homeowner, supervises him. Through their headphones, spectators hear one of the performance?s oral histories, offering pseudo-narration for the scene: ?As far as life goes, I?ve got the straight flush. There?s not much I can do but recognize it.?51 The narrator identifies himself as a straight white man. The gardener is playing music while he works, ?The Cupid Shuffle.? He teaches the homeowner the dance moves. Soon, the music changes: a slower, sweeter song plays. The dance transforms to match, they are now dancing cheek to cheek. This vignette is playful, a clear moment of levity in the play. I wrote in my notes, ?They dip, it?s fun.? While much of Promenade: Baltimore directly tackles racial injustice, this peculiar scene, the only one in Guilford, directs attention away from it. Though the privilege of residents is mentioned, the scene nor the soundtrack discusses the hostile urban planning or the history of segregation. Is a scene of liberal idealism, a dance that soothes away any injustice or unease at the clear power difference between the two men, or a delightful celebration of the city? For Brandon Block, a white reviewer writing in The Baltimore Sun, this was not a moment of ?heavy-handed racial harmony? but instead, ?everything is just weird and fun and not about power or stereotypes.?52 The impulse to find pleasure in place can be found both in staging and reception of this scene, in a moment of magic that obscures what is perceived as unpleasant. In both examples, the ?Highway to Nowhere? and Guilford, seeking pleasure in place has dire material consequences. Whether pleasure is found in mobility or in limiting it, in Baltimore, the relationship between place and pleasure is ultimately one of power deeply entrenched in the 51 Promenade Baltimore, Single Carrot Theatre and Stereo AKT, Performance, June 2, 2017. 52 Brandon Block, ?Single Carrot Theatre Takes Audiences on a Meandering Bus Ride through the City in ?Promenade: Baltimore?,? baltimoresun.com, accessed January 16, 2022, https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcpnews-single-carrot-promenade-review-20170615-story.html. 109 project of white supremacy. Of course, enjoying a place can come in many forms. However, the overly romanticized notion of scenic beauty, the joy of being in the city, glosses over the mechanics of how such delights were achieved. Consider the Department of Transportation?s own language in regard to projects like the Highway to Nowhere: ?To sweep along a freeway and into a city at dusk, as the sunset fades against the buildings and shadows deepen while myriad lights flick on among the darkening cubes, is to see the urban landscape in a new and magical way.?53 Bureaucratic language is replaced with vivid poetry, enticing the white motorist to see the city. It parallels the language used to describe Promenade: Baltimore: ?At sunset? And, you know, there were a few moments like that, where everything to me just like really synced up and felt magical.?54 Site-Unscene: Inside the Theatrical Frame As the bus in Promenade: Baltimore putters out of the Single Carrot Theatre parking lots and begins to weave through the neighborhood streets of Remington, a voice through the headphones of the spectators welcomes them with the promise ?Today is the only day you will see this city in exactly this way.?55 The sentiment?s emphasis on seeing identifies the performance?s main dramatic strategy: though the performance is supplemented by a soundscape of oral histories, local music, and fictional interjections, the performance?s dramaturgical work is one of spectacle, the interlay of the performance and the city outside the windows of the bus. As one reviewer noted, ?Never knowing when a Promenade scene may occur, everyone is constantly scanning the street and looking ? really looking ? at people.?56 From the bus, the first 53 Quoted in ?Freeway Building Once Was Simple.? 54 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 55 Promenade Baltimore, Single Carrot Theatre and Stereo AKT, Performance, June 2, 2017. 56 Mitchell, ?Review.? 110 people I see are a man and a woman selling slushies behind a folding table on the side of the road near an overpass. At this stage in the performance, it is impossible to tell what world they belong to, the theatrical world or the real world, and yet it perhaps makes no difference. Whether they are vendors or actors representing vendors, they are interpellated within the theatrical frame. At the onset of the performance, the spectator sees people like the slushie vendors as part of the world of the performance. Susan Bennett discusses this type of reception in her work on the interpretative interplay between the inner and outer frames: ?The audience is likely at the outset of a performance to read the stage as a macrocosm. All the elements may be taken as of more or less equal importance in establishing a hypothesis of the nature of the on-stage world?As the world, and the characters within that world, become known, the audience?s concentration tends to move to the smaller details.?57 She continues, ?Like the individual reader, the audience inevitably proceeds through the construction of hypotheses about the fictional world which are subsequently substantiated, revised, or negated.?58 Bennett?s theory of interpretive analysis is useful, suggesting that spectators are ultimately able to sus out who belongs to the performance, and who does not. However, the framework is clearly designed for performances on a traditional stage, in which the objects on it belong to it to some degree. What is the stage in Promenade: Baltimore? If the city is the stage, then do the slushie vendors ?belong? on stage there after all? In this configuration, site-specific performance like Promenade: Baltimore transforms Shakespeare?s oft-quoted sentiment ?All the World?s a Stage? into ?All the World?s on Stage,? distorting performing subjects into performance objects. 57 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed (London; New York: Routledge, 1997) 229-230. 58 Ibid., 230. 111 In Bennett?s comment, the question of ?what is the stage? is answered as ?what is behind the theatrical frame,? a physical boundary that most site-specific performance lacks. Despite the lack of proscenium, the theatrical frame operates as a device to structure the viewing experience. For Promenade: Baltimore, the theatrical frame is the window of the bus, still a physical boundary between the world of the spectator and the world of the performance. Slavoj ?i?ek helpfully examines the ways that frames organize spectator experience. He argues that there is a perceived difference in the realities (flat vs. ?fully real?) in and outside of the frame, engaging the spectator?s perception of shared space. To this point, he considers the window: ?when driving a car or looking through a window of a house, one perceives the reality outside in a weirdly de- realised state, as if one is watching a performance; when one opens the window, the direct impact of the external reality always causes a minimal shock, we are overwhelmed by its proximity.?59 In this capacity, the frame not only organizes the ways in which a space is received but also perceived, as if fictionalizing and flattening the world of the real. This troubles the space between the experience of the spectator on the bus (and its dramaturgical facsimile of a ride) and their gaze upon the city, transforming the residents into performance objects while participating in a simulation of their daily movement throughout the city. Historically, the theatrical frame can be placed in the lineage of landscape paintings.60 The relationship between the two gains new saliency when considered in relation to site-specific 59 Slavoj ?i?ek, ?Notes on Performing, Its Frame, and Its Gaze,? in ?i?ek and Performance., ed. Broderick Chow and Alex Mangold (Place of publication not identified: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 242. 60 Much has been written about the shared spatial strategies employed by both landscape painting and proscenium staging, particularly regarding their use of perspective painting. Perspective painting was a technique supposedly first developed by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1415 and first employed in theatre at the beginning of the 17th century by scenographers like Sebastiano Serlio in the form of backdrops and later three-dimensional set pieces. The use of perspective staging helpfully generates the appearance of realism, while simultaneously reifying the power of the spectator. After all, the illusion of perspective only works from one particular spot. Perspective?s ultimate use suggested that the world can be experienced (or mastered) through the eye. In the theatrical frame, perspective space is rendered flat for the sake of being perceived as three-dimensional. The tricky mechanism, that moves from three-dimensions space to two dimensions and back again, transforms and reduces the political power 112 performance. In both landscape painting and site-specific performance like Promenade: Baltimore, space is idealized for the benefit and the perspective of the spectator, a figure removed from the place itself. Una Chaudhuri considers how landscape paintings act as ideological tools that shape how the spectators see the world, while also serving as ?a way of not seeing, of masking and occluding the unsavory truths about our relations to each other and to the land we supposedly share.?61 Chaudhuri?s assessment highlights the role images of landscaped have played in shaping political ideologies and narratives of power. In site-specific performance, and in particular, itinerant performances, the theatrical frame, whether material or psychological, participates in a similar mode of seeing/not seeing in order to transform the relationship between those who share the space, the intended audience, and the unintended audience. Nicholas Ridout suggests in his short work Theatre & Ethics that the theatre is a unique place in which spectators become aware of their spectatorship: ?spectators are unusually conscious of their own status as spectators, and thus as people who may exercise ethical judgement?We watch ourselves watching people engaging with an ethical problem while knowing that we are also being watched in our watching.?62 Ridout helpfully imbues the theatre within the practice of ethical behavior, which I will return to shortly. However, I am less confident in the spectator?s keen awareness of the other spectating eyes. Stephen Bottoms gently critiques Ridout?s point, noting that in conventionally staged performances, the theatrical frame guides the eye toward the stage and only encounters other spectators through the back of their of space by proffering its realness as merely a convincing illusion. See, for instance, Pannill Camp, The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France, First paperback edition (Cambridge New York NY Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 61 Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/Scape/Theater, Theater--Theory/Text/Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) 11. 62 Nicholas Peter Ridout, Theatre & Ethics, 2009, (London: Palgrave MacMillan) 15. 113 heads.63 As such, is the spectator conscious of their shared viewing or is the presence of other spectators merely a minor obstacle towards the viewing the stage in its entirety? Role Reversal through the Theatrical Frame In the form of site-specific performance used in Promenade: Baltimore, while the intended audience may still see the back of each other?s heads as they crane their necks to see out of the vehicle?s windows, the act of watching is rendered highly visible, as Ridout argued, offering the opportunity to be keenly aware of one?s role as a spectator. Each ?audience? sees the other one watching them. For the unintended audience in Promenade: Baltimore, this comes in the form of a bus full of watchful eyes peering out at you. But, contrary to Ridout?s argument, the intended audience is presented with an interpretative choice: will they see the world outside their window as flat, akin to a landscape painting, or as round, akin to a landscape? Will they interpret the eyes looking back at them as belonging to performers or spectators? Erika Fischer-Lichte introduces the role-reversal into the spectatorial equation, marking it as a further instigator and disruptor that continues the spectatorial crisis: how should the audience behave when there is the perception of danger? Fischer-Lichte discusses Maria Abramovi??s 1975 performance Lips of Thomas in which she, among other things, cuts a star into her abdomen using a razor blade. Fischer-Lichte explains the tricky situation the audience finds themselves in: in performance, one does not interfere when there is staged violence; in real life, one should. She argues that such an occurrence transforms the spectator into an actor and the 63 Stephen Bottoms, ?Materialising the Audience: Tim Crouch?s Sight Specifics in ENGLAND and The Author,? Contemporary Theatre Review 21, no. 4 (November 2011): 446, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2011.610315. 114 piece of art into an event.64 As they navigate the boundary between fictive and real worlds, the spectators were as much the creators of the performance event as Abramovi?: There no longer exists a work of art, independent of its creator and recipient; instead, we are dealing with an event that involves everybody ? albeit to different degrees and in different capacities. If ?production? and ?reception? occur at the same time and place, this renders the parameters developed for a distinct aesthetics of production, work, and reception ineffectual.65 Where Fischer-Lichte discusses role-reversal concerning the co-presence of the bodies of the spectator and performer, I move to consider the various role-reversals that occurred in relation to the co-presence of the unintended audience, intended audience, and the performers. Whether the spectator receives the unintended audience as part of the performance or outside of the performance ultimately is determined by the legibility of the theatrical frame. The performance?s dramaturgy often leaves this intentionally ambiguous, leaving the intended spectator with less a choice than a puzzle. Hans-Thies Lehmann proposes, ?When the staging practice forces the spectators to wonder whether they should react to the events on stage as fiction (i.e., aesthetically) or as reality (for example, morally), theatre?s treading of the borderline of the real unsettles this crucial predisposition of the spectators: the unreflected certainty and security in which they experience being spectators as an unproblematic social behavior.?66 While Lehmann?s comment speaks to fictionalized theatrical practices becoming too ?real,? Promenade: Baltimore allows the real to closely resemble the fictional. Framing Baltimore in theatrical terms aims to ?dematrix everyday life, rendering it into something uncanny, both familiar and unfamiliar.?67 Simultaneously, performance is dematrixed; it too becomes uncanny 64 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance 12-3. 65 Fischer-Lichte 18. 66 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London: Routledge, 2006), 104. 67 Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance & the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement, Theater--Theory/Text/Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005) 171. 115 and defamiliarized. Lehmann?s assertion also troubles the notion that spectatorship is without consequence, recognizing that the act, even in a traditional theatre, is not without consequence. Where Ridout characterizes theatrical spectatorship as an opportunity for the practice of ethics through mutual recognition, Lehmann addresses the dubiousness of sight without recognition. The hesitancy in the spectator that he spots points towards both their complicity and complacency in the transformation of the sights/sites before them. Fischer-Lichte agrees with Lehmann, suggesting ?The collision and disruption of frames plunge[s] the audience into a crisis. For one, they were permanently deciding through which frame to view the action. Moreover, any given boundaries between these different frames became increasingly blurred and eventually invalidated.?68 She suggests that this dynamic makes the audience simultaneously more powerful and impotent. Whether on the bus or in the car, the spectator?s gaze is part of a world-shaping practice that defines the political realities around them, without directly interfering with them. Because they are still located before the theatrical frame, the act of spectating retains the appearance of passivity. But the spatial separation caused by the theatrical frame is ultimately an illusion. The spectators, whether traveling by car or by bus, are in the city, moving through its streets, rather than simply observing it through the window. They move through three-dimensional space rather than witness two-dimensional action. As such, the spectators (and the performers) participate in place and actively change the political realities for those observed. Here we can locate a central tension between the aesthetic and political power of spectatorship and the employment of the theatrical frame. Emphasizing delight as a potential reaction to the ?unsettled?certainty? of the overlayed elements contained within the theatrical 68 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2008) 48. 116 frame does not dismiss or erase the complicity Lehmann observes, nor does it turn to an aesthetic analysis over a political one.69 Instead, this emphasis positions delight as political, meaning that to experience the spectatorial position (or what is caught in the theatrical frame) as delightful is already inherently a position of political power, that shapes the social world around them. The spectators are viewing what is caught between fiction and reality and reveling in the lack of clarity between them. Spatial delight does not incentivize the spectator to untangle what is caught in the theatrical frame but instead offers the peculiar uncertainty as an enticing spectatorial position: the world as it is/not. Notably, the only instance of a scene in which there are no performers is the scene that reflects on the 2015 death of Freddie Gray and the subsequent protests. On April 12th, Freddie Gray was arrested and thrown into the back of a police transport van.70 He was not secured into a seat. Over the next half hour, the van made four stops. Within an hour, Gray was unresponsive and slipped into a coma. He died on April 19th, sparking protests throughout Baltimore. Rather than staging their rumination of these events in Gray?s neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester, or in one of the other neighborhoods the police drove throughout on his fateful ride, the bus paused on North Avenue, in the Charles North Avenue in Baltimore. On an adjacent building, a graffitied billboard reads ?Whoever Died from a Rough Ride??71 It answers its own question, ?The whole damn system?? Staging the scene here demonstrates a clear ethical choice by the production team to not replicate harm through their performance. By design, there are no 69 Lehmann, Post-dramatic Theatre 66. 70 Wesley Lowery, They Can?t Kill Us All: The Story of the Struggle for Black Lives, First Back Bay paperback edition (New York, NY: Back Bay Books: Little, Brown and Company, 2016) 133-4. 71 Christopher Metzger, ?Whoever Died from a Rough Ride?,? Public Art Dialogue 8, no. 2 (July 3, 2018): 290?304, https://doi.org/10.1080/21502552.2018.1500231. 117 performers outside the bus. This decision centers on the oral histories of Baltimore residents, instead of the fictional characters. These performance choices illustrate that Single Carrot operated within a structure of care, stressing the need to allow the city to speak for itself. However, as a result, instead of vacating the theatrical elements, dispensing of the performers meant that the city is the only thing caught within the theatrical frame. It is left vulnerable to inspection, under the soundscape of its residents grappling with the indignity and injustice of Gray?s death. One person laments, ?One of my regrets after Freddie Gray was that we didn?t burn the whole place down. People ask, ?why would you burn your own neighborhood?? It?s not our neighborhood.?72 His biting comment addresses the ways white supremacy, under the guise of the police and politicians, has disrupted Black life within Baltimore. By showcasing the city as itself, does Promenade: Baltimore work to return the neighborhood to its residents, or does it further alienate them from it through performance tourism? The mechanics of the performance do not dissolve in the absence of the performers: the bus windows still serve as a pseudo-proscenium and the audience is still trained to read the city as a performance. Promenade: Baltimore, performed only two years after Gray?s death, illustrates the internal tension that comes with these theatrical mechanisms. While they attempt to address Gray?s death in an ethical manner understanding it as an important event in the landscape of Baltimore, Promenade: Baltimore has an uneasy time navigating the thorny dramaturgy created through their theatrical devices. If anything, projecting the narratives found in the oral histories onto bodies streets is even more appealing to the spectators in the absence of the performers. The performers, too, were equally susceptible to the scene?s overlay of image and audio. Before the 72 Promenade Baltimore, Single Carrot Theatre and Stereo AKT, Performance, June 2, 2017. 118 show opened, the performers took one ride on the bus, to experience the route from the perspective of the intended audience. Shea recalled that he saw two boys playing ball, perfectly aligned to an oral history that spoke of kids just their age. For Shea, even without the decidedly theatrical language, the chance sighting offered a moment of spatial delight: ?I realized, I?m the only person who will ever see this scene. No one will ever see that again. Genevieve [de Mahy, the artistic director of Single Carrot] was sitting in front of me and I remember leaning forward and being like ?This show is going to be so fucking great.??73 While the semblance of serendipity can transform a bus ride into a once-in-a-lifetime experience, it can also cause the spectator to forgo engaging the political realities of those outside the window. Seeing and Being Seen in Site-Specific Theatre Unlike the traditional role of the performer who in the 20th century and beyond largely upholds the boundaries of the fourth wall, the unintended audience looks back, reciprocating the glance of the intended audience. Recalling Una Chaudhuri?s assessment of the frame?s structuring of the viewing places of landscape, site-specific performance reconfigures those ?not- seen? in a position to look back, to see who won?t see them. Dominic Johnson points out, unlike other art, theatre always has the potential for reciprocal vision.74 However, in conventionally staged theatre, it is the performer who looks back at the audience, not a bystander treated as set dressing. Reciprocity offers an opportunity for spectatorship that is neither passive nor immobile but instead opens the opportunity for political or ethical engagement. 73 Interview with Matt Shea, September 8, 2019. 74 Dominic Johnson, Theatre and The Visual (Macmillan International Higher Education, 2012) 31. 119 The first staged scene the audience of Promenade: Baltimore encounters features the actor, Meghan Stanton. She sits on an exterior staircase on the side of a stone building. She is dressed casually, a flannel over a tank top and jeans. She sits working on a laptop, with her purse beside her. Through their headphones, the audience hears a monologue performed by Stanton, the first fictional oral history of the show. Stanton?s unnamed character describes the day of the Women?s March in 2016. She did not attend herself but recalls how packed the train station was and how police officers told people the trains were not running to D.C., that they should turn around and leave. Stanton?s character remembers trying to correct this disinformation: the trains were running; they should go to the march. Perhaps the most memorable thing about this early scene was her regular scene partners: a gaggle of Black children, approximately aged nine and under. Stanton recalls that the children noticed her as a reoccurring fixture in their neighborhood halfway through the run. It was at this point that they joined her. At first, it was just two children, but over time, it became a ?little posse? of about five children.75 As Stanton explained that she was performing in a show and that a bus would go by. Initially, the kids remained low, scoping out the bus. As they became familiar with Stanton, though, they began to unravel the fiction of the scene: they went through her prop purse, investigated her non-functional computer, and wave at the bus as it passed. Over the course of the performance?s run, the action of the scene began to change because of the presence of the children. Rather than ignoring the presence of the children, Stanton interacted with them. No longer did she act working on her computer, but instead she took Instagram photos with the kids. However, neither she nor the artistic team ever considered changing its content to reflect or incorporate the children, nor move the scene to another 75 Interview with Meghan Stanton, September 27, 2019. 120 location. Throughout the run, the recorded version of Stanton would always discuss the women?s march. In a sense, this was part of the ?roll with the punches? model that guided Promenade: Baltimore?s performance process. The city was always visible through the performance, there was always the chance that a person would walk through a scene, or that the performance of a scene would need to be adjusted because of life in the city. I remember seeing the children during my first viewing of Promenade: Baltimore. It was a striking moment. As the first true scene of the play, my interpretative frame had not yet been calibrated. Stanton was clearly a performer, the bus stopped beside her. But what about these children? Which world did they belong to, the real or the fictional? If they were child actors, why did the content of the scene not reflect their presence? As we drove on, my lingering thought was about the ethics of incorporating children within the theatrical frame. If they belong to the real world, and not the world of the performance, what dangers emerge when a primarily white spectators peers out the window of a Johns Hopkins bus at five or so Black children? Seeing the ?real? world and being seen back is a well-documented feature of itinerant site-specific performance. For instance, Erika Fischer-Lichte, while seeing Cornerstone Theatre?s Foot/Mouth (2001) observes, ?Some people became irritated when an elderly lady (an actress) leaned so far over the balustrade that one feared she wanted to hurl herself down. Other passers- by in their turn stared at the spectators equipped with headphones.?76 Of Forced Entertainment?s Nights in This City (1995), Nick Kaye writes of his ?gaze returned by passers-by and, on one occasion, performers who simply look back as the coach winds its way through areas where such a journey is explicitly out of place.?77 Likewise, discussing her experience seeing One Step At a Time Like This?s En Route (2009), Liz Tomlin comments: 76 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance 113. 77 Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation (London; New York: Routledge, 2000) 17. 121 At that moment the man looks across at me, a lone figure in a backyard of small- scale industrial enterprises, wearing headphones and watching him, and it becomes clear that I, in my watching, am also a spectacle for the gaze of others. When later passing through the private courtyard of a block of flats and smiling at the woman sitting on her doorstep who greeted me, I wondered if I was appropriating her habitual reality to perform for my spectatorship, or if she was only sitting there in the first place to enjoy the spectacle of performers in headphones walking through her courtyard at half-hourly intervals. 78 In each of these accounts, the scholars note the reciprocal vision that transgresses the boundary between theatre and life. They ponder the peculiarity of such an encounter, and note amusement, or mild frustration in those who see them. None deeply grapple with the ethics at hand. There is little consideration of the experience of the people who suddenly find themselves as participants in a performance. Tomlin pauses to consider if her journey through a ?private courtyard? might be ?appropriating [a woman?s] habitual reality? but does not linger to theorize nor critique her own behavior as an invasion of privacy.79 Instead, what catches the interest of these scholars is the shift in viewing that places them as the spectacle. In these moments, they register the pleasure I characterize as spatial delight. My critique here is grounded in the argument that the vision of the intended audience is not neutral simply because it is reciprocated. The approach to spectatorship seen in these examples seems to perpetuate the common perception that positions ?the seer as neutral, absent, non-desiring, disembodied eye.?80 Of course, vision is a political act has been well documented.81 If these scholars were asked if the spectator?s sight is indeed neutral, they would surely reject this claim. Yet, why does the presumed neutrality or harmlessness regularly appear 78 Liz Tomlin, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990-2010 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016) 153. 79 Ibid. 80 Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre 105. 81 Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre; Johnson, Theatre and The Visual. 122 in accounts of spectator experience? Erving Goffman argued that one of the operative functions of the theatrical frame is that it allows for the spectator to look at the performer for an extended period without offending them.82 It seems that itinerant site-specific theatre is yet to dispose of this pretense. The construct of the theatrical frame, though no literal frame is present, allows the presumption that they cause no offense when they stare, invade someone?s privacy, or turn their mere presence into dramaturgy. The perspective of the audience, whether they be intended or unintended, is never singular. Certainly, this is also the case in site-specific performance. It is here where Tomlin may be right: perhaps the woman she spotted was sitting outside to enjoy the people wandering by with headphones. Rather than frustration, she might be experiencing delight. In Promenade: Baltimore this was regularly the case: passersby would watch scenes from their porches, gather in the park to watch a dance sequence, and sit on church benches to observe the bus passing. These unintended spectators would learn when the performance would pass and plan their viewings accordingly. They, like many in the intended audience, found delight. Like the children on the staircase, they placed themselves in the theatrical frame. But it is precisely through their ability to see and recognize the theatrical frame that this delight can be found. One performer recalled a man calling out from his balcony ?Great job on the show tonight!?83 Like the intended audience, the unintended audience recognized the serendipitous overlap of the performance and the city. They returned the gaze of the spectator, ?that fractured reciprocity whereby beholder and beheld reverse positions in a way that renders a steady position of spectatorship impossible.?84 There is power in the theatre, and the theatre holds power over us. When the 82 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1974) 124. 83 Interview with Matt Shea, September 8, 2019. 84 Freedman, Staging the Gaze 1. 123 theatrical frame can be seen in site-specific performance, the spectator can arrange their sights and bodies accordingly. However, theatre is far more powerful (and dangerous) when the theatrical frame is not observed. Invisible Theatre & Participation When the theatrical frame is not evident to the unintended audience, in ways, Promenade: Baltimore resembles the unframed mode of performance most often associated in Augusto Boal?s invisible theatre. Invisible theatre is the practice, made well-known by Boal and his students, of staging performances about political topics in plain sight, without revealing that they were indeed rehearsed. Spectators would receive them as real and engage the political principles accordingly. Boal wrote that the goal of invisible theatre was that ?spectators would see the show, without seeing it as a show.?85 As such, it is not the performance that is gone, but the frame, which offers spectators the ability to discern that it is a performance. It is the ?interpenetration? of the fiction and reality that interests Boal, as he argues that truthfully there is no fiction in his presentation, merely scripted life.86 This is a particularly useful comparison for Promenade: Baltimore, as it illuminates the power differential between the performers and the unintended audience. Boal?s consideration of the performance as scripted life points to the banality and the plausibility of the scenes that were staged in Promenade: Baltimore. They lacked a certain element of theatricality that might have rendered them legible as a performance to the spectators. For Boal, invisible theatre is both politically efficacious and politically necessary, due to the 85 Augusto Boal, Hamlet and the Baker?s Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics (London; New York: Routledge, 2001) 304. Emphasis in the original. 86 Ibid. 124 dictatorship installed in Argentina during their original use. Claire Bishop is quick to remind us that the conditions of Boal?s participatory theatre are ?far harsher? than those practiced in Europe, and by supposition, the United States.87 He used invisible theatre as a way of creating active spectators who would intervene in the present or in the future when shown the outrageous nature of political inequality. His spectators were bystanders, but indeed the intended audience. They were never made aware that what they witnessed was a play. The clearest difference between Boal?s invisible theatre and this type of performance is that Single Carrot Theatre endeavored to tell the unintended audience that they were seeing a performance whenever possible. The actors of Promenade: Baltimore frequently explained the nature of the show just after the bus pulled away. Many, like Matt Shea, carried show flyers on them for when they were unable to stay and chat: the performance?s mad dash across the city always required the actors to be somewhere else. However, instances of being unable to differentiate between interpenetrated fiction and reality occurred regularly. This is to be expected as Promenade: Baltimore staged all its scenes on the city sidewalks and the front stoops and yards. There were far more opportunities for the unintended audience to see such sights, up close or at a distance. However, the performance was followed by an audience seated on an out-of- place Johns Hopkins bus. Together, these dramaturgical choices render Promenade: Baltimore simultaneously more and less likely to be seen, without necessarily being seen as a performance. The street scenes blend in, while the audience on the bus stands out. 87 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London; New York: Verso Books, 2012) 126. 125 The Unintended Spectator as Participant Rohaizad Suaidi plays a mailperson in Promenade: Baltimore. In one scene, he is delivering mail when he finds an earring on the ground. He puts the mail in the mailbox and pockets the earring. Later, Suaidi?s character is seen with the earring, part of his ongoing narrative about his experimentations with gender. In one performance, Suaidi performed the scene, as usual, this time under the watchful eyes of two middle-aged Black women who were seated on the stoop.88 As he went to pocket the earring, one woman grabbed it, scolding, ?This does not belong to you.? Suaidi recalls angling his body away from the intended audience on the bus to address the women. He told them about the performance and what he was doing. The woman replied, ?You?re not part of anything. You?re the mailman.? Suaidi directed their attention to the bus. ?I?m an actor, this is a scene, there is the audience,? Suaidi argued, as if the bus and the watchful eyes were proof enough to make the theatrical frame appear. They looked up, seemingly seeing the bus. But they doubled down. ?No, you are the mailman. Look, you have your uniform, you have a mailbag.? Suaidi faced a dilemma. As the earring was a key prop to a future scene, the bus only moved on once the audience saw him place it in his pocket. There was no way to directly communicate to the onboard stage manager what was happening, and the women were not relenting. He decided to give up. He left the earring on the stoop, made a gesture signaling ?whatever,? and left the scene. The women remained set in their convictions that he was a mailman. They refused to see the theatrical frame. Though the disbelief of these women may feel remarkable, it is not surprising that they did not believe a man who told them this seemingly outlandish story. Instead, the incident alerts 88 Interview with Rohaizad Suaidi, November 19, 2019. 126 us to how site-specific performance can be intrusive and invasive, whether or not the performance?s frame is visible. Unlike Boal?s invisible theatre, this moment has no political saliency, driving the unwitting spectators towards activism. To those who do not see the theatrical frame, the actors on the street are merely people. Perhaps if they are anything more than simply other Baltimoreans, they are Baltimoreans acting strangely. These moments in which the performance and the world are so seamlessly knit together can be unnerving. There is something off-kilter. During the run of Promenade: Baltimore, there were numerous instances in which the unintended audience believed the actors to be, like them, simply inhabitants of the city. In one scene, two white actors performed a scene in which their car broke down while they were on a date. The older white man, Michael Salconi, uses a gesture called ?hacking,? a distinctly Baltimorean practice used to hail an ?illegal taxi? or catch a ride.89 He has seen this gesture before but never used it. His date is played by Laura Malkus, a middle-aged white performer with a heavy Dundalkian accent. Her character, a ?townie,? better understands the use of the hack and teases him about his awkward attempt. During a performance I attended, they were approached by a Black male pedestrian eager to help them with their car troubles. According to performers, many people stopped during this scene, some were in cars, responding to the ?hack,? while others walking by offered to help them with their car. One performer who saw the scene regularly recalled that this was something they began to anticipate: ?So many times, people would stop. They?d be like, ?hey do you need help???people were all the way ready to jump out 89 ?HAIL AT OWN RISK,? Baltimore Sun, accessed January 9, 2022, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm- 2009-09-15-0909150013-story.html; Shernay Williams, ?The Anatomy of a ?Hack,?? Afro (blog), November 3, 2011, http://54.204.251.142/the-anatomy-of-a-hack/; ?Why Do People Here Point to the Ground When You Drive By?,? Reddit Post, R/Baltimore, July 23, 2014, www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/2bgad2/why_do_people_here_point_to_the_ground_when_you/. 127 and help them start their car, or [be like] ?do you need a ride, do you need me to call someone???90 Anecdotally, the performers remembered that most of the people who stopped to offer help were typically Black couples or families. The scene was set abutting Waverly, a majority Black community.91 Recalling the scene staged in the neighboring community of Guildford, the comparison between the two is striking. In Guildford, the scene was not disruptive. It did not ask anything from the community by way of seemingly signaling them. In Waverly, the scene almost elicits participation. In this context, the scene in Waverly can be read as if it is a metaphor for the entire performance. The awkwardness of Salconi?s use of hacking is as out of place and misused as Promenade: Baltimore decision to have the gesture performed by two white actors in a predominantly Black neighborhood: for both the character and the performance, the gesture is an action they have seen done in Baltimore and they feel like they have the right to replicate, regardless of the socio-cultural context. While the residents who approached them were more than ready to give their assistance, the scene causes a friction between the theatrical and the real that is ultimately hinged upon the power relations of place. Dramaturgically, the scene understands that the ?very Baltimore? gesture can signify daily behavior in the city and is self- conscious enough to poke fun at the older wealthy white many using it but fails to consider the ways in which the gesture has a practical meaning to residents of the city. To them, it does not simply suggest ?Baltimore.? One way of examining these case studies is through the way Single Carrot Theatre harnesses participatory aesthetics. In each of these examples? the women on the stoop debating 90 Interview with Meghan Stanton, September 27, 2019. 91 In Waverly, 69.7% of the population identify as Black/African-American (Non-Hispanic) as of 2019. ?Vital Signs for The Waverlies,? accessed January 9, 2022, https://bniajfi.org/community/The%20Waverlies/. 128 the ownership of an earring, the people stopping to help fix the performers? car ? residents of the city are enlisted to participate in the performance without their consent. They are simultaneously acting in the real world and performing in a fictional one. Bishop argues that this duality is an inherent feature of participatory art: ?In using people as a medium, participatory art has always had a double ontological status: it is both an event in the world, and at one remove from it.?92 In this sense, the use of an unintended, non-consenting audience as an artistic medium extends the characteristic through an uneven distribution of power and knowledge. As Sherry Arnstein has argued, ?participation without redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless. It allows the powerholders to claim that all sides were considered but makes it possible for only some of those sides to benefit.?93 It is easy to apply Arnstein?s critique to site- specific performance. Here, there is no redistribution of power. The devisors, and the intended audience, maintain their position of knowledge as they shape the world around them. While pedestrians on the street participate in the performance, they are not granted even the semblance of agency that is typically associated with the participatory arts: the performance is not shaped through their actions, but in spite of their presence. Pedestrians may cause performers to improvise or change their blocking. In return, they are left with little in terms of either their political response to the performance or an ability to reject participating altogether. If the goal of invisible theatre is to inspire citizens to act, the goal of the ?invisible? site-specific theatre can be seen as inspiring the intended audience, with little thought to the unaware citizens. In this capacity, the spectators on the bus in Promenade: Baltimore are not only the intended 92 Bishop, Artificial Hells 284. 93 Sherry R. Arnstein, ?A Ladder of Citizen Participation,? Journal of the American Planning Association 85, no. 1 (January 2, 2019): 24?34, https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2018.1559388. 129 audience of the performance but also the only audience granted agency. Others are merely caught in the frame as set dressing, not performers. Promenade: Baltimore made good faith efforts to inform pedestrians, businesses, and residents about the play in advance of their performances, but canvassing the city is ultimately an impossible task. When people were informed in advance about the performance, many opted out. In this regard, foreknowledge is the only means of rejecting being caught in the theatrical frame and the politics that accompany it. Scenes were regularly moved because of the discomfort caused by the ?invisible performance,? including an apartment complex that refused to let them stage an argument out front, another that was worried about loitering, and a Black-owned caf? that rejected the politics of the performance and requested they move the scene elsewhere.94 Matt Shea described an encounter with a resident who was upset to be regularly seeing the Johns Hopkins bus traversing the street. When they told her about the performance, she rebutted, ?This is our lives. This isn?t, some, and you may have gotten permission from the caf?, but you didn?t get permission from all of us to be on display.?95 Without the ability to consent their participation, the interplay between city and performance is abrasive. At worst, it recalls Bishop?s use of Le?n Ferrari. He remarks, ?Art will be neither beauty nor novelty; art will be efficacy and disturbance,? a quality she characterizes as ?art as a terrorist act.?96 However, in these case studies, the art is less terrorism in the sense that it demands political change, and more so in that it can inflict terror and pain on those caught in its wake. 94 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 95 Interview with Matt Shea, September 8, 2019. 96 Quoted in Bishop, Artificial Hells 126-127. 130 Shouting ?Fire? in a Crowded Street Theatre In his oft-referenced remark, Oliver Wendel Holmes argues, ?The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.?97 While Holmes critique of free speech has frequently misused, critiqued, and reexamined, his example leaves fertile ground for exploration, particularly in regard to Promenade: Baltimore because it reveals the dangerous of misplaced belief under theatrical conditions. In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti connects the danger of fire in a theatre with the efficacy of performance. He argues that without the fire ?The audience might have remained together but not because they felt gripped by [the performance], but simply because they happened to be there. What the play could not achieve is immediately achieved by a fire.?98 The performance failed to unite the audience as a whole, but there is a fleeting unity found in panic. It is the double-edged combination of fear and panicked individualism that makes them so dangerous. The crowd must disintegrate to escape the danger. This is particularly true in a theatre space, with an architectural arrangement that limits a swift exit. As only a few can exit at a time, the crowd itself becomes a danger akin to fire. Herbert Blau, reading Canetti, identifies the frantic individual who is trying to escape (with) the crowd as a ?terrific moment of participatory performance.?99 In this, Blau notices a similar interpenetration of fiction and reality, perhaps better articulated as the interpenetration of performance and reality: What is performance? Is it 97 Trevor Timm, ?It?s Time to Stop Using the ?Fire in a Crowded Theater? Quote,? The Atlantic, November 2, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater- quote/264449/; ??Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater,?? Washington Post, accessed December 1, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/11/shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater/. 98 Elias Canetti and Carol Stewart, Crowds and Power, Repr. der Ausg. London: V. Gollancz, 1962 (New York: Noonday Press, 1998) 24. 99 Herbert Blau, The Audience, Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 19. 131 the fire or the escape? The audience or the crowd? The audience shifts, as they do in less-lethal participatory performance, to a dual role of spectator and actor. Whether or not the fire is real, the fear and the danger very much are. Reading Holmes? analogy, many perceive the operative word to be ?falsely,? in which the person crying out ?fire? is willfully deceiving the audience-turned-crowd, rather than being simply incorrect. Holmes? analogy has often been read as a critique of the danger of crowds and how language works regarding a clear and present danger. However, it is not incidental that Holmes? example occurs in a theatre space. Certainly, Holmes? analogy may have been inspired by a number of real events in which someone caused panic by crying ?fire? in a theatre. Beyond its architectural significance as a gathering space and its limits in terms of egress, the theatre space challenges the certainty of the term ?false.? The theatre is a place that is primed for negotiated believability. Let us consider a real instance of a ?fire? in a crowded theatre. A Historical Fire On September 23, 1884, a performance of Storm-Beaten by Robert Buchanan was performed at the Mount Morris Theatre in Harlem. The melodrama features several special effect scenes, including a shipwreck, ice floes, and one notable scene in which the antagonist sets a ship on fire in order to kill the protagonist, who is locked up in the brig. It was during this scene, in which the ship was set on fire, that someone, believed to be Francis McCarron, cried out ?FIRE!? In this example, the exclamation of fire is perhaps ?false,? but in a way that evidences the fiction commingling with reality. Here, we can look at the ways in which performance and the real world are layered together. The fire was simultaneously real and unreal. It is unclear from contemporary reviews how a scenic illusion was created. These reviews frequently mention 132 how spectacular the effect was (?A fine scenic effect is now brought to the support of the play representing the ship on fire.?100) but indicate little about how ?real? the fire was. Despite its position behind the theatrical frame, performance can destabilize reality. As long as the fire is on stage, it is a sign that it belongs to the world of the play, where any fire in the audience clearly belongs to the real world. That assumption, however, relies on two things. Firstly, the spatial strategies afforded by the theatrical frame are legible to all spectators. After all, the stage space is only the world of fiction if one understands theatrical grammar. Secondly, it assumes that no real danger can happen on the stage space. Crying ?fire? suggests that there was some blurry space between the stage?s wholly fictional status and the real world. The fire may not have been ?real,? but the danger was. Or at least, the audience thought so. The account of the incident in The Sun indicates that one spectator in the gallery was in such a panic that he began to rush out of the theatre ?leaving his wife behind.?101 This man?s fears were allayed by a police officer who insisted there was no real danger. The New York Times and The New York Tribune similarly reported that ?many blanched faces were visible in the audience?102 and characterized panic as ?imminent.?103 However, curiously, the report suggests that panic was ultimately subdued by the continuation of the performance. The performance served as a testament to safety, consigning the danger to the world of the play while providing an assurance that nothing was amiss. The show wouldn?t go on if there was real danger. 100 ?STORM BEATEN.? The Evening Telegram (New York) (15 March, 1883) 101 The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]), 25 Sept. 1884. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. < https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1884-09-25/ed-1/seq-4/> 102 New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]), 25 Sept. 1884. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. < https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1884-09-25/ed-1/seq-8/> 103 A CRY OF FIRE IN A CROWDED THEATRE. New York Times (1857-1922); Sep 25, 1884; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 4 133 A Metaphorical Fire This is perhaps a perspective shared by the intended audience on the bus in Promenade: Baltimore. While there were many staged scenes of danger, the audience trusted that all danger was indeed fictional. But what of the unintended audience, who sees the theatrical danger unframed on the street as real? This type of invisible theatre infringes on the security of the real city, replacing it with a precarious uncertainty. In this capacity, the performance offers two types of theatrical danger: the first in which the theatrical fiction creates the perception of danger (e.g., ?that stage illusion of fire makes me worried for my safety?), and the second in which the act of theatre itself causes real danger through its theatrical fiction (e.g., the belief in the stage illusion which causes panic and a stampede in the theatre). In this capacity, this type of performance marks a distinct danger that lies between make-believe and make-belief. Richard Schechner draws a line between make-believe and make-belief, in which make-believe is clearly bounded performance fiction and make-belief creates the social realities they enact. Schechner uses this line to argue that there are two distinct possible positions: ?Performances can be either ?make- belief? or ?make-believe.??104 In this sense, Promenade: Baltimore is both make-believe and make-belief. It just depends on who is watching. On a street corner in the Baltimore neighborhood of Charles Village sits an abandoned suitcase. Walking down the street, a college student, played by Brian Gilbert, spots the luggage and begins to panic. His body language suggests that it could be a bomb. He cautiously approaches it, before throwing himself on it, in a misguided effort to diffuse the situation. A tourist, played by Matt Shea, approaches him to reproach him for causing panic. They argue as if saying ?You thought this was a bomb?!? This short scene in Promenade: Baltimore proved to be 104 Richard Schechner and Sara Brady, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 3rd ed (London; New York: Routledge, 2013) 42-3. 134 one of the play?s most explosive. Gilbert and Shea never said the word ?bomb,? instead they spoke about ice cream. However, from a distance, their body language was enough to make- belief. Those who were not looking for a theatrical frame saw instead a moment of real danger. Members of the community pushed back, challenging the decision to even stage such a scene: ?What are you playing at? Why would you pretend? Why would you scare us and make us think there was something wrong like a bomb in our neighborhood??105 This scene moves the ?fire? out from behind the theatrical frame and into the street. Is a cry of ?ice cream? as deceptive and dangerous as the false cry of ?fire? when all one can see the panicked behavior, as if the crowd was already moving for the door? The scene is a moment of make-believe that can easily be read as make-belief, and as such proves the danger of such ambiguity. Single Carrot Theatre took many precautions in staging the scene. The performers made efforts to tell anyone passing by what would happen in advance or quickly reassure any onlookers once the bus had passed. They kept flyers on their person as proof. They attempted to time their performance so that there were as few pedestrians as possible. Yet, cast against the real, live background of a city, failure is inevitable. During one performance, a woman walked through the scene in progress, while another man caught it from down the block. The woman seemed ?freaked out? and disturbed by their actions.106 Once the bus pulled away, the actors employed their techniques to quickly explain what just happened and calm her. According to actor Meghan Stanton, who was watching from a car that served as ?backstage,? the man became belligerent. He began to argue with Shea and Gilbert. When the actors needed to move on to the next scene, the man continued the confrontation and followed them several blocks. At the next location, with the bus in sight, he continued to loudly argue. 105 Paraphrased in Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 106 Interview with Meghan Stanton, September 27, 2019. 135 According to the stage manager Kate Lynch, he seemed to be angry that he appeared foolish for being fearful.107 Discussing Boal?s invisible theatre and its modern aesthetic counterparts, curator Catherine Wood notes that such art does not afford agency to the spectator, ?but instead, registers the fear that any instance of personal encounter might be manipulated invisibly. They propose a paranoid cityscape laced with a pervasive mistrust of perception, and, therefore of many of the assumptions upon which one?s social and economic navigation of the city?and of the institutional space of art? depend.?108 Such a ?paranoid cityscape? is what is created in the dangerous fold between make-believe and make-belief. This man?s experience of the city was destabilized by the duplicity of the moment. No longer was his interpretation of his safety as simple as trusting what his eyes saw. His anger responded to the intrusion of the performance into his daily life, the insertion of danger for the sake of entertainment and pleasure. Discussing this incident, Stanton remarked, ?I can?t imagine that the audience wasn?t taken out of that?they probably did have one of those [moments] like, is this part of it? Are these two people we?ve never seen before? But then as soon as you hear an argument between a performer and a person on the street happening, it?s like a reality check.?109 Such a moment, in which the performance itself is being argued, the theatrical conventions are on full display for the audience. Where once they peered through the bus window-as-theatrical frame without seeing the implicit mechanic at work, now they view the performance within the context of the city, seeing them as two distinct entities layered on top of one another. This is, in a sense, the exact opposite of the spectatorial effect intended by director Martin Boross. Stage manager, Kate 107 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 108 Quoted in Bishop, Artificial Hells 126. 109 Interview with Meghan Stanton, September 27, 2019. 136 Lynch, noted that Boross did not even want the actors to inform passersby about the performance, preferring for them to see the performance as part of the city. ?Artistically, a big part of the ?gotcha? element of the show is that blending of reality and fiction, and that includes making the civilians, the everyday folks, a part of the play. And that can be beautiful when it?s from the audience?s perspective and you?re like ?Everything?s art! I get to see things through a totally different lens.? But when you?re the actual person, you might not be cool with that.?110 For Boross, it seems that blending fiction and reality is a means of revealing beauty through danger. In the original iteration of his Promenade series that was performed in Budapest, there was a scene in which the audience on the bus witnessed a woman commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. This was a moment he hoped to replicate in the Baltimore production, but Single Carrot Theatre flatly rejected it: this would not be a passable scene to stage in Baltimore.111 The bomb scene is Promenade: Baltimore?s closest flirtation with the same sort of danger. As intended, the intended audience on the bus does not see the performance in relation to the city but instead sees them as unified within the theatrical frame. These are conditions under which one reviewer speculated, ?The audience wondered what?s in there, a bomb or something beautiful.?112 In Promenade: Baltimore, the suitcase is not a bomb, but instead, a glimpse of magical realism. A mix of magic and utility, the suitcase appears throughout the performance, offering various performers the prop they need at the right moment. As the intended audience learns the performance?s grammar, they see this suitcase as a moment of wonder, a wink toward spatial delight. It seems unlikely that the unintended audience ever speculated that the suitcase might hold something beautiful. 110 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 111 Interview with Matt Shea, September 8, 2019. 112 Brennen Jensen, ?#TheShowMustGoOn,? Baltimore Style (blog), August 22, 2017, https://www.baltimorestyle.com/theshowmustgoon/. 137 Pleasure and Parafiction Is the possibility of pleasure ever worth the cost of fear? Ultimately, this scene puts pressure on the thin line between delight and fear. Where the theatrical frame offers the certainty of safety and the possibility of surprise, its absence is unsettling or even fear-inducing. Destabilizing the truth is as much a part of the dramaturgical project as is revealing the beauty of the city. It appears the question is less if pleasure is worth the fear, but whether one can occur without the other. Whether yelling fire in a crowded theatre or pantomiming a bomb scare on a street, the danger lies less in the ?truth? and more in the perception. In this capacity, Promenade: Baltimore regularly offers its unintended audience ?parafiction,? meaning fiction that is experienced as fact. Carrie Lambert-Beatty describes parafictions as a performative that troubles Austen?s distinction between felicitous and infelicitous in that they cause someone to believe the reality they shape, even if only temporarily. Lambert-Beatty suggests that parafiction is less concerned with erasing the real than eroding trust. Discussing A Tribute to Safiye Behar, a real tribute to a fictional person by the artist Michael Blum, she notes, ?But it deceived nevertheless, allowing viewers to be caught in a ?gotcha? moment of having been fooled, to wonder uncomfortably about the status of the claims the exhibit made, or to go away in a strange kind of educated ignorance, their worldviews subtly altered?perhaps in truthful ways?by untruths.?113 The ?gotcha? moment designed by Blum mirrors Boross? aesthetic desires. The key difference, however, between Lambert-Beaty?s example and Borros? direction is that Promenade: Baltimore extends the ?gotcha? moment to the unintended audience on the street. 113 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ?Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,? October 129 (August 2009): 56, https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2009.129.1.51. 138 Let us briefly consider the ?Promenade Moment,? the ineffable building block of Promenade: Baltimore. The ?Promenade Moment? is imagined as an occurrence that can be viewed from either the bus or the street, that can occur just as easily on the sidewalk-as-stage as it can on the sidewalk-as-city. This condition makes the possibility of a ?Promenade Moment? available for both the intended audience and the unintended audience. Either can see indulge in the ?quirkiness? of an event they witness at a street corner and say to themselves ?Yep, that?s Baltimore.?114 For the unintended audience, who is not attuned to the theatrical frame, it seems like a peculiar event, part of city life. If the goal of a ?Promenade Moment? is to highlight the comingling of the theatrical and real, in which they are enhanced and made whole in the presence of one another, in order to make the audience see the city in a new light, the ?gotcha? moment feels counterintuitive. ?Gotcha? relies on the eventual reveal that all was not as it seems, even if what it is never made clear. Instead, the gotcha moment relies not on happenstance or chance, but deceit and purposeful orchestration. ?Gotcha? implies a power dynamic that is less about seeing the theatricality of the city as it is and more about the indistinguishability of the theatrical layers and the city. While there are many paratheatrical moments in which the intended audience is unsure what is part of the performance, particularly in the early moments of the performance before the intended audience is familiarized with the cast, the blurriness around ?truth? becomes an opportunity for delight.115 There is no danger in the blurriness; the theatrical frame sanctifies all that is blurry as mere fun. For the intended audience, the ?gotcha? is a part of the delight, the audience wants to be ?gotten.? Constructing a ?gotcha? moment for an unsuspecting (and unintended) audience does more than simply create a moment of foolishness or fear but creates 114 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 115 Bruce Wilshire, ?The Concept of the Paratheatrical,? TDR (1988-) 34, no. 4 (1990): 169. 139 the potential for real danger. In this, the ?gotcha? moves the responsibility for the panic and danger away from the person who cried fire and back to the person who created the uneven circumstances in which it would be cried out at all. Stage Combat While the bomb scene in Promenade: Baltimore seems like a moment of an exceptional lack of judgment, the potential for danger arises at many points of contact between the performance groups (the intended audience and the performers) and the real world. The possibility of danger, though not necessarily the realization of disaster, is an unintended, but unavoidable, a consequence to layering of city and performance. To seek pleasure, in this manner, is to court danger, or at the very least, move warily ahead. In this section, I look to the moments of friction between the triad that puncture the fourth wall and demand action. These events strike at the safety provided by the theatrical frame that I analyzed in the last section. As such, I now move to ask, how do spectatorial strategies, put in place by the theatrical frame, limit our abilities to see the real danger? What ethics guide spectators and performers as they teeter on the line between supposed passivity and activity in their engagement of place? In this section, I look at moments where the unintended audience, the intended audience, and the performers found themselves witnessing, or in, actual danger. If the bomb scene was staged danger that could turn into real danger, here, I examine real danger that is flattened into staged danger, leaving the vulnerable at risk, nonetheless. As Erving Goffman suggests, the theatrical frame insists that the intended audience has ?neither the right nor obligation? to intercede with the drama unfolding on stage.116 However, in 116 Goffman, Frame Analysis 125. 140 instances of real danger, it is essential that the audience member, whether intended or unintended, can act accordingly. Returning briefly to Fischer-Lichte?s spectator and performer role-reversal, she points to moments of ethical behavior in the face of danger as part of the transformation of a spectator into an actor.117 In the moments of real danger discussed in this scene, the intended audience, the unintended audience, and the performers all encounter collision points in which they must decide how to behave, when to bend the rules of performance, and when to preserve the frame. In this sense, we see the culmination of the collapsed dichotomy between aesthetics and politics. Decisions are constantly weighed, by the performers and audiences, as if they only affect one: the preservation of the theatrical frame at the expense of the world or vice versa. But instead, ?Role reversal lays bare and simultaneously affords the actors and spectators the experience of a performance that is by default as much aesthetic as it is political.?118 Pivoting the matter of bodies to the matter of place, the collapse of aesthetic and political function resembles spatial delight, in which the experience of place is simultaneously pleasurable and politically abrasive. Actors in Danger Like in the scene with the ?bomb,? there were several instances in which Promenade: Baltimore actors were followed or felt threatened by people on the street. Kate Lynch, the stage manager of Promenade: Baltimore, noted that one of the challenges of such a performance is that unlike a show in a traditional theatre, or even a site-specific show with a ?backstage area, she was always separated from the actors because she was riding the bus with the intended audience. 117 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance 15. 118 Ibid., 44. 141 Consequently, there is no way to have ?real-time communication with the actors who are performing the scene? and that visibility is often limited.119 She often had to make safety calls for the actors, without their input. Lynch was adamant that there was never an emergency, but there were a number of close calls in which she cut the scene short or stopped the scene completely. Lynch divided this into two categories. The first were instances in which the tension of a scene was getting an unintended audience member riled up and intervened on behalf of others. The second was when an actor appeared to be in danger. During one performance, a group of men began to pound on the performance bus before a scene began in the Penn North neighborhood. Simultaneously, another group of men approached a young, Black actor, E?Tona Ford. It?s important to remember when discussing moments of real or potential danger, like the men pounding on the bus, or the group approaching an actor on her own, that the performance is a disruptive force in neighborhoods. The intended audience might see the city as it is, the city sees the looming form of a Johns Hopkins bus traveling through neighborhoods where it does not belong, without a clear motive or intention. The bus had no clear markers affiliating it with Single Carrot Theatre. Black residents of Baltimore have long had a contentious relationship with Johns Hopkins University. Between over a century of rumors about night doctors,120 the duplicitous use of Henrietta Lacks? cancer cells without familial consent,121 and the deliberate 119 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 120 They Were Afraid of the ?Night Doctors.? The Sun (1837-1995); Aug 26, 1892; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Sun pg. 8, FEAR OF ?NIGHT DOCTORS.?: THE STRANGE SUPERSITION THAT STILL CLINGS TO OLD COLORED FOLKS, The Washington Post (1877-1922); May 13, 1891; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post pg. 8, WASHINGTON NIGHT DOCTORS.: Capital Man Declares Colored People Hold Them in Dread. From the Baltimore American. The Washington Post (1877-1922); Feb 6, 1909; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post pg. 6. 121 ??Henrietta Lacks?: A Donor?s Immortal Legacy: NPR,? accessed December 20, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2010/02/02/123232331/henrietta-lacks-a-donors-immortal-legacy. 142 political work to gentrify the neighborhoods? adjacent to its campus,122 Johns Hopkins is an unwelcome, if not alarming sight. From the perspective of the intended audience, the introduction of performance into the city is seamless, from the perspective of the unintended audience, its intrusive and harmful. It is perhaps this intrusive element that prompted the men to pound their fists on the side of the bus. Lynch notes that there was a group of men around the Penn North neighborhood who, over the weeks of the performance, became ?increasingly interested, irritated? at the presence of the bus. 123 Because of the theatrical mechanisms in play, in which the stage manager and audience are physically separated from the street, Lynch was never able to speak with the group of unintended spectators. On this day, the men came into the street and began to pry open the bus?s doors, before pounding on the side. Lynch notes that the situation became dangerous because of the congruence of events: because of the incident happening at the bus, she was losing visibility of Ford as another group approached her. She was alone; the ?backstage? performance car was around the block and no other actors were in the area. Noting that the audience was becoming increasingly uncomfortable and reading Ford as increasingly unsafe, Lynch communicated with a crew-driver to pick her up, and the scene did not happen. Reflecting on this event, Lynch thoughtfully offers that she?s long been unsure if she made the right decision: ?It?s just so hard to say what anybody?s real intentions were.?124 Lynch reflects that, looking back at the incident, she is unsure how bias may have impacted her reaction. She now wonders, how much danger was there really versus how much danger was 122 Siddhartha Mitter, ?Gentrify or Die? Inside a University?s Controversial Plan for Baltimore,? The Guardian, April 18, 2018, sec. Cities, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/apr/18/gentrify-or-die-inside-a-universitys- controversial-plan-for-baltimore. 123 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 124 Ibid. 143 perceived by being approached by a group of Black men in an unfamiliar neighborhood? In some sense, the perceived danger of this moment arose from the fact that the men were behaving in an unusual manner: why were they so determined to board the bus? Danger is seen in unexplained behavior. Yet, of course, the same can be said of the performance itself. What could be more exemplary of people behaving strangely than unmarked site-specific performance? The performance does not recognize the danger in its own reflection. Lynch regularly returned to the notion of the audience?s experience: ?you can?t stop the show to talk to people outside.?125 The audience?s experience is a guiding light, a condition that must be preserved at all costs. Here, the safety of the intended audience is perceived to be disrupted by the unintended audience. This safety is held as an equivalent to their ability to spectate; the actions available to preserve one are limited by the other. In a sense, ?the show must go on? morphed from a mantra of resilience to a statement of value, in which the performance and city are distinguished and evaluated. Ultimately, it illuminates a new side of the necessary adaptivity of site-specific performance: while a site-specific performance necessitates flexibility in regard to its environment and vice versa, it is ultimately the performance that must persevere. The same logic, preserving the theatrical frame and the audience experience, permeated another incident of danger within the performance field. Pedestrians in Danger In between scenes during a performance of Promenade: Baltimore, performers Brian David Gilbert and Matt Shea were walking to the next location of a scene when they witnessed a bicyclist get hit by a car. Shea noted that the bicyclist was biking on the wrong side of the street. 125 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 144 It was then that a driver made a right turn without looking and struck him: ?and he just got broadsided, t-boned basically, and went right down and DOWN, like down and out.?126 The bicyclist had not been wearing a helmet, and, though he was not bleeding, he was knocked unconscious. Shea and Gilbert were the only witnesses to the accident. In this moment, they had to make a quick decision that essentially weighed the continued integrity of the show in the city with the reality of their responsibility to the city. At first glance, it might appear as if the accident between two parties that had no affiliation with the show and was simply witnessed by performers has little bearing on the relationship between site-specific performance and place. Instead, I move to argue that this incident punctures the seeming hermetically sealed performance world by demanding the performers engage with Baltimore not as a site but as a city. No longer are the performers simply flexibly bending (but not breaking) around the city to preserve the performance, but instead, they must engage the city directly. It is an urgent reminder that the performance is the city, too.127 They split the difference. As Shea remembered, ?I just turned to Brian and was like ?ok, we can do the scene without you, we can?t do the scene without me, you stay and call the cops, I will get us back on track.?? Shea moved to the next scene of the play, while Gilbert stayed at the scene of the accident. He called the police, gave a statement, and was eventually picked up by a crew member in a car. Discussing the incident, Kate Lynch remarked that she had to simultaneously assess the ?geographic possibilities of [the] situation? within the limits of the production and storyline.128 In this instance, the terrain of the city is utilized at the behest of the 126 Interview with Matt Shea, September 8, 2019. 127 Petra Kempf, You Are the City: Oberservation, Organization and Transformation of Urban Settings (Baden: Lars M?ller Publishers, 2009). 128 Interview with Kate Lynch, October 8, 2019. 145 play to make sure that it stays its course. The reality of Baltimore disrupted the smooth action of the performance; it must be further contended with in order for the show to go on. A recurring motif in these two examples is that the show must go on. This phrase is, of course, a familiar mantra in theatre and performance at large. It has also become a phrase in popular parlance, used to signify any instance in which the event is continuing despite setbacks. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the phrase was regularly used in journalism to discuss both the resilience of theatre as a form and to probe the impact of that resilience on the safety of the performers and audience.129 In instances of danger, the phrase is perhaps reconfigured to be ?The show must go on?? or ?Must the show go on?? In Promenade: Baltimore the show going on became a priority, operating as an essential framework for the interpretation of place.130 If the show goes on, the presence of safety remains for the intended audience. This logic stands as remarkable because the phrase itself is rarely deployed in safe situations. In this sense, the show must go on because, otherwise, the danger is really real. But must the show go on at all? The preservation of the show when danger is afoot illuminates a destructive fidelity to the performance event. The proclivity for preserving the theatrical frame transforms the real danger, whether experienced by the intended audience, the unintended audience, or the performers, into spatial delight. In this sense, the danger becomes fodder for pleasure. Spatial delight operates as a means of seeing the city as separate while being 129 Michael Cooper and Alex Marshall, ?When the Show Must Go On, Even Amid a Coronavirus Outbreak,? The New York Times, March 4, 2020, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/arts/music/arts-coronavirus.html; Jill Serjeant, ?The Show Must Go on: Broadway Comes Back with New Investors, Bold Plans,? Reuters, August 18, 2021, sec. Lifestyle, https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/show-must-go-broadway-comes-back-with-new-investors- bold-plans-2021-08-18/; ?The Show Must Go on: ?My Fair Lady? Opens at Segerstrom ? with Precautions in Place,? Daily Pilot, January 13, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/entertainment/story/2022-01-12/the- show-must-go-on-my-fair-lady-opens-at-segerstrom-with-precautions. 130 This mantra is so tied to the show?s theatrical approach, that it appears as the title of a review. See Jensen, ?#TheShowMustGoOn.? 146 within it. In this instance, the theatrical frame offers an opportunity to see the danger as separate, while being in it. If the danger is separate, it belongs to the world of the theatre: the fire is theatrical, the show must go on. But the danger is not separate: performers can be followed, the performance bus might be hit, the actors might need to give a witness statement following a medical emergency. One could easily argue that in these circumstances, the show need not go on, that there are some dangers that should take precedent. But, in each instance, the show did go on: the play maneuvered around the disruptive element of place. The performer was picked up, the scene was cut short, the actors improvised, utilizing the best of what is meant by that now clich? phrase. But what about how the city maneuvers around the disruptive element of the performances? Instead of being in danger, should the show still go on when the performance itself is the danger? The Place Must Go On After Promenade: Baltimore rolled through the streets for the last time in July 2017, the city remained. Site endures long after a specific performance. Site-specific theory has long operated under the assumption that ?site? is full of meaning that permeates and informs the performance. For instance, Mike Pearson and Cliff McLucas theorize the relationship between site and performance as the triumvirate ?Host,? ?Ghost,? and ?Witness.?131 The host, or the site, is temporally inhabited by the ghost, the theatrical event. Significantly, the ghost is translucent, and the witness, or audience, is always to see the host through the ghost. Once the performance is over, the ghost and witnesses leave, leaving the host as it was. In Pearson and McLucas? 131 There is an extended discussion of these topics with McLucas in Kaye, Site-Specific Art 125-9. This initial discussion is elaborated upon in Mike Pearson, Site-Specific Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 37. 147 interpretive model, the haunting allows for the ghost/performance to be informed by the host/site but does not consider how the host was changed by being haunted. In general, less attention has been paid to the impact site-specific performance has on the place. This is peculiar because as many cultural geographers and philosophers have long argued, place is an ongoing project, rather than a solidified object.132 Site-specific performance is not excluded from the ongoing project of place, even as it works to represent or frame it through art. It is not only about the city, it is the city. Here, I briefly turn to the aftermath of site-specific performance and how it shapes the experience of place in its wake. In her consideration of the space-defining nature of protests, Sophie Nield usefully offers Henri LeFebvre?s horizon of meaning as an alternative analytical model. Nield argues that Pearson and McLucas? model constructs a fixed temporality, in which the meaning of the host/site pre-exists the ghost/performance so that while the ghost is informed by the host, the host?s meaning is not changed by the performance. The horizon of meaning, however, allows for a multitude of shifting and changing meanings: ?All actions which have gone into, and which continue to go into, the constitution of a space, remain in it as part of its specific horizon of meanings.?133 I turn back to site-specific theatre in order to ask how the resonances of the performance impact Baltimore long after the Johns Hopkins bus drops off its final audience. In this chapter, I have examined many instances of how the unintended audience, and the city of Baltimore in the abstract, are affected during the performance. However, while the event of the performance may end, the effects linger long after, for both the intended and unintended 132 Massey, For Space; Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Radical Thinkers (London New York: Verso, 2011); Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 133 Sophie Nield, ?Siting the People: Power, Protest, and Public Space,? in Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, ed. Joanne Tompkins and Anna Birch (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) 231. 148 audiences.134 There are many ways to approach the lingering impact of site-specific performance: its participation in gentrification, the affective response it causes, or the oversimplification of complex political experiences tied to the place, to name only a few. Both audiences? experience of a place is shaped by the events that happened there, in this instance for the sake of and in a performance. For the unintended audience, the unexpected joy of a dance piece or anxiety of a ?bomb? does not quickly dissipate. Without the framing of a theatrical event, their experience of the place is forever altered by the fact that an event like that might occur without warning. To be caught in the theatrical frame, too, is invasive. It turns the mundane into a spectacle in a way that recalls Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett?s analysis of the ethnographic gaze: ?To make people going about their ordinary business objects of visual interest and available to total scrutiny is dehumanizing.?135 Such an experience is not soon forgotten. For the intended audience, many of whom entered these neighborhoods for the first time with Promenade: Baltimore, their understanding of the streets outside of the bus window is entirely shaped by the performance. Guildford is shaped less by its history of racism and more by a joyful dance sequence, Charles North is shaped through the oral histories that discussed the Freddie Gray protests. Promenade: Baltimore urges the spectator to see the city with fresh eyes, to delight in the wonder of what?s outside of their window. If (or when) they return to those sights, do they see the city or do they see the city or the performance? As Sara Ahmed reminds us, ?What is around an object can become happy: for instance, if you receive something 134 Nield, "Siting the People," 223. 135 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ?Objects of Ethnography,? in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 415. 149 delightful in a certain place, then the place itself is invested with happiness??136 When we return to a place, spatial delight returns, too. 136 Ahmed, ?Happy Objects? 33. 150 Chapter 3 ?Here and/or Now: Ordinary Time on the 7 Train? Introduction Above the heads of passengers in a crowded 7 train heading from Times Square to Flushing, an ad proclaimed, ?All New York is a Stage. Amazing local performances are closer than you think!? I smirked. While ?All the World?s a Stage? has grown stale, the play upon the familiar phrase was more apt than its copywriter could have ever imagined. It was 2019 and I sat on the 7 train listening to The International Local Trail: 7 by Jenny Lyn Bader. The ?podplay? is one in a trilogy of site-specific audio plays crafted for specific round-trip journeys on the New York Subway by This is Not a Theatre Company. Known as The Subway Plays, the audio plays utilize the conceit of overhearing people on the train to dramatize the experience of commuting. They suggestively create ordinary scenarios (only dramatic in the sense of theatrical) that one might encounter while riding the train on any given day. The podplays, then, invite the listener to imagine that the conversations in the recording belonged to their fellow passengers: the gaggle of teenage girls by the doors becomes the ones playing word games in the podplay, the woman in all black wearing the wide-brimmed hat must be the person the speakers refer to as ?coolest person they?ve ever seen.?1 The experience becomes an advanced form of people watching, in which the audio is projected onto the bodies of the listener?s ?non-performing? fellow passengers. To the listener, as an audience member of one, the riders become part of the play. ?Amazing local performances are closer than you think!? One of the compelling qualities of The Subway Plays is how they typify place for the sake of creating a soundtrack that will illuminate the mundane features of it, no matter when, day 1 Spare Some Change, Colin Waitt, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. 151 or night, winter or summer, it is played. Because the plays are self-started, a spectator can start a performance at any time by simply pressing play when they enter the train at the designated spot. The Subway Plays dramaturgically constructs the experience of ?ordinary time? by capturing moments of everyday life on a subway commute. Rather than literally predicting what the spectator will see, the play operates through a certain expectation of the type of things that they might encounter. Because the playwrights are writing for specific places (the specific train routes, the specific stops), there is a certain sense of safety in assuming that there could be a homeless person on the N train, multilingual speakers on the 7 train, and Brooklynites returning home after a meal out on the L train. The plays lean less on the guarantee that the spectator will see these, and more on the fact that they will see people who could fit these roles within their own imagination. This is Not a Theatre Company?s project is to illuminate the spirit of the place, and not to uncannily predict it. But, in all likelihood, with the podplays? careful dramaturgy, the listener very well may see those ?characters.? The Subway Plays relies on a kind of ?ordinary time.? Ordinary time is a guiding principle behind the podplays? dramatic engagement with place, as well as a fundamental component of the play?s ideological project. Ordinary time here means a time in which there are no special events, no crises, but instead an everyday temporality. In ordinary time place is typified through its common usage. It is in this sense that one might locate a ?sense of place? or the spirit of a place. Ordinary time purports an experience of place in its ?neutral? state, as if exposing it in its raw form. This approach to time assumes that there is a kind of authentic truth to place, that its underlying character will be revealed through the mundane events that occur there. As such, The Subway Plays offer a productive means of examining the deeply conflicted 152 and intertwined relationship between place and temporality, particularly as they manifest in site- specific performance. The relationship between place and time is not simple. In The Subway Plays, there are two contradictory placial practices happening in relation to time. The first is governed by an impulse to hold place still, as if a place will be what it always was. This can be seen in the presumption of an enduring present, the persistence of ordinary time that holds aloft the fundamental and authentic truths about a place. This is the type of place originally argued for by Heidegger. It is related to the type of place that is the subject of geography, which privileges location above all else. The second is to understand that place is progress. This is the model championed by cultural geographers like Doreen Massey, who argue that place is ultimately unrepeatable because it keeps moving. I will return to both these approaches, but for now, it is worth recognizing that site-specific performance has a propensity to approach place through the former. However, the latter is immensely useful. In setting The Subway Plays on, well, the subway, This is Not a Theatre Company appears to wish that both approaches to place can be true, as if a static non-changing place can be one of life and movement. One problem with seeing place through ordinary time is that it does not anticipate, nor stave off, catastrophe. Though ordinary time, in its enduring present, assumes that it will be like this forever, it never will be. The audio plays, first available in 2017, can still be experienced. I first sat on the 7 train to listen to The Subway Plays in 2019. I returned in 2022. In the intervening years, there was a global pandemic. If my first ride was perhaps ?ordinary time,? the second, in a ?post? pandemic world was nothing of the sort. And yet, as I sat on the same train, the same audio called forth the same experience of place, as if it were a long-lost memory beckoning from the before times. 153 The Subway Plays rely on the is the spectator?s perception of being in the here and now, two interrelated phenomena that are fundamental to our general understanding of theatre but are particularly relevant in site-specific performance. Marvin Carlson argues, ?Here-ness is fundamental both to the particular kind of fiction with which the theatre is involved, and equally important, with the particular way in which that fiction is experienced by the audience.?2 Carlson amends the sole emphasis on the now, to suggest that theatre is also here. But what the audience perceives as here and now is ultimately malleable. Robert Quillen Camp suggests that the spectators of an audio-walk performance ?put together different perceptual streams? which crafts a new perspective of here.3 This can be extended to the now. In 2022, the experience of being here, as shaped by The Subway Plays, was challenged by the dueling nows. The now playing in my ears unsettles the now before my eyes. The perspective of here is shifted accordingly. As such, this chapter considers the interrelated conditions of here and now as they inform the spectator?s experience of place. Case Study: The Subway Plays and the 7, N, and L Trains The New York Subway is ideal for examining ordinary time because it is a necessity of everyday urban life. It is a quotidian space that is regularly used but largely ignored in the daily routines of its passengers. Certainly, it has been the subject of much art, by poets, playwrights, and visual artists alike. But for many who ride the train every day, they have ceased to think about the subway as anything other than a means to an end. They are familiar with its rumble, and they know its rhythms. They do not fall over as it chugs along and screeches to a sudden 2 Marvin Carlson, ?The Theatre Ici,? in Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz, 2013, 16, http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1092694. 3 Camp, ?Quaint Devices,? 42. 154 halt. The hum of the track, the notes of the closing doors, and the flat tone of the conductor are simply part of the rhythm of life. The ordinary and familiar commute seems to promise a predictable experience of place. As I stated earlier, The Subway Plays were first released via an app in 2017. They were produced by This is Not a Theatre Company, a New York-based (theatre) company founded by Erin B. Mee, the daughter of playwright Charles L. Mee.4 The company describes its work as ?site-based, interactive, multi-sensory, participatory dance-theatre that is smelled, touched, and tasted as well as seen and heard.?5 The Subway Plays follow a 2015 work called Ferry Play, which was set on the Staten Island Ferry and followed the same ?podplay? model. Other productions by the company include Theatre in the Dark (2019, 2020), a performance in which the spectator is blindfolded before being given sensory items to experience, Play in Your Bathtub: An Audio Spa for Physical Distancing (2020), a pandemic era ?podplay? that is designed to be listened to in the spectator?s home tub, and Pool Play (2014), a performance that took the form of a water-ballet and invited the spectators to sit on the edge of the pool and dangle their feet in the water. The Subway Plays is a collection of three plays: The International Local by Jenny Lyn Bader which runs on the 7 train from Times Square to 74th Street-Broadway/Roosevelt Ave in Queens, Damper Felts by Jessie Bear which runs on the N train from Times Square to Astoria- Ditmars Boulevard in Queens, and Spare Some Change by Colin Waitt which runs on the L Train between 8 Ave in Manhattan and Broadway Junction in Brooklyn. Each play tells a unique story that is particular to the types of people you might see on that train. This easily enables the 4 The company?s name is an illusion to ?The Treachery of Images? (1929) by Ren? Magritte. 5 ?This Is Not a Theatre Company,? This is Not a Theatre Company, accessed April 11, 2022, https://www.thisisnotatheatrecompany.com. 155 spectator to overlay those narratives and characters onto their fellow riders, the people who are likely like the ones portrayed in the podplay. The podplays are self-started, meaning that the spectator can choose when they want to experience them. This means that, despite being on a specific route, the conditions under which the plays are received can vary drastically. The podplays feel different when the train is crowded versus when it is empty, for instance. Each play comes with instructions on what train to board (local or express) and where to get on and off. Each consists of two halves: one outbound, leaving Manhattan for either Queens or Brooklyn, and one inbound, a return journey. However, the order in which the spectator experiences the halves is up to them. Some might select to hear the inbound first, whereas others might begin in Manhattan. Though the spectator is largely stationary, The Subway Plays participate in a tradition of audio-walk performances. Examples of this genre include Janet Cardiff?s Her Long Black Hair (2004-2005), in which the spectator listens to a CD using a portable player which guides them on a 35-minute journey through Central Park, or Rimini Protokoll?s Remote X (2013-Present), a performance in which a group of 50 spectators embarks on an excursion through varying cities while wearing headphones. 6 Typically, this performance form promotes spectator autonomy, detaching them from the collective noun of the ?audience.? The spectator is seen as a lone individual, who can easily blend into the urban landscape as someone merely listening through headphones. In this capacity, audio-walk performances recall what Shuhei Hosokawa termed as ?secret theatre.?7 Hosokawa uses this metaphor to explore how the invention of the Walkman allowed individuals to be publicly engaged in a secretive act, meaning that others knew the 6 ?Her Long Black Hair - Public Art Fund,? accessed April 21, 2022, https://www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/her-long-black-hair/; ?Remote X,? accessed April 21, 2022, https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project/remote-x. 7 Shuhei Hosokawa, ?The Walkman Effect,? Popular Music 4 (1984): 177. 156 person was listening to something privately, but what they were listening to remained unknown. The performance style of the audio walk literalizes the metaphor and takes it a step further, adding to the secret that the listener may be overlaying the audio on the on-lookers? bodies, incorporating them into the theatre. The form of The Subway Plays is also reminiscent of Single Carrot Theatre?s Promenade: Baltimore, discussed in chapter 2. Both plays have many formal features in common ? their public transportation setting, their use of headphones, and their prompting of the spectator to see the city as a stage. However, one significant difference is that where Promenade: Baltimore brought a bus full of spectators into areas they would normally not travel, The Subway Plays are experienced individually along existing routes. Subsequently, the performance is essentially invisible to other riders. The lone spectator who might be perceived as merely another passenger stands in stark contrast to a bus full of gawking faces, on a vehicle that would normally not travel down your street. The formal similarities also beget similar themes and critiques of place. Each asks the spectator to see the city (and its residents) as part of the performance. However, Promenade: Baltimore provides the audience with actors who stand-in for (or often, stand next to) real residents. In The Subway Plays, there are no performers present and consequently, fellow riders are seen as readily available to be interpolated into the performance. Though my consideration of the ethics of such spectatorship is largely located in chapter 2, I attend to them again here to recognize the ways in which setting an expectation of the types of people seen on the train asks the spectator to look out for types of people. Both case studies are also concerned with elevating the experience of seeing the city, now, an ideological project of being in the moment that is so common in site-specific performance. 157 To offer an ordinary experience of the city, the podplays utilize one of its most stalwart symbols: the subway.8 Opening in 1904, the system now has an annual ridership of nearly 1.7 billion people.9 It transports passengers across four boroughs ? Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx ? through use of 424 active stations.10 Over the course of twelve decades, the subway has radically reoriented the spatial experience of the city. The subway creates an ease of access, shortening the distance between here and there. As Michael W. Brooks suggests, ?If?modern urbanism is born in the transition from a compact city in which work and home are spatially close to a much vaster one in which they are separated by a long daily journey, then it follows that rapid transit would do more than just serve the city. It would arrange its spaces, structure its movement, and define its textures.?11 Brooks? argument reminds us that space is not a given, but socially constructed. The subway, as a form of rapid transit, offers the potential for literal and social mobility. In The Subway Plays, this spatiality is used as a dramatic structure, offering a version of catharsis when the spectator reaches their destination. Beyond its influence on the urban experience, another notable quality of the subway is that it not only moves riders from place to place, but it is a place in itself. Tim Cresswell, arguing that a ship can be a place, claims that while a place must have a location, it does not follow that said location must stay the same.12 A subway car has a cultural meaning, a history, and a set of social practices. For instance, persistently, New Yorkers do not acknowledge others on the train. They may move over, but they do not engage. Each pretends that they are alone. To do otherwise 8 Brian J. Cudahy, Under the Sidewalks of New York: The Story of the Greatest Subway System in the World, Rev. ed (Lexington, Mass.?: New York, N.Y., U.S.A: S. Greene Press?; Distributed by Viking Penguin, 1988), xi. 9 ?Subway and Bus Ridership for 2020,? MTA, accessed April 12, 2022, https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city- transit/subway-bus-ridership-2020. 10 ?Mta.Info | Facts and Figures,? accessed April 12, 2022, http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/. 11 Michael W. Brooks, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 3. 12 Cresswell, Geographic Thought a Critical Introduction, 113. 158 would upset the social patterns of the train. Of course, like in any place, there are those who transgress these rules. The spectator is one such person, steadfastly observing their fellow riders with little concern to their wish to be ignored. People watching is one of the primary means through which the podplays prompt the spectator to experience the present moment. The spectator overlays the dialogue from the podplays onto the bodies of their fellow passengers as if the spectator was overhearing their conversations. Another strategy prompts the spectator to mentally answer hypothetical questions, a game played only with themselves and the voices in their headphones. Those voices ask each other to look across the aisle and imagine the person sitting across from them ten years ago: ?Do you think they would be happy with who they are today??13 Once, the man across from me during this moment looked like he was experiencing utter despair, and I resented the question because I did not know if he would be. The present moment is not always pleasant. The Subway Plays are primed for a consideration of the relationship between place and time, because of their thematic rumination on the present and the passage of time, as well as their formal quality of being unfixed in time. They are temporally drenched. Site-Specific Performance in Ordinary Time How does site-specific performance, a genre so occupied with where, contend with when? Is theatre?s insistence on now an excuse to forgo an in-depth analysis of a place?s temporality? Does site-specific performance imagine place and time to be coupled or uncoupled? And, in one of the most relevant questions to site-specific performance, is place static or dynamic? The Subway Plays seem ultimately undecided on the matter. Certainly, This is Not a 13 Spare Some Change, Colin Waitt, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. 159 Theatre Company is invested in a place as dynamic. Movement, whether that refers to the actual subway car ridden during the performance or the movement of passengers on and off the car during the trip, is a fundamental part of the experience of this place. The company allows the spectator to choose freely when they listen to the plays. There is no direction to start at 9 AM on a Tuesday to perfectly capture the experience of rush hour, nor 9 PM on a Saturday to catch a late-night atmosphere. This is Not a Theatre Company knows that place is not stagnant, that winter and summer and weekends and weekdays have a different character to them, but they place their bet on that they all add up to the experience of New York City. However, because the podplays can be experienced any ?when? the spectator wants, there is an underlying assumption that place, whether imagined as the 7, N, or L trains, the subway system itself, or perhaps even naively, New York, will hold fast to a certain sense of place. The plays operate under the belief that change is ultimately too gradual. Place does change, but it is indistinguishable across time. Not all time, just some time. This assumption could be articulated through the belief that the 7 train will long be ?The International Express,? maintaining the diverse ridership that is captured in the podplay. Maybe it will not ?always? be, but it will be, at least for now. But this, of course, will change. Gentrification is already pressing marginalized renters further and further out. The community that the 7 train served when it was first built is not the same one it serves today. If the play captures the spirit of the place for now, how long is now? When I say that the performance is formally unfixed in time, I am referring to the stretched distance between the ?present? in 2017 and the ?present? now, whenever that might be. I am also referring to the ways in which the overlay between the performance as ?belonging? to the present and the place of the subway falls out of sync with the experience of being in the 160 subway. This happens frequently during The Subway Play, as the fixed audio track is never able to fully anticipate the real-time experience of the subway ride. While the audio track is largely timed for the subway track, and as one reviewer in the New York Times notes, ?Erin B. Mee?s precise timing is impeccable, the city seems to be working with her at all times,? there are inevitably gaps.14 The subway might be held for traffic up ahead, which will mean that the play finishes early on the route. A station might be out of service, meaning that the spectator is still listening to the play as they stand on the destination platform. These moments are examples of what I call elsewhere in this dissertation ?misalignments,? where the site of the performance is made hyper-visible to the spectator.15 The site of the subway car, one aligned during the duration of the performance, is particularly clear in the silence that follows the end of the track, when all that is left is the white noise rumbling of the subway car. One of the consequences of this misalignment is that the unfixed temporality is made explicit and visceral. Site-specific performance is always faced with the problem of representing place. A representation will always inevitably be incomplete and partial. However, most site-specific performances have less distance between the representation and the place itself, as they are performed here (which is also the now.) The Subway Plays, created in 2017, inherently contain a distance between the New York that is represented in the podplays and the New York that the spectator ?sees? and in which the spectator is immersed in the podplays. Under the assumption of ordinary time, it is impossible to know how long now will last. Perhaps that was never clearer to most alive today than in 2020 when suddenly, because of a pandemic, ordinary time as we knew 14 ?Dance, Theater and More: Works to Experience at Home This Weekend,? The New York Times, March 26, 2020, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/arts/dance-music-theater-roundup-virus.html. 15 See chapter 1 for more about misalignments. 161 it was suddenly no more. If place, as some have suggested, can only be experienced in time, the end of ordinary time signals a very different moment. Does it also signal a very different place? COVID-19 is an extreme example of the end of ordinary time, and one that I will return to towards the end of the chapter. However, the struggle to represent a place (that is always changing) might make some wish that place would simply hold still. In tension with this desire is the pursuit of revealing the real place as is, a central ideological project of performances like The Subway Plays. As much as these perceptions of place conflict with one another, so too is the place represented in the podplay and the place present in front of the spectator. The podplays, the only static element in play, are unable to adapt to a changing place. Ordinary time is the perception that time is unchanging, an enduring present, a long now. However, change is still happening. The place changes right under the nose of the performance, who keeps on as if nothing is different. Perhaps The Subway Plays will only end, not when the place has dramatically changed, nor when ordinary time has waned, but when the technology used to maintain the performance fails. In this chapter, I look at the tensions that arise in representing a place as its ?normal? self-across time, stretching out from the moment it was first made available to the public, through the end of ordinary time, and beyond. Chapter Overview Throughout this dissertation, I have regularly returned to the notion of place as an event. In chapter 2, the event becomes theoretical through-line in examining the contemporaneous use of place by the residents of Baltimore and the performers of Single Carrot Theatre?s Promenade: Baltimore. In chapter 4, this will be seen clearly as I argue that temporality is an intrinsic part of reconstructing the experience of place, meaning that Confection is not merely about the place of England but, in particular, early modern England. Though the theme emerges throughout this 162 text, the relationship between place and time is particularly central to this chapter and warrants in-depth analysis. Whereas in other chapters, temporality was a delimiting condition that directed us towards points of inquiry, in The Subway Plays the relationship between time and place is a central inquiry. In The Subway Plays, now is both a recurring project of the drama and an unsettling condition of the spectator?s experience of place. I will demonstrate how The Subway Plays puts pressure on this relationship and shapes the spectator?s perspective of both. In this chapter, I analyze the relationship between place and time exemplified in The Subway Plays through three movements. First, I consider the longstanding and conflicted relationship between place and time. Here, I situate the debate about whether place and time are diametrically opposed, as argued by various philosophers and geographers, or if they are indeed inseparable conditions of one another, an approach embraced by cultural geographers like Doreen Massey. In this section, I consider the ways in which site-specific performances like The Subway Plays contradictorily employ and place pressure on models as they capture and relay a sense of place in ordinary time. Then, I offer a close reading of the plays? temporal dramaturgy, the tactics used to situate the spectatorial experience in the enduring present by typifying a place?s ordinary time. In this section, I look closely at the spectatorial practices that seek out specific bodies and behaviors on the trains. ?The enduring present? is a notion that carries into the next section, in which I consider the prevalent ideological project of site-specific performance, which romanticizes place through its engagement with the quotidian. This section attends to experience of being in the now, a perspective that is so valued across site-specific performance. Lastly, I test the limits of ordinary time as an experience of place by analyzing the experience of being a Subway Plays spectator in 2022. In this section, I measure the distance between a place?s ordinary and extraordinary time, by offering two accounts of spectatorship: 163 pre- and ?post-? pandemic. In this chapter, I focus on the intersection of time and place, in order to place pressure on the reliance on here and now that anchors site-specific performance. I argue that here and now are more malleable in site-specific performance than they first appear. A Place in Time As a point of philosophical consideration, time has a much richer complexity than can be addressed with the scope of this dissertation. To begin, one can consider its rhythms, its tempo, its relationship to the body, to the natural world. Time can be discussed in the abstract but is only experienced in the context of the real. As a social construct, it underpins every facet of our life, propelling us to be productive, to consume, to worship, to celebrate. It is defined by conceptual approach. For instance, one major debate among philosophers of time is between a phenomenological approach, which sees time as movement-based and measured through change, and a post-structuralist approach, which sees movement as, at best, a representation of time, and more often, a distraction to understanding and studying it.16 We cannot study time directly, yet we are always experiencing its effects. We are of time, as much as we are in time. The idea of ?ordinary time? appears to be most prominent in two forms. In its most colloquial sense, ?Ordinary Time? is used by the Catholic Church to describe the majority of time throughout the year. Catholic time, in many ways, is one of the most pervasive temporal structures throughout Euro-American (and its influential conceptions of global) history. Through Catholicism, the week is distinguished through the establishment of a day of worship.17 16 Jack Reynolds, ?Time Out of Joint Between Phenomenology and Post-Structuralism,? in Performance and Temporalisation, ed. Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), 101?2, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410276. 17 David Wiles, Theatre & Time, Theatre & (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire?; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 56. 164 Catholicism situates time in relation to death and eternal life. Augustine, a major early theorist of time, suggests that the present is, in actuality, eternity. 18 It cannot be time, for it never passes. Unlike Augustine?s conception of the present, Ordinary Time is to be passed, as the strange yet everyday interval between celebrations. The Church distinguishes it as distinct from periods of celebration and reflection like Advent, Easter, and Lent. Ordinary Time makes up the rest of the year, as the common experience of life. However, in the Catholic Church, Ordinary Time is not simply uneventful or mundane, but instead, it is a time for growth and maturation. In Catholicism, Ordinary Times transforms the banal into the purposeful. Martin Heidegger offers an alternative approach to ordinary time. Also calling it vulgar time, Heidegger suggests that ordinary time is the abstract, scientific time that is measurable by clocks. It is not tied to a particular context or frame but exists nearly as a pure instance of the now. Ordinary time is imagined as ?the present-at-hand,? marred by a form of disunity.19 David Wiles notes that the present is particularly tricky because it becomes meaningless in isolation: ?[It] is fine until we try to pin down exactly what we mean by ?now? or ?present.? If you isolate a single note of music, it ceases to be music.?20 For Heidegger, ordinary time is non-relational, meaning that it has a connection to what happened before or what will happen after the present moment, a condition he assigns to world-time.21 World-time situates the present in relation to the past (the no-longer-now) and the future (the not-yet-now). World-time in many ways resembles what Aristotle posits in Physics, in which the present is the ?link of time.?22 Wiles, likewise, 18 Quoted in Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen, eds., Performance and Temporalisation (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), 4, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410276. 19 Heidegger, Macquarrie, and Robinson, Being and Time. 20 Wiles, Theatre & Time, 8. 21 Heidegger, Macquarrie, and Robinson, Being and Time. 22 Aristotle, Physics, ed. Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 75. 165 argues a united sense of time, suggesting that single instances in performance are only meaningful in relation to what came before.23 However, as Jack Reynolds observes, ordinary time and world-time are not quite as distant as Heidegger would like.24 In its pragmatic form, world-time takes on the qualities of ordinary time by measuring the distance between now and then. While Heidegger ultimately rejects both world-time and ordinary time in favor of originary time, a model that projects the subject towards the future, the intersection of ordinary time and world-time is of particular interest for this project. My approach to ordinary time understands it as concerned with an enduring present. Where Heidegger?s approach to ordinary time suggests an instantaneously, fleeting, and abstract present, the approach I offer here extends the present into a long now. In this model, now is contemporary, but non-exact. This is perhaps the type of now found in the common Welsh expression ?Now in a minute,? which means imminent but not immediate.25 It extends the contemporariness of now beyond the instant to the next bit of time. Now is still the relational center through which all time is subjectively understood, but the present is not disconnected nor instantaneous. An enduring present offers a sense of united, continuous time that remains distinct from a generalized past and future. In this sense, the present is generalized too. It is now. And now. And now. And those moments are read indiscriminately, forgetting their minute differences in favor of its general flavor. Ordinary time is a pervasive day to day ?sameness.? It trades in the quotidian, it?s the everyday temporality of place. Ordinary time sees not the gradual growth, instead of homogenizing it as the same temporal location, the same ?vibes.? Change does happen, but it is 23 Wiles, Theatre & Time, 8. 24 Reynolds, ?Time Out of Joint Between Phenomenology and Post-Structuralism,? 103. 25 Rebecca Astill, ?13 Slang Words and Phrases You Only Know If You Live in Wales,? WalesOnline, August 27, 2021, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/local-news/13-slang-words-phrases-you-21421863. 166 either unobserved or unidentified until it is sizable. In this chapter, ordinary time can be read as an essential feature in the representation and experience of a place. As I will discuss in greater depth in my discussion of Confection in chapter 4, maintaining a sense of place often depends on place being received as relatively timeless, as if static, so that it can be authentically returned to time and time again. Ordinary time shares much in common with the notion of an ?authentic? ?sense of place,? a central theme of that chapter. Cultural geographer J.B. Jackson notes that the phrase derives from genius loci, suggesting a supernatural unique quality that inhabits a space.26 In this capacity, the sense of place is similar to the place?s aura. Ordinary time is the temporal equivalent, in which it grasps the experience of what aural time is like in a given place. My approach to ordinary time offers a temporal counterpart, in which change is recognized, but only on a grand scale so that the experience of place in the everyday retains its essential characteristics. Ordinary time at once slows down and keeps pace with time. It measures time through rhythm, rather than difference. It anticipates and links moments that feel relatively similar, for the sake of holding down place. Timing Place Place and time are a theoretical knot that is heavily influenced by the relationship between space and time. Historically, place was conceived as static and grounded. One aspect of this approach sees place as being a fixed point in space.27 This is a model regularly employed in traditional geography, a discipline that uses ?spatial science? to attend more to the shape of the land and less to its cultural and social usage.28 Essentially, the approach understands place as 26 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), 157. 27 Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin, eds., Key Thinkers on Space and Place, 2nd ed (Los Angeles, [Calif.]: Sage, 2011), 21. 28 Cresswell, Geographic Thought a Critical Introduction, 91. 167 location, as ?an objective point in space marked by longitude and latitude and with specific distances from other locations.?29 Likewise, time was held at a distance from space and place by theorists who felt that it interfered with its study. But there is a long history of time being prioritized over space. For instance, a major proponent of this approach was Henri Bergson, who argued for uncoupling space and time. Bergson believed that space belonged to the external world, whereas time was largely internal.30 Jeff Malpas argues that Heidegger extends this approach, prioritizing time over space.31 Though space and place regularly make their presence known in Heidegger?s writing, Malpas suggests ?one can see even more clearly how time may indeed be viewed as dynamic and determinative, in contrast to the static and undifferentiated character of space.?32 Uncoupled, this approach suggests that, at best, space is a representation of time and place is a means of experiencing time. It is precisely this perspective that post-structuralist geographer Edward Soja rejected. He lamented, ?space still tends to be treated as fixed, dead, undialectical; time as richness, life, dialectic, the revealing context for critical social theorization.?33 Tim Cresswell characterized Soja?s well-known remark, suggesting that ?space had been relegated in social theory to a dead stage for history.?34 Soja?s comment sets the stage for the recoupling between time and place, present in the spatial turn towards the end of the 20th century, but the reunion has never been complete, nor easy. The persistence of time over place can be seen throughout cultural 29 Cresswell, 279. 30 Jeff Malpas, ?Timing Space?Spacing Time: On Transcendence, Performance, and Place,? in Performance and Temporalisation, ed. Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), 27, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410276. 31 Jeff Malpas, Heidegger?s Topology Being, Place, World (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT, 2008), 175, http://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=Exeter&isbn=9780262250337. 32 Malpas, ?Timing Space?Spacing Time: On Transcendence, Performance, and Place,? 27. 33 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 11. 34 Cresswell, Geographic Thought a Critical Introduction, 181. 168 geography and theories of place. Marc Aug? theorizes two forms of place, anthropological and non-places.35 Where the former is organic, social, and fixed, the latter is a transitionary space, devoid of social interactions. Critics, like Peter Merriman, have Aug? for reinforcing a static notion of place.36 Such criticism suggests that place and ?non-place? alike are far more dynamic than Aug? allows for, and that tedium and loneliness (qualities associated with non-place) can emerge in both familiar and unfamiliar spaces. Under Aug?, both place and non-place resemble the ?death? central to Soja?s critique. Place is read as fixed, non-places as empty vessels, devoid of character and social meaning. For many, place is a spatial container through which to experience time. Under this model, place is considered through its relationship to time, but remained stagnant itself. As such, it was ripe for romanticism. Its relationship to time is nearly exclusively through the past, offering a nostalgic sense of place. For instance, in The Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard examines the power ?place? holds in a person?s life through its ability to recall the past through the exactness of location: Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person?s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.37 Lippard?s remark invests in an intimate relationship between time and place, but ultimately lands on a formulation of place that might satisfy Bergson: place is meaningful because it is subjective, based not on the external world but activated through it.38 One might suggest that in Lippard?s 35 Aug?, Non-Places. 36 Peter Merriman, ?Driving Places: Marc Aug?, Non-Places, and the Geographies of England?s M1 Motorway,? Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 4?5 (October 2004): 162, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276404046065. 37 Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: New Press, 1998), 7. 38 Lippard, 7. 169 construction, which is heavily drenched in nostalgia, time is mediated and reconstituted through place. As such, rather than reading the two together, Lippard ultimately still casts place as subordinate to time. Since the spatial turn, a number of critiques have productively read space/place and time together, arguing that place can be approached as an event. This elevates the status of place to that of time, meaning that they are read as equals, who mutually produce the other. There are several spots one can begin reading this history, such as with theorists like Henri Lefebvre who famously argued for the production of space (which maintains that space is an ongoing project, rather than an inert resolution) or Soja himself. I turn to Doreen Massey, a cultural geographer whose work perhaps best represents the extreme end of place and time. Massey sees ?places not as points or areas on maps, but as integrations of space and time; as spatio-temporal events.?39 She thoroughly rejects the notion of place as static, situating movement and flow into every facet of place. Ultimately, for Massey, the same place cannot be stepped into twice. When you return to it, it has shifted in your absence. Place is a network of activity, continuously influenced by the factors, whether people or environmental, that shape it. As Massey suggests, ??here? is no more (and no less) than our encounter, and what is made of it. It is, irretrievably, here and now. It won?t be the same ?here? when it is no longer now.?40 Drawing attention to the interconnectedness of time and place through the indexical word here, Massey?s claim applies pressure on the approach to place and time utilized in site-specific performance. Unlike conventionally staged theatre, the place of site-specific performance directly informs the 39 Massey, For Space, 130. 40 Ibid., 139. 170 composition and contents of the performance. Consequently, it must be performed under selective conditions that necessitate presence: a shared here and now.41 While The Subway Plays craft a sense of here through a rumination on the now, what that now indexes is highly contested within the performance. Does now refer to the present, meaning when the spectator sits on the subway car? This is certainly the most immediate and available now to the spectator. It is the integration of the here and now as Massey suggests. However, other nows compete, like the now of 2017. When listening to the performance, it is easy for the audio to ?slip,? meaning that is unclear to the spectator if the noise they just heard was from the podplay or the people on the train, the fictional or the real, the then-now or the now-now. As much as the performance is about the present, it is also unfixed in time, indulging in a now that is locatable through its positioned relationship to the past. Recalling Rebecca Schneider?s ponderings about time returning, the past, the no-longer-now, might be now once again.42 The return of a previous now may be seamless or highly visible, creating a gap between the past and the present. Here, the site is misaligned. This might happen when the experience of the ride was longer or shorter than the audio track. It also happens in the cracks and crevices of the ordinary time that was imagined in 2017 and how it is experienced now. For This is Not a Theatre Company, the gap between the two is expected: ?It?s a mix of the recording, which never changes, and what they see and hear and smell and touch, which always changes,? said Mee in a 2018 interview.43 As such, one way of thinking about how the plays deal with these two seemingly contradictory approaches to place and time is to see each as attended to by one aspect 41 Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks. Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being. (London: Routledge, 2012). 42 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2011), 2, http://site.ebrary.com/id/10462712. 43 ?PCV Director: The Future of Theater Is on Your Smartphone,? Town & Village, February 23, 2018, https://town- village.com/2018/02/23/pcv-subway-plays/. 171 of the performance. The podplay element offers an approach place that is generally static, but flexible enough to be applicable in many circumstances, over the duration of a persistent present. The other half of the experience, being on the subway itself, is heavily invested in the mobility of place. Utilizing both approaches also The Subway Plays to structure the temporality of ordinary time, in which place can be represented through the everyday. Representations of Place, Representations of Time Site-specific performance is deeply concerned with the representability of place. The performance genre works to animate representations of place, emphasizing the relationship between drama and place as central to the performance. The potential for representation is a matter that is intimately connected with place and time. When held as separate entities, space is often utilized to represent time. Time is spatialized so that it can be examined and critiqued. Recall, Heidegger?s concern that space was merely a way of representing and experiencing time. Nick Kaye and Gabriella Giannachi note that representation implies a gap in which there is a functional difference announced by the representation of an absent object. In this light, what is represented comes implicitly after what it represents. However, the authors suggest that this temporal relationship does not preclude the notion of presence, suggesting instead that presence emerges through ?the uncertainties and slippages in the experience of ?being there? and being ?before?? of the representation and the real.44 Note that their forms of presence, being there and being before, signal spatial and temporal dynamics. The interchangeability or inherent confusion of space and time widens their potential use in representing the other. 44 Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye, Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated (Manchester, UK?: New York: Manchester University Press?; Distributed in the United States by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 20. 172 The complexity of space and time, in regard to representability, is further complicated by Frederic Jameson. Jameson argues that in postmodernism, ?the past has disappeared? in favor of a single time, the present.45 He refers to this atemporal, single time experienced under postmodernism as ?space.? Doreen Massey offers a close reading of Frederick Jameson?s analysis use of space, suggesting that one implication of Jameson?s text, in which he desires to return to a single ordering of history, is that the ?failure to achieve representation? emerges out of the multiplicity of time, as any representation will be unavoidably incomplete.46 Massey challenges, ?Is it an implicit claim by Jameson that (complete) representation was possible when we didn?t have to deal with all this confusing coevalness??47 She argues that approach to representation perpetuates the hierarchical position of time over space, by treating space as if it were singular and simple: ?it is this kind of ?representation? which denies the multiplicity of the spatial.?48 Massey capitulates, recognizing that Jameson is largely expressing that the reality of space is its ?unrepresentability.? She concludes ?far from standing for the stability of representation, real space (space-time) is indeed impossible to pin down.?49 If place is an event, it evades the simplification and immobility needed to properly represent it. Let us assume that any representation will ultimately be incomplete. In this chapter, I reverse the approach the common approach that uses space to represent time. I do so in order to focus on the analytic potential for time to represent place. This follows the work of Amanda Yates and Gemma Loving-Hutchins who suggest (in the theoretical tradition of Elizabeth Grosz) 45 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2013), 309. 46 Quoted in Massey, For Space, 79. 47 Massey, 79. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 80 173 that space be temporalized.50 In The Subway Plays, the experience of place is animated through the representation of the rhythms of ordinary time, daily life as it regularly appears on the subway. In this, time is held, not in Jameson?s estimation in which it evades representation, but for the sake of representation. Rather than being a problem, the present becomes a valuable dramaturgical tool in site-specific performance. I return to this in the next section. Here, I will consider in greater depth the ways in which place is typified and represented in site-specific performance and what effect it has on the experience of place. Typifying a Place The Subway Plays are filled with ambient noises. Each section of the podplays begins with the sound of the subway moving (despite it also happening in real life around the spectator). The soundtrack also includes indistinct background chatter and absent-mindedly humming. As The Subway Plays begin to construct a sense of what a subway ride will be on an ordinary day, they begin with the aural constants. The plays offer snippets of conversations before another one cuts in, or the characters leave the train. A major factor in the performance?s success is a deep understanding that the subway is ultimately about rhythm. Any encounter is ultimately fleeting. One might encounter the same people time and time again, or simply the same types of people. The Subway Plays is heavily oriented towards the latter. Each play pays particular attention to what type of people you might encounter on the train and what they might be doing. The podplays use two primary dramatic strategies to do achieve this. The first is to build out dramatic characters who are followed throughout one ride, 50 Amanda Yates and Gemma Loving-Hutchins, ?Situated Structures: Performing Time and Space,? in Performance and Temporalisation, ed. Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), 38, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410276. 174 often not for the entire time. These characters are deliberate portrayals of people one might meet on the train: Brooklynite students, tourists, and businesspeople on their way home. This is where the performance feels at most like a staged drama. While it is easy to overlay these speakers onto the bodies of their fellow passengers by matching an archetype, the second strategy is more effective. The second strategy involves the characters speaking about a non-speaking third party on the train. For instance, a child asks his mother why that person looks so sad. Though the question is asked under the pretense of speaking to another character, dramaturgically, the question is directed at the spectator, who then looks around to find a person to whom this could refer. This strategy is often successful, because it does not ask the spectator to find specific, fleshed-out characters. Instead, it creates an open-ended question that the spectator can answer in a number of ways. What sad means and who it might apply to depends on the perspective of the spectator. At times, it feels like The Subway Plays are betting on their own familiarity with New York City, the specific lines on which the plays run, and the experience of a typical subway ride. For instance, it is delightful when a character asks, ?Why is everyone wearing black?? and indeed, everyone to the spectator?s right is indeed wearing black.51 There are times, of course, when the spectator will look around, and they are not surrounded by a mass of black-wearing subway riders, but the aesthetic is so very New York, that This is Not a Theatre Company expects that the odds are on their side. As much as the three plays as a whole are invested in the experience of the subway, they are also particular about evoking the spirit of their particular line. In this capacity, each play is populated with a different set of character types. I look now to an extended example of this on the 7 train. 51 Colin Waitt, Spare Some Change, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. 175 The 7 train is colloquially known as ?The International Express,? referring to the diverse and multiethnic neighborhoods served by the line.52 The name was coined by Hillary Clinton during the White House?s 1999 ?National Millennium Trails? project. Clinton declared: The Number Seven Train through Queens, New York, connects a series of immigrant neighborhoods and is a metaphor for the migration of all the world?s people to America?s shores. Pakistani, Irish, Romanian, African-American, Italian, Korean, Hispanic, Indian, Argentinean and other ethnic neighborhoods are connected and available for exploration and cultural discovery on this route from Sunnyside to Flushing.53 In these comments, the Clinton administration highlights immigration as a distinctly American value, seemingly countering the prevalent image of diversity in New York as a ?cesspool? with the familiar image of the Great American Melting Pot. Some months after Clinton?s comments, Atlanta Braves Pitcher John Rocker?s famously derided the 7 train, which brought baseball fans to Shea Stadium. Rocker?s remark mirrors Clinton?s in structure, but replaces a celebration of diversity with overt racism and blatant homophobia: ?next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids [?] The biggest thing I don?t like about New York are the foreigners.?54 Rocker?s comments reinforce an image of the subway as dangerous, an image Rocker used to express his dislike of New York more generally as a place. Literary critic Michael W. Brooks has argued that the subway is a protean symbol, which can be used equally by proponents and detractors. He notes, ?Within very recent memory [subways] have both provoked fear and inspired visions of a renewed, habitable city.?55 Brooks comments, slightly 52 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ?Destination Museum,? in The Cultural Geography Reader, ed. Timothy S. Oakes and Patricia L. Price (London: Routledge, 2008), 453. 53 ?Millenium Trails Announcement,? accessed April 12, 2022, https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/Initiatives/Millennium/trails_doc.html. 54 William Neuman, ?ROCKER: I?LL BE ON NO. 7,? New York Post (blog), June 21, 2000, https://nypost.com/2000/06/21/rocker-ill-be-on-no-7/. 55 Brooks, Subway City, 3. 176 before Clinton?s and Rocker?s, seem to anticipate the rhetorical position of the 7 train. For some, like Rocker, the subway is a threat; for others, like Clinton, it?s a wonder. But one suspects that neither Rocker nor Clinton has spent much real time on the 7 train or any other subway. Their sense of the 7 train is in this respect largely abstract. It is clear what approach is preferred by This is Not a Theatre Company. Playing off Clinton?s epithet, the podplay The International Local works to highlight and celebrate the diversity of the neighborhoods serviced by the 7 train in more concrete quotidian terms. In one scene on the journey into Manhattan, the spectator hears a child anxiously ask his grandmother to speak English on the train. She rebukes him: ?You want people to think we are speaking English? [...] On the 7 Train? [...] But many people speak Chinese here. People speak everything on this train.?56 The spectator, whether or not they know the history of the train, is quickly (and overtly) keyed into its diverse ridership. Largely, this expectation holds true when riding the 7. The passengers appear more racially diverse than those on the L or N trains. The Subway Plays seemingly want the spectator to observe who is around them. Together, the podplay prompts you to notice (and implicitly celebrate) the diversity of the car, and by extension New York. However, as Sunny Stalter-Pace reminds us, one can read Clinton?s call for ?exploration and cultural discovery? along the 7 train as a call for ?postmillennial slumming? by an implied white population.57 This same critique can be applied to The International Local, replacing the call for ?slumming? with the behavior itself. The podplay offers the opportunity to conduct the exact type of exploration and cultural discovery called for by Clinton. Stalter-Pace warns of transforming the 7 train into a ?monorail? (a term used by the Times in the wake of Clinton) that 56 Jenny Lyn Bader, The International Local, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. The characters do not distinguish what dialect that are referring to. 57 Sunny Stalter-Pace, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 138. 177 would transform Queens into Epcot.58 This comment directly mirrors one made by a spectator who referred to The Subway Plays as ?a bit like an animated ride.?59 In this sense, the podplay is an endeavor in urban tourism that veers towards voyeurism. But the play doesn?t see it that way. Instead, it sees its work as diligently representing the type of place the 7 train is and the type of people who ride it. As such, it offers the spectator an ideal view of New York by animating the present moment, driving the spectator?s attention to what (and who) is before them. The play is characterizing ordinary time on the 7 train by typifying the people who ride it. Seeing and Being Seen on the Subway The most arresting moment of the podplays occurs at the end of Damper Felts by Jessie Bear. A homeless character named Lou delivers a monologue that eviscerates but ultimately perpetuates the people-watching apparatus that lies at the center of The Subway Plays. In the podplays most political moment, Lou speaks loudly to all in the car, admonishing them for treating him as if he were invisible. Before promising that he will go back to being invisible, Lou renders the other passengers hyper-visible: ?But first, I am going to see you. That?s right. You ride the subway, I?m going to see you.?60 While there are several scenes about homelessness throughout the three plays, this moment is noteworthy because it highlights the duality of being seen on the subway. For Lou, being unseen highlights the lack of dignity that is afforded to him. He is unseen because his poverty makes others uncomfortable. He is ignored, overlooked, and forgotten. Whereas for many passengers on the subway, being unseen is ideal. Calling the New York Subway ?profoundly lonely,? photographer Natan Dvir observed in his series Platform, 58 Stalter-Pace, 138; Sandee Brawarsky, ?On the 7 Train, Living the Multicultural Ideal,? The New York Times, September 22, 2000, sec. E. 59 Spectator Interview, conducted by Kelley Holley, March 20, 2022. 60 Jessie Bear, Damper Felts, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. 178 that New Yorkers will go to extreme lengths to avoid interacting with each other.61 They will avoid eye contact, spatially distance themselves on the platform, and pretend that no one else is there. In this capacity, each pretends that they are alone, together. No one even looks up when a man in a giant coat covered in purple feathers enters the L train. To be unseen, from this vantage point, is a position of privacy and dignity. Rendering passengers as hyper-visible is precisely the activity of The Subway Plays. The spectator closely observes the behaviors of their fellow riders, in a way that is normally uncouth. Lou?s monologue consequently serves as a critique, reminding the spectator about how invasive this type of looking is. However, he does so through the same appeal to ordinary time and people-watching that can be found throughout all three plays. Lou singles out individual, unnamed passengers and proves that they have been seen: I know when you tried to rest your head against the window, but you had to stop because the train was too jerky. I saw when you scratched your crotch and thought not no one would notice. I saw you when you thought about taking your phone out of your pocket but stopped because you thought I?d think you were taking out money to give me. You worried you?d attract my attention, I saw your arm hesitate, I saw it go back to your lap. I saw you decide to take your phone out after I left. And I saw you pretend to sleep so you didn?t have to give that old woman your seat. I watched you.62 The language of Lou?s monologue is generic. Each person that he calls out could be anyone, at any time. Seat-stealing, avoiding a homeless person, and napping are clear examples of regularly observed behavior on the subway car. They are clearly recognizable as such, even when no one around is presently demonstrating them. Lou is a type of ?character? that one might find on the train. The situation feels plausible in this setting. The actions are intentionally so vague that they are easy to apply to any person on the train. One of those people could even be the spectator. In 61 Michael Hardy, ?The Profound Loneliness of New York Subway Platforms,? Wired, accessed April 15, 2022, https://www.wired.com/story/nyc-subway-photo-gallery/. 62 Jessie Bear, Damper Felts, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. 179 this capacity, the gaze is momentarily reversed. He cautions, ?You think I?m a performer in your show, but the real truth is you?re a performer in mine.?63 The statement?s nimble reversal illustrates a fundamental truth of the performance. The spectator is available to be watched, as they watch others. If all the world is a stage, the spectator cannot presume to be in the audience. For the spectator and the unnamed fictional passengers in Lou?s speech alike, being seen is unpleasant and invasive. One spectator noted a version of this, commenting that he felt uncomfortable when the people on the subway watched him back.64 Being observed is unpleasant and the speech confronts our desires to exist in a bubble, ignoring the plight of others for our own comfort. Of course, for the playwright, this is the purpose of the monologue. It is a political critique of the disenfranchised and often ignored status of the homeless population in New York. In many ways, this is achieved through the activation of hypervisibility. But one of the most peculiar aspects of this monologue is how it seems unaware of how it, in turn, perpetuates and justifies the people-watching function of the performance. It invites the spectator to look to see who might be the person who is hogging a priority seat, to see if there is someone resting their head who can be carefully interpolated into the narrative. Beyond that, the monologue suggests that hypervisibility is both ideal and inevitable. In the last moments of the monologue, Lou snarls, ?You don?t like being watched? Don?t ride the subway.?65 Serving as one option for The Subway Plays? thesis, the comment indignantly justifies its own dramatic conceit, without admitting any culpability. It does not acknowledge that hypervisibility can be invasive, or even dangerous. It does not see the gaze that it encourages as an ethically dubious 63 Bear, Damper Felts. 64 Spectator Interview with Kelley Holley, March 20, 2022. 65 Ibid. 180 practice that turns everyone in the car into a potential spectacle. Instead, it essentially says, if you?re on the subway, you?re in public. Tough luck. To an extent, this is of course true. The private act of observation is always happening, particularly when one is in public. Being seen is inevitable. But often, one can escape noticing the glance of someone across the train. Their ponderings about you are ultimately unknowable. Perhaps the difference here is that The Subway Plays bring you to this site for the explicit purpose of seeing one?s fellow riders as totems of place, archetypal figures in the typical landscape of the city. It serves the riders as representatives of the city who will be subject to spectatorial scrutiny. Even in the moments in which it implicates the spectator as someone who is seen, it fails to grapple with the likelihood that the spectator is immune from the full experience of being seen within this landscape. If the spectator does not ride this line normally, they are not truly a representative of the place. Whether or not they are seen, the impact is less than those who interpolated into the drama as representative riders along the N line. After all, if there were to be a homeless man on the N train ?during? the subway play, the spectatorial gaze does little to afford him dignity. Beyond Lou?s monologue, there are several other instances that seem to make an explicit case for voyeurism. For instance, one character romanticizes a person who draws riders on the train without their knowledge. She suggests to her friend that when she?s on the train that she should always keep her eyes up (and away from her phone) because if he were to draw her the picture would be better. The character enthusiastically chirps, ?Isn?t it cool though? That any moment you could be a model in a figure drawing class? Even when you?re just like, going to work or whatever.?66 The character takes the alternative perspective to the one being offered by 66 Jessie Bear, Damper Felts, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. 181 Lou. Being seen is romantic. It adds whimsy to the world. In this moment, the two facets of the podplays merge. In The Subway Plays voyeurism and being in the moment go hand-in-hand, as if you could not have one without the other. Her interlocutor isn?t so sure. Isn?t it violating? The first character has the final word. ?The subway is a public place [?] you have to be open to that.?67 Spectatorship, whether in and outside a podplay, is an ordinary and undeniable feature of the subway. The Spectacular Now: Presence and the Present Postdramatic Theatre Because of its emphasis on the now, The Subway Plays, and their like-minded site- specific brethren, can be situated in dialogue with postdramatic theatre. Hans-Thies Lehmann calls postdramatic theatre a ?theatre of the present.?68 Whereas Aristotelian drama has concerns about the temporality of performance, obscuring the realities of time, postdramatic drama happily presents time as time. As such, postdramatic performance moves away from representation. The Subway Plays sit strangely in the middle, in which they both about the now and are in now. They simultaneously represent the present and present the present. How Lehmann?s insistence on theatre of the present is not one of the enduring present discussed in this chapter. For Lehmann, postdramatic theatre operates under the opinion that ?the present is necessarily the erosion and slippage of presence.?69 For Lehmann, the present is always slipping away, on the verge of beginning the no-longer-now. It is the splinter of a moment, that is almost imperceptible because it is always already gone. Lehmann claims, in this way, postdramatic theatre is more about dying than life. For some, like Patrice Pavis, postdramatic theatre suffers 67 Bear. 68 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen J?rs-Munby (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2006), 143. 69 Lehmann, 144. 182 because of its inherent presentism. Pavis, however, does not direct his comments to the aesthetic present. His critique is targeted at the ideological function of postdramatic theatre because he understands the present as the static moment that Jameson describes. Pavis suggests that postdramatic performance is a passing movement, deriding what he reads as its insistence on an ?eternal present? that ?fascinates but also imprisons.?70 What space is there in postdramatic theatre for a temporality that is situated between an eternal present and an always slipping now? Philip Watkinson offers an alternative approach to the present in postdramatic performance. He suggests, ?what is in fact emphasized is an unsettling of the present, where historical events and explorations of futurity are shown to be constitutive of a contradictory present that holds conflicting temporalities together in the here-and-now.?71 This is a particularly salient comment in regard to The Subway Plays, which fundamentally holds two contradictory temporalities together for the illusion that they could be one. Such instability can be read as a desire to keep the present present while knowing that it is inevitably drifting further and further away. This is like the ?continuous present? that Rachel Fensham suggests characterizes the spectator?s experience of time in postdramatic work.72 Fensham, however, perpetuates commonly held opinion about the present in postdramatic, which is that it occurs through a shared time between the performers and the audience. Certainly, this model does not apply to The Subway Plays, where the performers and the spectators could not share time any less. The closest the podplays come to sharing time is between the spectators and their fellow riders. However, Watkinson presses back on this, suggesting that it misunderstands the unsettled present 70 Patrice Pavis, Contemporary Mise En Sc?ne: Staging Theatre Today (London?; New York: Routledge, 2013), 240. 71 Philip Watkinson, ?Time: Unsettling the Present,? in Postdramatic Theatre and Form, Methuen Drama Engage (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 68. 72 Rachel Fensham, ?Postdramatic Spectatorship: Participate or Else,? Critical Stages/Sc?nes Critiques, no. 7 (December 2012), https://www.critical-stages.org/7/postdramatic-spectatorship-participate-or-else/. 183 in postdramatic performance. Watkinson proposes that the experience of time need not be shared, for often it is the project of the actors to unsettle the present on behalf of the spectator. The actors, recorded in the past, will likely never share space nor time with their spectators. Yet, they participate in a similar project of animating the present moment. Is animating the present the same as unsettling it? While The Subway Plays mirror Watkinson?s remarks about the contradictory temporality held within the present, what the spectator experiences is the past returning as the present, to unsettle it, rather than an explicit injection of the past as the past into the present. Perhaps, instead, the unsettled present that is found in The Subway Plays is in its persistence, its startling unwillingness to fade away. Watkinson insists that postdramatic theatre situates the now as its temporal dimension in order to destabilize it, not fetishize it. However, the purpose behind building up the now in site-specific performance is less clear. Perhaps the now is ultimately unsettled, but is this an intention or a side effect? Site-specific performances, like The Subway Plays, do employ a fetishistic approach to the now, temporally stretching the present across their dramatic frames for the sake of their spectator being in the moment. Being Here, Now What is the value of the present? What is gained from embracing it, and why are so many site-specific projects concerned with spectacularizing it? There is a noted anxiety around ?missing the present as it happens.?73 The present is so ephemeral that we will certainly miss it. Attending to the present hopes to counter this anxiety by keeping hold of it. The beauty of the 73 Sarah Chihaya, Joshua Kotin, and Kinohi Nishikawa, ?Introduction: How to Be Now,? Post45 (blog), July 15, 2019, https://post45.org/2019/07/introduction-how-to-be-now/. 184 present moment is a clear thread in The Subway Plays. In The International Local, for instance, one character chastises a tourist for looking at her map, ?You missed the whole sweep of things, all the special places [?] Don?t take your phone out on the train. [?] You?ll get caught up in the screen and miss the view.?74 Towards the end of the play, the tourist capitulates: ?You?re right. I?m missing stuff by looking at my phone on the train. There?s so much to see out there.?75 These lines echo sentiments in Promenade: Baltimore (?Today is the only day you will see this city in exactly this way,? ?You are bound to miss something to the right, especially when you want to see it all??) and in Days Go By, a site-specific dance which I will discuss in the conclusion.76 In these lines, it clear that part of being in the now is also about seeing the world around you, experiencing and valuing the spirit of a place. One way that The Subway Plays highlights its dedication to being in the moment is by having its characters constantly strike up conversations with strangers. In each play, there is an instance of an overly earnest tourist who talks for an extended period with a local. There are meet-cutes between passengers and strangers who confess to each other their greatest fears and innermost secrets. One spectator noted this reoccurring element as peculiar, commenting, ?The subway plays call for this friendly, neighborhood of being, of interacting with each other, whereas the reality is that people are ignoring, on the phones, in an almost a way of self- preservation. No one talks to each other that much in real life.?77 Of course, to some extent this is born of the dramatic necessity that requires characters to form narratives with each other over even the briefest of subway rides. Beyond this, it asks the spectator to imagine an ideal version 74 Jenny Lyn Bader, The International Local, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. 75 Ibid. 76 Promenade: Baltimore, Single Carrot Theatre and Stereo AKT, 2017. 77 Spectator Interview with Kelley Holley, March 20, 2022. 185 of New York in which everyone is communal rather than distracted and self-isolating, in which everyone lives in the present moment. But what is so good about the present, anyway? It is inescapable. It is the constant and exclusive perspective by which we experience the world. Does it really need a champion? In many ways, it seems peculiar that this is such a dominant theme of site-specific performance. But, upon further examination, there are several clear consequences to this project. If now is important, it?s because it portends to offer the spectator the most authentic and unmediated experience of a place. By emphasizing the present moment, The Subway Plays situates the now as both extraordinary, a temporal state worth attending to, and ordinary, part of the everyday experience of the city. By privileging the present, the play suggests that this slice of ordinary time is spectacular. If it is now ordinary time, which evidences a place as it is in its natural, non- celebratory, non-crisis, state, place is available to be experienced in its most authentic form. The exemplary status of the present moment, which is of course also ordinary allows for this double trick. If now is ordinary, it shows us the normal temporality of a place. If now is special, it emphasizes that the temporal moment is not just average, but textbook, the best and most essential means of experiencing a place. The now is situated as an exemplary moment of an authentic experience of a place. ?Witness place as it truly is, in its most authentic form,? cries out the now. Here is place, exposed right before your eyes. Emphasizing the now becomes an essential dramaturgical strategy to reveal and represent the ?true? spirit of a place, to render its aura accessible to the audience. This approach to now has a spark of the utopian. It recalls a similar emphasis that Jill Dolan places on the now as she theorizes the utopian performative. She suggests that they are the ?small but profound moments in which the performance calls the attention of the audience in a 186 way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking and intersubjectively intense.?78 Similarly, Marvin Carlson offers of his own personal experience, ?I also have now and then experienced moments of such intensity that they might be called epiphanies. It seems to me that theatre is perhaps particularly well suited as an art to generate such moments because it constantly oscillates between the fleeting present and the stillness of infinity...?79 Dolan and Carlson?s comments suggest that delight is a fleeting condition and that it is directly connected to being in the moment. When it comes to theatre, this impression of hope and delight are intimately tied to being in the now and serves as the idealist version of theatre?s potential impact. In site-specific performance, this effect is more profound, with additional emphasis placed on being on site. Emphasizing the now in site-specific performance highlights the still-unusual nature of theatrical performance outside of a theatre space. The now implies the here. After all, to some extent, site-specific performance is intimately concerned with indexing presence. Reminding the audience to be in the now serves to also remind audiences about the uniqueness of being here, on site. Being present has cultural cache, but it also knits the spectator into the scene, temporally and spatially. Nick Kaye and Gabriella Giannachi suggest that ?presence is the ecology or network that inexorably ties the ?I am? with its past and future, and that forces ?I am? to confront itself with what is other from ?it?.?80 In some respects, the emphasis on the spectator being in the moment inescapably places them in the scene. There is no denying that you, the spectator, are in the here and now. 78 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005) 5. 79 Marvin Carlson, "The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive," Theatre Journal 55, no. 1 (2003): 211. 80 Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye. Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011) 5. 187 The prominence of the now in The Subway Plays curiously plucks at the mediatization of the performance. After all, The Subway Plays are not live. They are only ?now? in their activation by the spectator. In reality, they are statically locked back in 2017, the no-longer-now. The nowness so central to the podplays, in some ways, feels like ?a determination to catch ?nowness? within the medium of live theatre.?81 The use of the now reasserts the privilege of performance. Even though the actors are mediated, the setting is not. The overlay between audio and place, the creation of a site, occurs now, each time the spectator presses play. Of course, as useful as the now is as a dramaturgical tool, to tease out an authentic place or reassert a lagging theatrical quality, it is also elusive and slippery. Geraldine Cousin posits, ?If the continuum that we take for granted in the auditorium is challenged or disrupted on the stage, we are confronted with the disturbing unreliability of the present tense. Our confidence in nowness is threatened.?82 If the now is so unreliable in a traditional theatre building, it is doubly so on site. Each moment is not received singularly, but instead through its real and theatrical meanings, meaning that there is no clear idea of which present is present. The Now and the No-Longer-Now In The Subway Plays, it is always now. Of course, the same can be said for our own experience of time. You are reading this now. Heidegger?s world time gives us a productive model for this experience, in which time can be generally surmised in three time zones: the now, the no-longer-now, and the not-yet-now. One of the most salient dramaturgical features of World Time is that while the experience of a future now may be unpredictable, it will still hold the same 81 Wiles, Theatre & Time, 52. 82 Geraldine Cousin, Playing for time: Stories of lost children, ghosts and the endangered present in contemporary theatre. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), xii, http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4705151. 188 general relationship with the past. The past will always be no-longer-now, no matter when now is. This temporal relationship is that it is preserved even as the distance between that no-longer- now and the current now stretches. The Subway Plays make great use of this for the benefit of staging an unknown present for its spectator. For instance, in The International Local on the 7 train, one character points out to another character the location of 5Pointz, a building in Queens that was covered in graffiti- style murals. It contained over 200 artist?s studios, many of which with art on the exterior of the building. The building was the subject of controversy in 2013 when it was whitewashed by its owner in the dead of night. He did so without informing the artists, and later demolished the building83 Regretfully, the character shares: ?You know what we've passed just moments ago. 5Pointz. Or rather the spot where it used to be.?84 Her remark makes no use of dates, and she does not measure how long it has been since it was torn down. She simply signals to the past. The effect on the spectator is the same whether they are listening in 2017, 2022, or 2027. The building is no longer available to be seen. All the spectator (and the characters) can do is reflect on what once was. The podplays map place through a similar model. Though the plays are timed for each specific subway ride, variation is inevitable. As such, the character states that ?we?ve passed just moments ago? the former location of 5pointz. This technique allows the play to be imprecisely precise. Characters regularly refer to landmarks as either coming up or having ?just? passed. For instance, during Damper Felts, one character wistfully describes an upcoming part of the N train?s route: ?That first moment when the train emerges from under the river and all the light 83 Lauren Hard, ?5 Years Ago, Their 5Pointz Art Was Erased. Now There?s a Museum for It.,? The New York Times, September 16, 2018, sec. New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/16/nyregion/5pointz-street-art-graffiti- museum-nyc.html. 84 Jenny Lyn Bader, The International Local, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. 189 comes in. It's like everyone takes a deep breath. They don't even realize it.?85 In addition to creating a buffer a mildly unsynchronized audio track, the distance between now and future (spatial) events invites the spectator to look out for them, to take a deep breath when they enter the light. The Subway Plays constructs place as relational, demarcating here through its relationship to the no-longer-here and the not-yet-here. ?Yet? and ?longer? are strikingly temporal words that position space, operating at the spatial and temporal intersection of a journey. The parallel between now and here reminds us of their interconnectivity. Their effectiveness in constructing the other (temporalizing space, spatializing time) serves to dramatically orient the spectator in the here and now of the podplay, no matter when or where they are. Despite the wiggle room created by gesturing towards the past and the future, The Subway Plays still fall prey to noticeable anachronisms, as the podplays fall out of sync with the present. The now of the future is ultimately unpredictable, but there are some specific events or changes that might have been anticipated. A child character on the 7 train speaks at length about the game Plants vs. Zombies, which, even in 2017, had long passed the peak of its trendiness.86 Perhaps this game was chosen because its popularity had already waned, a selection that suggests that always being out of date is better than finding oneself there later one. Other anachronisms are minor. The seats on the N train are described as blue but are orange. Stephen Sondheim is discussed in the present tense, a reference that made it nearly five years before becoming obsolete by his 2021 death. 85 Jessie Bear, Damper Felts, This is Not a Theatre Company, 2017. 86 ?Google Trends,? Google Trends, accessed April 21, 2022, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F05q4qn2. 190 Figure 5: ?Damper Felts,? The N Train, March 2022. Photo by the Author. In a notable example, a man and a woman discuss the ?Rikers is Here? stickers that were part of the guerilla campaign #SeeRikers. In the campaign, which was launched in 2016, stickers were placed on MTA maps to identify the unlabeled Rikers Island. The creators argued that the absence of Rikers from the MTA map is ?emblematic of a broader cultural willingness to overlook the places, policies, and practices that support the systemic violence of mass incarceration.?87 Damper Felts seems to agree. It features a character who argues on behalf of the protest. However, in 2022, the protest feels like a distant memory because of its ultimate success. The MTA maps now label Rikers Island. The podplays, in trying to dramatize a current political moment that is deeply entwined in this specific place, become anachronistic in the best possible way. In this sense, perhaps it is not wholly undesirable to fall out of sync, as doing so demonstrates that the ways in which places are described and situated within a social consciousness are shaped over time. That change is not only possible but certain. 87 ?Putting Rikers on the Map | States of Incarceration,? accessed April 21, 2022, https://statesofincarceration.org/story/putting-rikers-map. 191 Sounding Here and Now The Subway Plays? project of getting its audience to be present in the here and now, of luxuriating in the moment and experiencing the raw city as it is, occasionally gets in its own way. What does the spectator miss about the now in favor of the ?now? that they are presented through their headphones? After all, while the audio directs the spectator to be in the present moment, it also pulls their focus away from just that. The experience of the past-now competes for the spectator?s attention. Robert Quillen Camp suggests that this easy shift between the recorded here and now of the audio and the visual and kinesthetic here and now of the present evidences ?how easily damaged our sense of here actually is.?88 Certainly this is true throughout The Subway Plays where it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between the lower rumble of ambient noise of the recording and of the subway itself. Conversations between riders are inaudible. The format of the show privileges the staged conversations and does not lend itself to eavesdropping. As such, the spectator will miss moments that are not unlike those staged in the play, moments in which the subway feels a bit like magic. Though the podplays regularly stage conversations between strangers, it happens irregularly on the trains themselves. However, when one does happen, it is largely lost to the spectator. For instance, during one ?performance,? a man popped into the open doors of the N train to ask for directions. A man and his son quickly helped him, and he swiftly exited before the train?s doors closed and he was forced to go in the wrong direction. Seeing this interaction, I elected to pause the play. Another spectator who accompanied me that day did not. He later incredulously remarked about how often 88 Camp, ?Quaint Devices,? 47 Emphasis in original. 192 conversations between strangers happened in the plays. He was surprised to learn it had happened in front of him and that he had missed it.89 Choosing to pause seemingly defies the performance?s form, while supporting its efforts to live in the present moment. Another spectator told me that while he was listening to the podplay on the 7 train, the train was held. He decided to pause, so as to not fall out of sync with the play?s timing. Because he had paused, he heard what he described as ?the most New York thing ever?: the conductor announced that the train was ?stopped because kids were hanging off back of the train and [they] needed to get them off of the train.?90 The announcement is remarkable for the very reasons that The Subway Plays hope the spectator will be in the moment: it reveals the city as it is. The activity is irreverent, dangerous, and, maybe, fun. The announcement is overly candid. It would have been easy to miss if he had kept listening to the play. It would have been nothing more than a muffled announcement before the train eventually started again. Instead, hearing it offers a sense of ordinary time that could not be anticipated by This is Not a Theatre Company. People often ?surf? the 7 train.91 Trains are commonly delayed. The unanticipated joy found in observing the world around is difficult to account for. It can be overlooked completely if one?s attention is not on the now, but on the ?now.? The Enduring Present: Ordinary Time During Extraordinary Time In 2022, ordinary time feels like a distant concept. In the face of a crisis (or, in the case of 2020 and 2021, many, many crises) quotidian life is overturned. The shelter-in-place mandates 89 Conversation with a spectator, November 9, 2019. 90 Interview with a spectator, March 20, 2022. 91 ?Subway Surfer Spotted on the 7 Train in Sunnyside Last Week Turns Himself in to Police,? Sunnyside Post, April 17, 2017, https://sunnysidepost.com/subway-surfer-spotted-on-the-7-train-in-sunnyside-last-week-turns-himself- into-police; Jake Offenhartz, ?Teen Killed While Subway Surfing Atop 7 Train,? Gothamist, November 25, 2019, https://gothamist.com. 193 that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic emptied the streets of New York City.92 Ridership of the subway fell dramatically in the first half of 2020, beginning to creep up again in the fall.93 The subway served less than half the passengers it does in a typical year. In April 2020, it served only 8% of its pre-pandemic ridership. As normal urban activity disappeared, the perception of ordinary time did too. Over the last two years, people have regularly remarked about how 2020 seems endless, how they feel unfixed in time.94 Missing the temporal markers that evidenced the passage of time, the present endures. Under COVID, one enduring present, that of ordinary time, is substituted for another, the unfixed temporality of crisis. It is this kind of radical disruption that should seemingly end ordinary time. New York in the pandemic is not the New York of the pre-pandemic, when time was normal and every day. Yet, peculiarly, The Subway Plays persisted. In the early days of the pandemic, The New York Times billed the podplays as a COVID-safe art experience. Critic Jose Sol?s wistfully remarked, ?the plays now feel like bittersweet phantasmagoria. Snapshots preserved in sounds and feelings, of a city that may never be the same.?95 Of course, if place is constructed through time, as Massey suggests, it will never be the same. However, as a spectator of The Subway Plays in a pandemic and ?post-? pandemic world, the podplays seem to suggest that nothing has changed at all. The city is still the same, ordinary time persists. 92 Photographs by The New York Times and Michael Kimmelman, ?The Great Empty,? The New York Times, March 23, 2020, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/23/world/coronavirus-great-empty.html; Jessica Snouwaert, ?13 Photos of New York City Looking Deserted as the City Tries to Limit the Spread of the Coronavirus,? Business Insider, April 1, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pictures-of-new-york- city-empty-streets-2020-3. 93 ?Subway and Bus Ridership for 2020.? 94 Shannon Stirone, ?Why 2020 Felt like a Time Warp, According to Science,? Vox, December 9, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22150990/2020-time-covid-warp-year-end; Leigh Weingus, ?If You Keep Having This Weird Feeling Like 2020 Never Happened, You?re Not Alone?Here?s What?s Going On,? Parade: Entertainment, Recipes, Health, Life, Holidays, February 21, 2021, https://parade.com/1167332/leighweingus/why-do-i-feel-like-2020-never-happened/. 95 ?Dance, Theater and More.? 194 I first saw The Subway Plays in October 2019 and most recently I saw them in March 2022. Returning to New York, I wondered how out of place this experience of place would feel. Of course, I would be on the site, but would the site still animate place as it once did? Would The Subway Plays feel like a relic of a time gone by, the no-longer-now, or would it still feel like it was happening now? If place is an event, meaning that it is always changing, the COVID-19 pandemic might move us away dramatically enough that the place captured in the podplays no longer felt like the place in which the spectator sat. The Subway Plays always knew that time would keep getting away from them, that the city would keep moving and changing long after the recording was completed. How elastic is ordinary time? When does a place begin to feel like a different place? On the day I most recently saw The Subway Plays, 3,284,022 people took the subway, which is only 57.6% of the MTA?s pre-pandemic ridership.96 The trains were largely empty, though not entirely. Some were crowded, but I was always able to find a seat, even during rush hour. Masks were still required on the train, though not everyone wore one. Knowing this before arriving, I wondered before seeing the plays if masks would make it easier to imagine that the dialogue of characters in The Subway Plays belonged to the people on the train, since their lips were not visible. It did not. Other spectators agreed with my observation.97 Rather than making it seem as if anyone could be talking, it appeared as if no one was talking. It was unclear to me when I saw the show previously how much the layering effect depended on people?s lips moving. One of the distinctly tricky things about layering the past-now onto the present-now was that it was impossible to anticipate how communication styles would change. Likewise, a notable difference between the present moment and that represented in the podplays was that no one 96 ?Day-by-Day Ridership Numbers,? MTA, accessed April 17, 2022, https://new.mta.info/coronavirus/ridership. 97 Spectator Interviews, March 20, 2022. 195 spoke about COVID or masks. Of course, they did not. From the standpoint of 2017, wearing masks was simply unfathomable. But in the present moment, its absence in ?everyday? conversation was noticeable. In some respects, listening to the podplays in 2022 feels less like the distance between 2017 and the present, and more like the past trying to create an alternative timeline of the present. One way of approaching this is through Derrida?s notion of contretemps, which he uses to refer to unforeseen circumstances or events but can also translate as ?counter-time.?98 Derrida uses contretemps as the time which breaks the present apart and does not simply emerge when the world is in crisis. Jack Reynolds, commenting upon Derrida?s analysis, suggests ?The movements by which time had been measured are disrupted, leaving only an empty form of time that eschews the unity of the subject.?99 In the Subway Plays, the out of joint nature of the present is magnified through crisis, but perhaps it was always out of joint, always an alternative time emerging in the present. Geraldine Cousin productively identifies the suppleness of the present, suggesting that ?Though the theatrical present moment is subject to erasure, it also contains the possibility of restitution. The past can be reconstituted within the present, just as the future can be imagined.?100 The podplays are, perhaps, exactly that, the past being reconstituted in the present, as the present. Their dramatic temporality acts as if time had not marched on, but the present simply endured. If this is the experience of time in The Subway Plays under the constraints of COVID-19, what happens to the experience of place? We can imagine a spatial counterpart to contretemps, a contrelieu, that understands place out of joint. It imagines a disrupted unity of place. In this 98 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 88. 99 Reynolds, ?Time Out of Joint Between Phenomenology and Post-Structuralism,? 110. 100 Cousin, Playing for time, xii. 196 approach, place is not singular, but united in its trajectory through time. Like its temporal counterpart, contrelieu measures the disruption that breaks apart place. Such an approach considers the distance between place as expected and place as received. Place will always be different than we expect, as it marches on whether or not we are there. Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us that ?A place is opened and delimited by the always similar taking-place of an event that is always different. Taking-place is merely the intersection of time and space- it?s opening. This opening is singular, producing each time its own local colour- or rather, the place itself as a colour??101 Does even anticipating the potential for contrelieu reinstate place as naturally stable, in which what is counter than it a surprising interruption? Or is contrelieu, as part of a constantly changing place, offer no difference from other theorizations of place after all? Perhaps the most striking aspect of The Subway Plays under COVID was how much of the present moment presented in the plays still applied to New York, still created a sense of now. In this sense, we can recognize that change, even during a time of crisis, is incremental. While time might feel out of joint, and The Subway Plays cannot account for all that has transpired since they were recorded, ultimately, the contemporary moment may still have much in common with the assumption of ordinary time. New Yorkers still wear black, the architecture of the stations and route remains the same, and people still endlessly navigate the strange social space that is the subway. If time is an essential feature of experiencing a place, and a particularly crucial function of site-specific performance, it is essential to remember that one of the reasons that ordinary time seems to endure is because change is glacial, and places tend to resist it. The fervent prayer of New Yorkers in 2022 might as well be, ?please, let us return to ordinary time.? 101 Jean-Luc Nancy, ?The Technique of the Present,? in Time, ed. Amelia Groom, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art (London?: Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery?; The MIT Press, 2013), 108. 197 Of course, while the effects of the passage of time upon the performance might be less impactful than first imagined, that?s not to say that they had no effect. One of the clearest victims of the ravages of time was the Android app. Despite This is Not a Theatre Company?s use of the term ?podplays,? the delivery of The Subway Plays only shares their auditory nature with podcasts. Instead, the user must download an app that houses the audio tracks and directions. I downloaded the app in 2019 and made use of it in the time between then and my last visit. However, in March 2022, when planning my final trip, I discovered that the Android app was out of date and thus unusable. Though I ultimately found a workaround, the decaying technology certainly evidenced how much time had passed (and how much had changed) since the plays premiered. Erin Mee, commenting on the matter, lamented, ?digital performance requires *constant* updating. Sigh.?102 The Subway Plays are beholden to an evolving place and time, in both form and content. Representations might hold place still, but they are pressing against its nature. Time and place are always out of joint, but perhaps not with each other. After all, ?all our dead maps will eventually fail.?103 It?s just a matter of time. 102 Email correspondence between Erin Mee and Kelley Holley, ?Subway Plays,? March 23, 2022. 103 Camp, ?Quaint Devices,? 50. 198 Chapter 4 ?Eating Place: Consumption and Authenticity in Washington D.C. and Early Modern England? Introduction Seated next to a crumb-coated cake and a small vanity mirror, a man alternates between frosting the cake and frosting his face. Using red buttercream, he creates a tiny rosette at the center of the cake and then rouges his face. It is a moment of preparation, of food, and for the stage. He works in near darkness, lit only by a brass reading light. The man is Alberto Denis. He is dressed in what appears to be an Elizabethan tunic, complete with puffy sleeves and lace detail. He makes direct eye contact with members of his audience, simultaneously inviting and accusing. This early scene in Third Rail Projects? Confection, a site-specific performance staged in the reading rooms of the Folger Shakespeare Library, gives the audience a taste of what is yet to come. It also gives us a taste of a number of central issues raised by the entire performance, issues like food inequality and its gendered and racialized politics that linger under the disguise of sweet decadence. Over the course of a 50-minute performance, Confection commingles abundance with deprivation. It engages the feasting culture, economics, and gender politics of early modern England ? all in ways that question our own complicity in the perpetuating food inequality and that critique the food culture of contemporary Washington D.C. Devised by Third Rail Projects, a New York City-based company known for their immersive performances like Then She Fell, in collaboration with the Folger Theatre, Confection is a ?research-fueled romp? based on scholarly work of researchers at the Folger Institute.1 Using archival materials, such as recipes or 1 BWW News Desk, ?Third Rail Projects? Immersive CONFECTION Comes To Folger Theatre,? BroadwayWorld.com, accessed February 20, 2020, https://www.broadwayworld.com/washington-dc/article/Third-Rail-Projects- Immersive-CONFECTION-Comes-To-Folger-Theatre-20190206. 199 ?receipts,? banquet inventories, and ledgers, alongside decorative croquembouche and other decadent treats, the performance plays with the site of the Folger Shakespeare Library to conjure a sense of place for an audience presumably unfamiliar with the tastes of early modern England. After an evening of unconsumed tempting treats, the performance culminates in a shared dessert that appears to be the ?authentic? foodstuffs of the Old World. The audience transforms into culinary tourists, experiencing a place through their palates. Confection tasked its audience to think about place through the cultural registers that constitute it unique and recognizable. In Confection, food becomes a primary dramaturgical means of understanding both the site of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Washington DC more broadly, as well as figuring the landscape of early modern England. Food is staged in relation to what it can bring together (communities, temporalities, and placialities) and what it can keep apart (classes, genders, and races). As such, food is never just about sustenance but is a political and social force for shaping the lived experience of a place. Through the use of a site- specific performance that occupied a multi-sited imaginary, Third Rail Projects? Confection attempted to represent the heterogeneity of place through the individualized experience of consumption and the shared experience of commensality. Case Study: Confection by Third Rail Projects The operative conceit in Confection is an essentialist imagining of early modern English food, which Third Rail Projects uses in the basic equation that it offers its audiences: that experiencing a sense of taste or having gustatory experience will translate into a sense of place. In other words, Confection engages a transportive fantasy using the bite as a central feature of its dramaturgy. That dramaturgical equation is in fact an ingenious answer to a series of 200 fundamental questions that Third Rail Projects faced as they moved from the material to the performative: How do they establish a sense of place for those who are unacquainted with Early Modern England and who have never had access to its culture? How does an audience who has never been to a banquet hall, feasted at a coronation, or watched on hungrily as others gorged themselves contextualize and historicize what they are experiencing? In this capacity, the experience of taste not only functioned to establish a sense of place. It also provided a context that de-familiarized an otherwise familiarized, rote practice. First and foremost, the dramaturgical use of food filled in the gaps of experience. Although audiences were not actually transported across the Atlantic and back hundreds of years, the gustatory experience staged a kind of familiarity and accessibility that presented the illusion of authenticity and thus blurred the lines between simulated and actual evidence, all of which complicated the notions of presence and access. In many respects, this gustatory dramaturgy constructed of a sense of place and provided audiences with the kind of familiarity with Early Modern England and the sense of authenticity that a tourist might gain by traveling abroad. Consequently, when the audience finally tasted the morsels before them, they were, like tourists at a reconstructed historical site, able to perceive the experience as authentic, as if they are savoring another world from another place and time. Ironically, Confection never directly laid claims to authenticity. But it implied as much through the use of archival text, architecture, and taste even though none of this material was demarcated as authentic. The result was that Confection played with the illusion of authenticity not so much in order to idealize the past, in the way nostalgia suggests, but as part of an aesthetic ploy or construct that invited the audience to participate, while making them feel uneasy for doing so and thus providing them with a real opportunity to interpret and act in the face of an 201 inequity that seemed to traverse temporal and spatial boundaries. And here the contrast was between the experience of a seemingly authentic historical construct on the one hand and the actual immediacy of a contemporary D.C. on the other. Through the disparity of that experience, Third Rail Projects prompted the audience to consider the inherent inequalities of food, and subsequently of place. But what were the operative means here? Third Rail Projects? Confection attempted to use food represent place in both spatial and temporal terms. The cultural registers that construct the experience of place can be imagined as one?s sense of place. Akin to a unique and recognizable flavor, ?a sense of place? is distinguished from the production of place. While social, cultural, and political factors influence how a place is created, a sense of place instead looks at how a place is understood and experienced. For many, the marker of authenticity is a vital measure of the essence and quality of a sense of a place and thus defines how it is experienced.2 It differentiates the accuracy of the experience as discrete and distinct from the encounters with other places. For tourists and locals alike, authenticity appeals to a desire for place to be settled, wherein one can expect the delight of an oft-spoken of dish or the comfort of a familiar meal. If a sense of place is conveyed to a person through food ? through what is constructed, presented and received as ?authentic cuisine? ? then the perception of authenticity corroborates the relationship between the two, assuring individuals that they are indeed experiencing the ?true? place. Under the auspices of this kind of authenticity, place can become static, ostensibly preserving essential characteristics and communal bounds despite the pressure of external influence. For the tourist, the sensorial experience of a seemingly unchanged place appeals to an underlying romanticism and nostalgia that assumes the possibility of a ?true? and ?timeless? 2 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), 157. 202 experience of a place. There is a variation of this experience for the local as well, who finds nostalgia to be a comfort and an answer to cravings for the lost moments of childhood and ?the way things used to be.? For tourist and local alike such an experience affirms or at least implies a kind of belonging that equates a ?sense of place? with a sense of ?their place,? and a sense that knowing where and how they ?properly? fit within that place is an affirmation of its authenticity. The desire for authenticity, therefore, is a desire to hold and contain place, keeping it safe from the passage of time. But as cultural geographers like Doreen Massey and Tim Cresswell are swift to point out, this is a futile effort that discounts global mobility. While Massey characterizes place in decisively performative terms, describing it as a spatio-temporal event,3 Cresswell underscores the importance of that event-centered characterization by reminding us that a static treatment of place upholds hegemonic structures of class and race through the identification of who is out of place.4 Like the ephemerality of a performance event, nothing about place can stay, in the end. Even the mountains move, after all.5 While the possibility of an authentic place might itself be fraught, having sense of place means not having to dispose of authenticity outright. It is not that a sense of place needs to be authentic, but a sense of place is rendered through the idea of the authentic. As a sense of place speaks to experience and understanding, performance studies scholars might instead ask whether a place can be experienced as authentic and not be in itself authentic? 3 Doreen B. Massey, For Space (London?; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE, 2005) 130. 4 Tim Cresswell, ?Place and Ideological Strategies,? in In Place/Out of Place, NED-New edition, Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 149?62, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt1xt.9. 5 Massey, For Space, 130-142. 203 Metamodernism and Authenticity One way to understand how authenticity functions as a performance category, particularly with regard to their relevance to the objectives of this chapter, is to examine it through the lens of Robin Van Den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen?s work on metamodernism. They offer metamodern as an alternative to the skepticism of postmodernism and the enthusiasm of modernism, that ?seeks forever a truth it never expects to find.?6 Argued to be the dominant structure of feeling of the first decades of the 21st century, metamodernism explicitly embraces a ?both-neither? dynamic, rather than post-modernisms neither-nor.7 Rather than operating under binary opposition, metamodernism is situated in the in-between, as a oscillating pendulum or a knowing wink.8 I am particularly interested in how the reception of their notion of metamodernism by performance studies theorists like Daniel Schulze provides a conceptual model for the sense of place that operates in Third Rail Production?s Confection. Metamodernism offers a framework to analyze the audience?s experience of authenticity within forms of representation and performance. Discussing the uses of authenticity in 21st- century performance, Schulze considers the opportunities metamodernism opens for the audience. He suggests ?metamodernism allows for an authentic experience that is not parody or nostalgia but is genuinely real while everyone knows that it is fake.?9 Schulze suggestion offers an insight into how the audience embraces ?as-if? thinking, allowing themselves to have ?real? experiences within the confines of performance. This is particularly salient for Confection, in 6 Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, ?Notes on Metamodernism,? Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2, no. 1 (January 2010): 5677, https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677, 5. 7 Vermeulen and van den Akker, 9-10. 8 Robin Van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen, eds., Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism, Radical Cultural Studies 7 (London?; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) 11. 9 Daniel Schulze, Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Make It Real, Methuen Drama Engage (London?; New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017) 58. 204 which audience members experience the sensations of the place of Early Modern England, transported through a necessarily incomplete illusion. Audience members, engaged in real experiences of eating, allow those real bites to expose an indecipherable tension between theatricality and reality. I utilize this framework to interrogate how the pursuit of authenticity, despite its constant evasion, becomes an integral quality of a sense of place. Experiencing place as oscillating, as metamodernism is wont to do, between a na?ve sincerity (?here we are, in England?) and a harrowed skepticism (?3,585 miles separate the stained-glass windows of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Holy Trinity Church?), not only opens a third position (?Though I am here, I feel as if I am there?) but also directs our attention away from the literal localization of place to its theoretical framing. In this capacity, the oscillation is no longer between here and there, but a postmodern interest in the constructedness of place and a modernist belief in its undeniable essence, ready to be experienced upon arrival. 10 As Doreen Massey reminds us, ?far from standing for the stability of representation, real space (space-time) is indeed impossible to pin down.?11 A metamodern perspective, therefore, recognizes ?place? as an evolving assemblage that can also be experienced and recognized because of its inherent qualities. This is the same indefinite certainty that always surrounds the notion of place, since, as Massey might suggest, place moves on and is not quite experienced as expected or remembered, but encountered through the senses, nonetheless. In this chapter, I engage a metamodern framework to acknowledge the impossibilities and inevitable failures of representing place ?authentically,? while simultaneously investigating the shimmering moments of success in which place is experienced. The distance between ?failure? and ?success? is not always as far as it seems. Patrick Duggan calls ?mimetic 10 See Soja, Postmodern Geographies; Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference.. 11 Massey, For Space 80. 205 shimmering,? an ?undecidability? between reality and mimesis, that places the spectator in the ?gravitational pulls? of both polls.12 For Duggan, mimetic shimmering refuses resolution instead offering a simultaneity of experience. Likewise, literary scholar Wolfgang Funk characterizes authenticity as beyond binary opposition: beyond originality and fakeness, essence and construction, reality and fiction, authorship and reception.13 Duggan and Funk acknowledge and ultimately forgo binaries in favor of both-neither structure, the metaxis quality Van Den Akker and Vermeulen attribute to metamodernism.14 Duggan and Funk demonstrate that authenticity is not reliant on truth, but instead, perception. In particular, this is applicable to ?authentic? cuisine. Food and Performance The scholarly merit and representative potential of food have long been debated.15 It has taken decades for Food Studies to flourish within the Humanities, in part because the merit of food, particularly in regard to art, is disputed. For instance, building on the work of Hegel, philosopher Elizabeth Telfer dismisses food as a ?minor art,? citing its inability to be contemplated due to its ephemerality, its inability to convey representative meaning, and its inability to move us.16 Telfer?s suggestion about time to contemplate is so limiting it nearly excludes performance, a genre she tries meagerly to recuperate into the major arts by suggesting that it can live on in the mind of the spectator. Nicola Perullo argues that the temporality of 12 Patrick Duggan, Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance, Paperback edition, Manchester 1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) 73-74. 13 Wolfgang Funk, The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2017), 55. 14 Van den Akker, Gibbons, and Vermeulen, Metamodernism, 11. 15 Gitanjali G. Shahani and Jennifer Park, ?We Are What You Eat: Conversations on Food and Race? (Folger Shakespeare Library: Critical Race Conversations, Virtual, 15 2020). 16 Elizabeth Telfer, Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food (London?; New York: Routledge, 1996) 58-60. 206 eating does not allow one to lose themselves in contemplation.17 These claims have been disputed, with scholars maintaining that food does leave an impression on one?s memory, whether considering taste or practical skill.18 Certainly, I have long contemplated the food I tasted in March 2019 during Confection. Others have found Telfer?s others remarks about the artistic potential of food unconvincing.19 Theatre and food scholar Kristin Hunt argues directly for the mimetic potential of food, examining the ways in which molecular gastronomy, taste is made strange, appearing in unexpected textures and forms, like chicken skin cotton candy or crab ice cream.20 Of course, the early modern period offers many iterations of mimetic food, including Robert May?s famed feast composed of a sugar-paste stag (in which a lady in attendance should remove an arrow, revealing a wine flowing ?as blood running out of a wound,? and a pie filled with live birds and frogs intended to burst out when cut, among numerous other eccentricities.21 Clearly, food is conceptualized with a sense of theatricality beyond its ephemerality.22 Though often first conceived of as the bite, food offers a variety of experiences outside of its consumption. Though Perullo rejects ?taste exclusivism,? it is worth considering how critics who emphasize the ephemerality of food imagine the mouth as the primary site of meaning making. Proponents of food?s mimetic potential interrogate how additional senses, such as sight 17 Nicola Perullo, Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food, 2016, 114. 18 David Sutton, ?Cooking Skills, the Senses, and Memory: The Fate of Practical Knowledge,? in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan, Penny Van Esterik, and Carole M. Counihan (London, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge, 2012), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umdcp/detail.action?docID=1097808. 19 William Hughes, ?Elizabeth Telfer, Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food,? Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1 (January 1, 1998): 56. 20 Kristin Hunt, Alimentary Performances: Mimesis, Theatricality, and Cuisine (Abington?; New York, N.Y: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2018). 21 ?The Accomplisht Cook: Introduction,? accessed October 17, 2020, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22790/22790-h/main.html. 22 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ?Making Sense of Food in Performance: The Table and the Stage,? in The Senses in Performance, ed. Sally Banes and Andr? Lepecki (New York: Routledge, 2006). 207 and touch, offer additional meaning. After all, as the idiom suggests, we ?eat with our eyes,? too.23 In this capacity, food has numerous sites of engagement, allowing it to have vast representative potential. The representative potential of food is not limited to taste but can also be seen in food insecurity and prosperity, food labor in its various forms, and the development of food cultures. Roland Barthes demonstrates the complex semiotic and symbolic power of food: ?Information about food must be gathered wherever it can be found: by direct observation in the economy, in techniques, usages, and advertising; and by indirect observation in the mental life of a given society.?24 Barthes illustrates that food operates complexly within a society: as a product of labor to be consumed sensorily, as a source of knowledge, and as a social mentality. Consequently, it is not enough to consider taste as the only way food conveys meaning or participates in place- making. Accordingly, this chapter considers not only what a place eats, but also how a place eats, and what it might mean when a place is eaten. A core dramaturgical question, Confection asked what it means to consume. To answer this, the spectator evaluated the eating habits of the Early Modern English in order to interrogate our own food cultures. Understanding that eating is always already a necessary act, Derrida poses a useful alternative that relocates consumption as an ethical quandary: The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there's no other definition of the good (du bien), how for goodness sake should one eat well (bien manger)?25 23 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ?Making Sense of Food in Performance: The Table and the Stage,? 4. 24 Roland Barthes, ?Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,? in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan, Penny Van Esterik, and Carole M. Counihan (London, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge, 2012), 24. 25 Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., ??Eating Well ,? or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,? in Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991) 115. 208 Whether one is an omnivore or a vegetarian, rich or poor, one consumes the world. Extrapolated upon, as literary and food scholar Gitanjali G. Shahani does, this is not limited to plants and animals we consume, but also ?individuals, places, people, cultures, forms of life, life-worlds.?26 To eat well, it is not a matter of what we eat, but how. Chapter Overview I begin this chapter with an overview of the relationship between food and place. In this, I examine food from the perspective of the ingredient, the recipe, the technique, and the meal, as the interval stages of how we conceive of food. Next, I turn to Confection, considering the ways in which the archive lent authenticity to a dramaturgical sense of place. Then, I analyze the final feast of Confection, a final capitulation to audience?s desire to taste. In this, I argue for a gustatory dramaturgy that enabled a sense of place. Finally, through the act of cooking, I consider preservation as a means of analyzing our desires of authenticity. Throughout this chapter, I argue that the act of eating offers spectators a new means of sensing place, as a means of critically engaging our own food cultures and practices. Salt, Fat, Acid, Here: A Survey of Food and Place What does it mean to ?eat? a place? Is it the ingredient from its land? The techniques from its kitchens? Or, shall we take a more sinister approach: To rape a land of its natural resources and enslave its people for sugar and spice? How is a sense of place marked and shaped by absence and trauma? Does that, too, lend to a sense of uniqueness and familiarity? Suggesting 26 Gitanjali G. Shahani, Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature (Ithaca, UNITED STATES: Cornell University Press, 2020), 18. 209 that the consumption or mere presence of food can foster an experience of place insists upon the complex ways in which food has traditionally been imagined to be unique to a locale. Serving as a synecdoche for a place, food is always already site-specific: arising from a nexus of practical and social processes and circumstances, the communal practice of the art of cookery and the intimacy of the bite both demand negotiations of place on different scales. The unique connection between food and places arises from numerous factors: the ingredients, the recipe, the foodways, the practices of consumption, and, as it digests and presumes the others, the meal, which is often imaged to be a quintessence of food and place. These will be addressed individually, analyzing their particular investment in the consumption of place. Ingredients First, the ingredients. The accessibility of ingredients is dependent on a range of factors in itself, such as the terrain and climate of the region. The available ingredients develop a flavor profile, often linked with regional cooking, as well as the substantive and nutritional components of a typical meal. Luce Giard uses the term terroir to refer to the regional specificity of the flavor of food.27 The French term is difficult to translate, containing allusions to both territory and soil from which the ingredient is grown or raised. The geologic and climatic differences influence the ultimate flavor of the food product: cheese from Languedoc-Roussillon has perceptible differences in taste from that of Normandy.28 As such, the connection of ingredients to a place is developed through both ecological and cultural factors. However, where a product is cultivated 27 Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life. Volume 2: Living and Cooking, New rev. and augm. ed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) ix, 171-198. 28 Ibid. 210 does not necessarily determine what products are used within local cuisine, as the latter is also concerned with trade and other economic dynamics. In many instances, an ingredient that is commonly understood as distinctly native to an area is seen as its quintessential food. In the Mid-Atlantic region, a clear example of this is Maryland?s affinity with crabs. Maryland prides itself on the Chesapeake blue crab. It uses the symbol in tourism, pointing eager eaters to its many crab shacks. A 500-pound stained glass effigy of the crustacean greets passengers at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.29 In 1989, the blue crab was designated as the state crustacean of Maryland, as if it had any competitors.30 Despite its celebratory status, the Chesapeake blue crab is always thought of first and foremost as a local ingredient to be used in the creation of familiar dishes like the Maryland Crab Cake and Crab Imperial, rather than as a living creature at home within the local ecosystem. Outside of Maryland, the ?Chesapeake? blue crab is known as the Atlantic blue crab and can even be found as far as the gulf water of Texas and Louisiana. In actuality, many Maryland crab houses use crabs from these regions when the local population has experienced a shortage.31 In attempt to restore the ?authentic? taste of Maryland, the state government created a program to ensure diners know when their crab meat is authentic Maryland crab. The ?True Blue? program has only 46 participating restaurants in Maryland, with 12 participates in Virginia, nine in D.C., three in Pennsylvania, two in Delaware, and even one in Florida. ?Eating local? puts pressure on the boundaries of place in favor of taste, but also the economy. As is the case with the Maryland 29 ?A 500 Pound Blue Crab Made from Stained Glass,? TwistedSifter (blog), May 15, 2013, https://twistedsifter.com/2013/05/500-pound-stained-glass-blue-crab-bwi-douglass/. 30 ?Blue Crab, Maryland State Crustacean,? accessed February 21, 2020, https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdmanual/01glance/html/symbols/crab.html. 31 Bill Addison, ?I Want Crab. Pure Maryland Crab.,? Eater, September 15, 2016, https://www.eater.com/2016/9/15/12929848/baltimore-maryland-where-to-eat-crab-crabcakes. 211 crab cake, the recognizable taste is often not associated with the ingredient but the recipe. Is the quintessence of a Maryland crab cake the blue crab itself or that it seasoned with a distinct blend of spices called Old Bay? Preparation and Composition As a second consideration of the relationship of food to place, the recipe can refer to both the preparation and composition of a dish. Dramatically impacting the taste and yet often under- appreciated, recipes are a form of literature in which techniques move from embodied practice onto the page for easy transmission and the composition of dishes becomes standardized. The recipe articulates the impact of different preparation techniques, distinguishing mixing from stirring, dicing from chopping, folding from creaming, and whisking. The seeming alchemy of cooking and baking is dependent on the differences held in each choice term: it is only through folding in your ingredients that a cake remains moist and tender. Broadly, the popularity of cooking techniques evidences the types of cuisine consumed in and associated with an area. This can be seen in the association of braising with French cuisine, the clambake with the New England summer, and barbecue with the American south.32 Of course, more people than just the French braise, clambakes are popular in inland cities like Cleveland, and barbecue is a worldwide phenomenon.33 The power to wield such an association is significant. Having a claim to a recognizable composition or preparation of a meal perpetuates power dynamics that foster classism and racism on a global scale. Examples are numerous and expand 32 Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014) 152. 33 Ibid. Janet Podolak, ?Clambakes a Northeast Ohio Tradition, a 75-Year Specialty for Euclid Fish in Mentor,? The News-Herald, accessed February 22, 2020, https://www.news-herald.com/lifestyle/clambakes-a-northeast-ohio- tradition-a--year-specialty-for/article_a7c438dc-c00b-11e8-9d21-4b7104172494.html. Joe Crea, ?Clambake Season: Northeast Ohio?s Favorite Fall Feast Has Its Traditions and Twists,? cleveland, September 18, 2012, https://www.cleveland.com/taste/2012/09/clambake_season_northeast_ohio.html. 212 into questions of culinary appropriation: once can consider the debate over distinctions between ?Soul Food? and Southern Food, the increasing ubiquity of the burrito, and so-called ?Clean Chinese Food? served by a Jewish-American couple in Manhattan.34 Confusing cultural practice, race, and articulations of place, these examples point to power struggles around identification with food preparation and composition. These negotiations are persistent, rarely recognizing the ways in which cooking strategies are borrowed. And yet, it can be through the existence of a recipe that these debates can be resolved. For example, in 2018, Sweden officially recognized that the meatball, a dish for which it is commonly known, is in fact based on a recipe King Charles XII brought back from Turkey in the early 18th century. As Sweden relinquishes its claim to the meatball, it simultaneously affirms a deep connection between food and its place of origin. The Meal The relationship between food and place also reveals not only how a place eats, but also how a place is imagined. A comment made by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in February 2020 highlights the connection. On the show Desus & Mero, AOC bemoaned the lack of bodegas in Washington D.C., noting I don?t know how anyone eats in Washington. D.C., 34 Kimberly Alters, ?How Soul Food Has Become Separated From Its Black Roots,? Huff Post, February 29, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/soul-food-southern-food-black-history_l_5c76070be4b062b30eb90849. Tim Carman, ?Perspective | Should White Chefs Sell Burritos? A Portland Food Cart?s Revealing Controversy.,? Washington Post, May 26, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/05/26/should-white- chefs-sell-burritos-a-portland-restaurants-revealing-controversy/. Helier Cheung, ?Why Do People Get so Angry about Food?,? BBC News, April 13, 2019, sec. US & Canada, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada- 47892747., Stefanie Tuder, ?New NYC Chinese Restaurant Draws Swift Backlash to Racist Language [Updated],? Eater NY, April 9, 2019, https://ny.eater.com/2019/4/9/18301861/lucky-lees-chinese-open-controversy-nyc. 213 which probably explains why everyone is fighting all the time?They?re hangry.?35 Washingtonians were less than amused, quickly taking to Twitter with their rebuttal: ?You must be eating in WASHINGTON. Let me know when you want to eat in **DC**?,? quipped activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham.36 Others chimed in to support AOC, ?Wait wait!!! AOC is right! We spent a few days in a Capitol Hill Hotel and could find no breakfast places at all.? 37 A third person countered with ellipses that suggested a self-evident distinction, ??that is Washington, not DC?.?38 This example succinctly demonstrates the complex imaginary of the District, in which there are two cities: the transient community composed primarily of white politicians and lobbyists, and the predominantly Black and largely overlooked residents who are deeply invested in the city?s culture. For the latter, food features prominently in its self-definition, as well as in its struggles for broader legibility. Since the broader national audience perceives the District as transient or residing outside its boundaries, residents are often faced with the common trope: ?No one is from D.C.? 39 AOC?s comment amends the trope, offering instead ?No one eats in D.C.,? 35 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: ?Welcome to the Bronx, Where Your Local Congresswoman Will Get You in Trouble with the MTA and Make You a Margarita after to Make up for It ? Https://T.Co/NdYJYzWFte? / Twitter,? Twitter, accessed February 17, 2020, https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1225641877895966721 (2:02-2:15) 36 Brittany Packnett Cunningham, ?Brittany Packnett Cunningham on Twitter: ?.@aoc I Have so Much Respect for You but I?m Really, Really Offended Right Now. I Never Expected to Feel This Way. You Really Got on @SHODesusAndMero & Said You Don?t Know How Folks Eat in DC?!? You Must Be Eating in WASHINGTON. Let Me Know When You Want to Eat in **DC**? Https://T.Co/Ui9cvp7WAp? / Twitter,? Twitter, accessed February 17, 2020, https://twitter.com/mspackyetti/status/1225780663762247682. 37 Profilewriter, ?Profilewriter on Twitter: ?@MsPackyetti @AOC @SHODesusAndMero Wait Wait!!! AOC Is Right! We Spent a Few Days in a Capitol Hill Hotel and Could Find No Breakfast Places at All. And Nothing Resembling a Bodega Anywhere.? / Twitter,? Twitter, accessed February 17, 2020, https://twitter.com/profilewriter/status/1225816924262748160. 38 Bigqueezie1013, ?Bigqueezie1013 on Twitter: ?@profilewriter @MsPackyetti @AOC @SHODesusAndMero That Is Because You Were on Capital Hill..That Is Washington, Not DC.....? / Twitter,? Twitter, accessed February 17, 2020, https://twitter.com/bigqueezie0205/status/1225888411057369088. 39 Flora Lindsay-Herrera, ?One City for All? The Characteristics of Residential Displacement in Southwest Washington, DC,? Land 8, no. 2 (February 2019): 34, https://doi.org/10.3390/land8020034, 34. 214 which is in many ways the same thing. To eat is to live. To discredit the eating habits of a place is to discredit the place. Residents of the District have been long overlooked as political subjects and cultural producers. Ethnographer Gabriella Gahlia Modan refers to this relationship as D.C.?s ?colonial reality,? which includes the present lack of congressional representation and the inability to vote in presidential elections until 1964.40 Similarly, the national opinion of D.C. cuisine has been tinged by the Federal Government, looking no further than government staffers and lobbyists at power lunches,41 presidential favorite dishes,42 and Senate Bean Soup.43 In a telling slogan, Metrocooking DC claims ?For two days only, DC will be delicious,? suggesting both that the District is normally bland and that place is a thing fit to be consumed.44 Largely excluded from the national perception of the city are the quintessential items that actually compose the local cuisine: half-smokes, Ethiopian fare, and the beloved mumbo sauce. It should be no surprise that these dishes are associated with D.C.?s Black community that composes the majority of its residents. For many residents, the authentic taste of D.C. is more than just the half-smoke, it?s the half-smoke from Ben?s Chili Bowl on U Street eaten with go-go music playing in the background. Accept no substitutions, like the hipster eatery called 40 Gabriella Gahlia Modan, Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place, New Directions in Ethnography 1 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007) 34-45. Sabiyha Prince, African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C: Race, Class and Social Justice in the Nation?s Capital, Urban Anthropology (Farnham, Surrey [England]?; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014) 81-84. 41 ?Power Lunch,? WAMU (blog), accessed April 18, 2020, https://wamu.org/show/dish-city/, https://wamu.org/story/19/10/24/power-lunch/. 42 ?The 24 Dishes That Took D.C. from Culinary Backwater to Food Destination - Washington Post,? accessed April 18, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/food/24-dishes-that-shaped-how-dc-eats/; Jaya Saxena, The Book of Lost Recipes: The Best Signature Dishes from Historic Restaurants Rediscovered (Salem, MA: Page Street Publishing Co, 2018). 43 Lauren Ober, ?Steeped In Tradition: The Story Of The Senate?s Signature Soup,? WAMU (blog), December 12, 2014, https://wamu.org/story/14/12/12/steeped_in_tradition_the_story_of_the_senates_signature_soup/; ?The 24 Dishes That Took D.C. from Culinary Backwater to Food Destination - Washington Post.? 44 ?MetroCooking DC 2017,? WTOP, accessed April 20, 2020, https://wtop.com/contests/metrocooking-dc-2017/. 215 HalfSmoke that opened in 2016 in neighboring Shaw. When HalfSmoke opened locals were frustrated, seeing the kitschy restaurant as a tourist trap capitalizing on authentic local cuisine. Instead, it was opened by Andre McCain, a Black D.C. native, who created the restaurant to provide a nostalgic respite for millennial Washingtonians. Clearly, the relationship between food, authenticity, and place remains unsettled even in the D.C. imaginary. Of course, D.C. and Washington are not wholly separate: they ?rub elbows,? influencing, obscuring, and blurring with one another due to the impossibility of untangling interconnected and contingent practices of place and its inhabitants.45 Co-occupying the same land turns D.C. residents into Washingtonians and the half-smoke into presidential food in the hands of President Obama.46 However, as the quintessential food of D.C. becomes increasingly known to tourists commercialized, with Ben?s Chili Bowl now having a location in the Ronald Regan National Airport, the tale of two places overlooks the precarity on which its larger food culture is situated. Eating The fourth consideration between food and place is how people eat in a place. This can be imagined in two ways: the first through food scarcity and insecurity; the second, through commensality. Exposing the deeply political implications of food, the relationship between place and food is also the relationship between place and hunger. ?Food Deserts,? a term used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that is largely rejected by activists in favor of terms like ?Food Apartheid? that do not obscure racialization and the processes that led to unequal access, are areas in which no grocery store is available within a half-mile walk, 40% or more households do 45 Prince, African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C., 83. 46 ?Obama Gets a Half-Smoke at Ben?s Chili Bowl | 44 | Washingtonpost.Com,? accessed April 20, 2020, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/01/10/obama_gets_a_half-smoke_at_ben.html. 216 not have access to a car, and the median household income is below the poverty level.47 In Washington D.C., 51% of ?Food Apartheids? are in Ward 8, with another 31% in Ward 7.48 Both Wards are located in Southeast D.C., in the predominantly Black communities across the Anacostia River. Compare this with the 4% of ?Food Apartheids? in Ward 6, the location of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Capitol Hill. In Southeast D.C., approximately 1/3 of the population experiences food insecurity.49 In 2017, Ward 7 had two full-service grocery stores, whereas Ward 8 had just one.50 The lack of choice in regard to grocery stores creates other problems. In his ethnographic study of food in Southeast D.C., Ashant? M. Reese found that many residents avoided the one Safeway available due to perpetual low stock, and anti-Black anti-theft measures meant police presence was high.51 When able, shoppers went to Maryland to get better quality food, relying on the economic resources of their own or of their neighbors.52 Others fish the Anacostia River with a reported 17,000 people eating what they catch.53 Many of these fishers eat their catch every day, well exceeding the health advisory given the pollution levels of the river.54 Without access 47 Ashant? M. Reese, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D. C. (Chapel Hill, UNITED STATES: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umdcp/detail.action?docID=5726166; Jessica Fu, ?Is It Time to Retire the Term ?Food Desert?,?? The Counter (blog), January 9, 2020, https://thecounter.org/is-it-time-to-retire-the-term- food-desert-grocery-snap/; Randy Smith, ?Food Access in D.C Is Deeply Connected to Poverty and Transportation,? D.C. Policy Center, March 13, 2017, https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/food-access-dc-deeply- connected-poverty-transportation/. 48 Smith, ?Food Access in D.C Is Deeply Connected to Poverty and Transportation.? 49 ?Capital Area Food Bank: Hunger Heat Map (Calendar Year 2019),? accessed December 4, 2020, https://cafb.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=8431eda28c1f4aaeb56192941cee249b. 50 Reese, Black Food Geographies, 47. 51 Reese, 48. 52 Ibid., 55. 53 SustainabilityBy Julie LawsonNovember 20 and 2012 7, ?Thousands Eating Contaminated Anacostia River Fish,? accessed December 4, 2020, https://ggwash.org/view/29405/thousands-eating-contaminated-anacostia-river-fish. 54 ?Subsistence Fishing, Ethnographic Resource Study ? Nature and Society,? accessed March 7, 2020, https://www.landscapepartnership.org/plan-design/nature-and-society/nps-spotlights/2016-spotlight-on- national-park-resources/subsistence-fishing-ethnographic-resource-study. 217 to affordable, wide-ranging food options, a place?s economy, public health, and quality of life are severely impacted. The nature of food insecurity also defines how a place eats in terms of commensality. Residents often grow community gardens, cook meals for their neighbors, create food pantries on their front lawns, and enlist local businesses.55 In this capacity, residents work locally to assert their agency in shaping their place through food. Here, residents illustrate the intersection between what is eaten and how it is eaten, the resulting nexus brings together local ingredients, foodways and meals, and commensality to forge a relationship between place and food. The Gastronomical Library: The Folger Shakespeare Library as Site The Folger Shakespeare Library sits atop Capitol Hill, across the street from the Library of Congress and caddy-corner to the Supreme Court. Significantly influencing the landscape and aesthetic of Capitol Hill, the building is an early example of ?modernized classicism,? a style- now recognizable throughout the District that strives to connect classical democracy to its American contemporary.56 If there was a question about whether the Folger Shakespeare Library was situated in Washington or D.C., it is perhaps best answered by author Paul Collins? quip, ?If geography is any indication, then the Folger Library is the fourth branch of American government.?57 For Henry Clay Folger and Emily Folger, the library they built was designed to 55 Reese, Black Food Geographies; Will Schick, ?This Mailbox Pantry In Hill East Is Trying To Make A Dent In Neighborhood Food Insecurity,? DCist, February 3, 2020, https://dcist.com/story/20/02/03/this-mailbox-pantry-in- hill-east-is-trying-to-make-a-dent-in-neighborhood-food-insecurity/; Margaret Barthel, ?This Grassroots Group Handed Out 600 Meals To Neighbors In Anacostia On Friday,? WAMU (blog), March 21, 2020, https://wamu.org/story/20/03/21/this-grassroots-group-handed-out-600-meals-to-neighbors-in-anacostia-on- friday/. 56 Wall text, ?A Monument to Shakespeare: The Architecture of the Folger Shakespeare Library,? The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. 57 Quoted in Grant, Collecting Shakespeare, 193. 218 ideologically tie America and the Elizabethan era in the mind of the nation, situating Shakespeare as a national heritage. Here heritage functions in a manner that recalls Brian Graham?s assertion, ?[I]f heritage is the contemporary use of the past, and if its meanings are defined in the present, then we create the heritage we require and manage it for a range of purposes defined by the needs and demands of our present societies.?58 At the Folger Shakespeare Library, heritage is at its most tender and malleable. Confection was performed in the library?s The Paster Reading Room, space infrequently accessed by the public but which they may glimpse through a window. The architecture is inspired by illustrations in the Folger?s vast collection, now of over 260,000 books from the 15th century to the present, 60,000 manuscripts, and over 90,000 other documents.59 Modeled to evoke the style of a Tudor-Stuart great hall, the room is lined with bookshelves, a large stone fireplace, and stained-glass windows that reach into its cathedral ceiling. The window was commissioned to imitate the apical window at the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon, introducing the theme of the ?Seven Ages of Man? from As You Like It.60 The transportive aesthetics of the Folger anticipate the dramaturgical conjuring yet to come, an essential backdrop to bring about the performance?s ?magic.?61 The library?s architecture merges the Old World with the New in a style called ?Tudor- Deco.?62 Authenticity, in the sense of complete accuracy, was not the goal. Emily Folger 58 Brian Graham, ?Heritage as Knowledge: Capital or Culture?,? Urban Studies 39, no. 5/6 (2002): 1004. 59 admin, ?The Collection,? Text, Folger Shakespeare Library, December 4, 2014, https://www.folger.edu/the- collection. 60 Betty Ann Kane, The Widening Circle: The Story of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Its Collections (Washington D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976) 17. 61 Brandon Santoro, .?.@TRPNYC?s New Show CONFECTION Is a Treat, Albeit a Bit Sloppy and Slobbery on the Edges. (It?s Just Barely Past Previews.) What an a Privilege to Gain Access to Such a Protected Space. Shakespeare Folger Library?s Reading Rooms Are Magical Characters in and of Themselves.,? Twitter, accessed December 5, 2020, https://twitter.com/brandonsantoro/status/1104240493532200960. 62 Wall text, ?A Monument to Shakespeare: The Architecture of the Folger Shakespeare Library,? The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. 219 remarked ?[w]e wished to get away from mere copying, but not away from the spirit of the best of the past.?63 In this sense, it is a rich site for a rumination on the relationship between place and authenticity, a performance about here and there. Confection is not merely about Early Modern England, but also Washington D.C. As Maura Judkis of the Washington Post notes in her review, ?even though ?Confection? is about history, it?s also about the present day.?64 The performance hopes to illuminate the relationship between food and place, and then have spectators apply what they have learned to both England and Washington D.C. With 600 of 910 audience members from the DMV area, D.C. is the easiest parallel for them to draw.65 Of course, Confection is also about the Folger Shakespeare Library. It was commissioned by the library in advance of their renovation, which began in 2020, closing their doors to the public for at least two years. Association Artistic Producer Beth Emelson, who commissioned the performance, remarked, ?The Folger as it has existed since 1932 will be no more. It will come back as a completely different thing?It will come back completely transformed.? In the Confection, spectators see the library as they have never before. Rather than peering through a window at its reading tables, they dine at them. Rather than tucked away, the archive is dramatically orated, and then, like all things in Confection, eaten, too. One Fish, Two Fish, Pickled Fish, Puffin Fish: Extravagance, Lack, and the Embodied Spectator Confection began with the books. The reading tables were turned, forming a single long banquet table. The performers sat atop the banquet, holding various volumes, reading. In this act, 63 Wall text, ?A Monument to Shakespeare.? 64 Maura Judkis, ?At This Show, You Get to Eat Cake. But You Might Feel a Little Guilty about It.,? Washington Post, March 11, 2019. 65 Personal Correspondence with Beth Emelson, February 26, 2020 220 the performers used the site as intended, before ripping out the pages and stuffing them delicately in their mouths. The archive became an amuse-bouche, permitting the performers to sample the knowledge contained within. In this moment of bibliophagy, ?the books [came] to life,?66 subverting the audience?s expectations of the reading room. The performers transformed the library from a place of knowledge to a place of consumption, drawing a clear relationship between knowledge and taste. Literalizing the bibliophagy of the early modern period, a logic that governed early modern reading practices which suggested that words were viewed as edible, Confection promised a complex look into not only the practices of food cultures but the sensibilities behind them.67 The archive became a means of both understanding and experiencing place, describing and being the very food itself. Confection utilized a variety of culinary texts to evoke the culinary landscapes recorded within them. Emerging from the archive of the Folger, documents provided access to the early modern gastronomic ethos. Containing not only cookbooks, but menus, inventories, and arrest records related to food insecurity, the rich wealth of material from the Folger Shakespeare Library archive was incorporated into the performance, as well as displayed in the Great Hall as part of the Before ?Farm to Table?: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures exhibit which greeted the audience upon entry. These documents attended to the range of ways food impacted a person?s life during the early modern period, including the dangers of poaching, the decadence of upper echelon dining, and the horrors of slavery that afforded such luxury in the form of sugar and spice. 66 Interview with Beth Emelson, February 14, 2020. 67 Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher, eds., Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words, Material Readings in Early Modern Culture (London New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019). 221 The archival documents included in Confection are crucial to constructing a sense of place for the audience, lending their authority to the performance?s mise en sc?ne. Never having experienced Early Modern England, the audience relied on the supposed authority of the documents to ground their understanding and set a horizon of expectations. However, the audiences? reliance on the documents operates under an assumption that the archive tells a singular, factual account of the place. Rather, these documents relay the rich and complex structure of feeling that Third Rail Projects uses to interrogate the audience?s assumptions of food cultures, both historical and contemporary, in England and D.C. The Banquet After literally consuming pages of text in the first sequence, Confection provided another means to consume the food hidden in the archive. Down the center of the reading tables, a document was unfurled. Covering the entirety of the table was a section of plate 29 of Francis Sandford?s The history of the coronation of the most high, most mighty, and most excellent monarch, James II. Sandford depicted the extravagant feast in Westminster Hall in full illustration, which featured not only the seven tables of food and the peers seated at them but galleries full of hungry onlookers who were only there to witness the spectacle. The document, rendered life-size, contained the exact placement of the 145 plates that graced ?their Majesties table? during the coronation feast of James II in 1685. Along the document?s border is the key, identifying the different plates by their content: plate 37 held for a dozen wild pigeons, twelve of which were larded, all of which were served hot.68 This should not 68 Francis Sandford, The History of the Coronation of ... James II, ... King of England, Scotland (Etc.) and of ... Queen Mary (Etc.) (Newcomb, 1687) 110-111. 222 be confused with the twenty-four tamed pigeons, larded, served hot on plate 43. Plate 84 held ?Twenty Four Puffins, cold.? There were periwinkles and mangoes and asparagus and whole fawns. These represented just a few of the total 1445 plates that were served throughout the hall on this occasion.69 The number of plates was overwhelming, a visible symbol of decadence and opulence. The unusual ingredients might have felt foreign, even unappetizing to a spectator unfamiliar with cold cardoons and pickled oysters, but the spectator could have also spotted lobsters, caviar, and truffles, dishes that are more associated with luxury and fine dining today. Sandford?s engraved plate evidenced a repas en ambigu, an elaborate formal composition of dishes on a table, that privileges the visual as it moves towards a theatrical event. ?Royalty and nobility made the act of eating an art,? performer Elizabeth Carena announced.70 In this capacity, eating is both something to do and something to witness. Historically, the visual became an increasingly important feature of using food to convey power. Even Sandford?s detailing of the coronation feast exemplifies the use of abundance for the sake of the appearance of power. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes, ?flavor cannot be witnessed, appearance can.?71 As a dramatic display of conspicuous consumption, the banquet scene conveyed that Early Modern eating was not only about the lavishness of the food, but the visible demarcation of class and privilege. Though this may be how the court ate, this is not how everyone ate. The visual feast keys the audience into the great disparity that existed between early modern eaters. In Confection, James II?s coronation is a dramaturgical element that is never forgotten, but instead, reconfigured and repositioned. The opening banquet scene was followed by another encounter with the coronation. In this instance, the spectators were cast in roles depicted in 69 Ibid., 115. 70 Confection, Third Rail Projects, Folger Shakespeare Library, March 15, 2019. 71 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ?Making Sense of Food in Performance: The Table and the Stage,? 3. 223 Sandford?s plate 24.72 This plate was on display in the Great Hall as part of the Before ?Farm to Table? exhibit. Spectators may have seen it beforehand, allowing it to act as a piece of dramaturgy that subsequently conditioned their spectatorship. Plate 24 offered a topographical view of the coronation feast at Westminster Hall. At the center of the illustration is His Royal Majesty?s table, parallel to the viewer. In the foreground, two long rows of perpendicular banquet tables stretch from the viewer to the king?s table, matching the ground plan Sandford provided in plate 29. Seated here were members of the court, bishops, the mayor of London, and ?principal citizens.?73 Running parallel to these tables were two two-tiered stands on either side of the hall, high above the heads of the dinners. These galleries were packed with men and women, gazing out over the feast, though consuming nothing themselves. I was directed to sit at a table at the end of the reading room, situated perpendicular from the banquet table to correspond with their archival counterpart. In the balcony, spectators on a different track looked down at our table. For Third Rail Projects and the staff of the Folger, this staging transformed the interpretation of the archive from visual practice into an embodied one. During a talkback, this tactic was made explicit for the audience. In conversation with Third Rail Projects performer Elizabeth Carena, Amanda Herbert, the Associate Director of the Folger Institute, and Heather Wolfe, an archivist at the Folger, spoke directly about the relationship between the staging and the engraving. Herbert observed, ?that book, you know I've looked at it now dozens and dozens of times, and I've studied it so carefully, and I've zoomed in to all of the little faces, but I appreciated it in a totally new way when I was in the performance standing up in the balcony and 72 Sandford, The History of the Coronation of ... James II, ... King of England, Scotland (Etc.) and of ... Queen Mary (Etc.). Plate 24. 73 Sandford. Plate 29. 224 watching the table below. And I just thought wow, it just hit me in an entirely new way as a scholar and just as a person to see that.?74 In this capacity, the archive was activated as a means of conveying not only the sensation of tasting, but sensation of lacking. Like in the opening scene, those on the balcony were outside of the feast, invited to witness but not participate. This time, however, Third Rail Projects positioned them to observe the empty distance between desire and gratification, not yet palpable in the first scene. Where the first scene instructed, ?imagine these decadent foods,? the second snaped back, ?now imagine you can?t have them.? This spatial dramaturgy offered the experiences of two different classes. Marissa Nielsen- Pincus, a performer in Confection, reflected on the challenges of achieving this moment in terms of access: the Folger was reluctant to allow the use of the reading room?s balcony. The company, however, was determined to draw attention to the experience of inequality, denying an arbitrary group of audience members a seat at the table. In the talk-back, Elizabeth Carena referenced the onlooking lower class above, an assertation that Wolfe and Herbert largely confirmed and directly linked to the coronation engraving. However, peculiarly, the archive presented an alternate reading. Plate 29 labels them as ?Spectators of the best Quality? (along with a gallery of musicians).75 Consequently, the spatial dramaturgy was at odds with the archive, a reoccurring theme throughout the production that gestured towards the innate tension found between the belief of an authentic archive and the pursuit of an authentic spectatorial experience. Situating class as a central consideration of its ruminations on food, Third Rail Projects engaged Sandford?s engraving as a lens through which the audience interpreted their own spatial embodiment, rather than the historical accuracy of the moment. The suggestion that the 74 ?Exploring Third Rail Projects? Confection at the Folger Shakespeare Library - YouTube,? accessed October 18, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhroN5vx7wI. 75 Sandford, The History of the Coronation of ... James II, ... King of England, Scotland (Etc.) and of ... Queen Mary (Etc.). 225 onlookers were members of a lower class, rather than individuals ?of the best Quality? who were likely honored to attend the coronation feast at all, offered a simple representation of class spatialization. It did not grapple with a more complex spatial dynamic in which those who are famished remain unseen, far beyond the powerful gaze of the new king. Authenticity, as a placeholder for truth, was not the goal, but a strategy that facilitates the ethos of place. As such, despite said elision, the effect upon the audience was largely the same. Wolfe and Herbert concur, watching from above presented an alternate means of understanding this engraving. Considered concurrently, the embodied experience and textual evidence of this moment persuasively offered a sense of place. That the scenario as dramatized departed from Sandford?s account only served to highlight the uneven relationship between sense of place and authenticity as truth. Wherein authenticity is seen as a category of performance, the spatialization of their bodies in accordance with the archive transformed the spectator?s experience into insider knowledge. How to Cook a Swan: Recipe Books and Cooking a Fantasy Elizabeth Carena, dressed in a wig and pants reminiscent of James II, climbed onto the table to a section of text that Third Rail Projects had found in Robert May?s The Accomplisht Cook (1660), a foundational Restoration cookbook.76 May is often considered the first modern celebrity chef, with The Accomplisht Cook serving a critical role in the culinary landscape of Early Modern England.77 The landmark text brought upon two significant developments in English food culture: he introduced new ingredients from the ?New World? and techniques from 76 Ken Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe, Food through History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003) 173. Interview with Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, September 27, 2019. 77 Wall, Recipes for Thought, 36. 226 the continent and he intiated a shift from cooking as a practical skill to an art. May?s text worked to define a sense of national identity within English cookery. Confection harnessed these qualities in their use of May?s text, a sense of place bolstered by the texts that defined it within culinary literature. Though Confection did not provide an in-performance citation of May?s work, the performance was delivered in a referential manner, which allowed the audience to recognize the act of quoting without necessarily recognizing the quotation itself. The selection was a list of carving verbs, demonstrating the unique language used to deconstruct certain animals ? ?sauce that capon, frust that chicken, lift that swan, allay that pheasant.?78 Carena recited this list seductively, connecting bodily pleasure to the precision of language, substituting the consumable flesh for the consumable word. The carving list?s insistence on a ?most exact? and yet unfamiliar language of butchery implied a certain legitimacy of this forgotten language and the accompanying culinary skills.79 For the audience, the words were as foreign to the ear as the taste of swan is to the tongue. The archival text contributed to developing an early modern sense of place, complete with its own distinct tastes and language. The pretense of exactness urged a belief in its accuracy. However, despite the purposed authority offered in May?s text, the carving list tested the limits of authenticity. While Third Rail Projects uncovered the carving list in The Accomplisht Cook, May reprinted the list from Wynkyn de Word?s 1508 pamphlet entitled The Boke of Kervynge, which itself reprinted the list from the 1486 pamphlet The Boke of Hawking and Hunting.80 Less indicative of the early modern period than it first appeared, the carving list was remarkably 78 ?The Accomplisht Cook: Introduction? B2. 79 Ibid. 80 Fleming, Juliet, ?Carving for Knaves,? ed. Scott-Warren, Jason, and Andrew Zurcher. Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018, ebook. 227 enduring, and was reprinted regularly up until the 19th century. Such a long genealogy shifts what was perceived as authentic early modern language back nearly two centuries in origin. While a Third Rail Projects? artist attributed the carving verb list to May,81 it also appeared in other English recipe books of the early modern period, including several attributed to Hannah Woolley, another recipe book author heavily featured in the Before ?Farm to Table? exhibit.82 Rather than the carving list?s longevity signaling its accuracy, book historian Juliet Fleming argues that it is because the words ?resisted normative use? they were not altered, nor did they evolve over time.83 Fleming observes a distinct distance between the skill and the word; for what good does it serve a hunter, butcher, or chef to know the correct terminology? Here, we can acknowledge that though the terminology directs one to ?sauce? a capon and ?frust? a chicken, the processes of dismembering the two fowls are actually the same. As such, the words are more ornamental than practical, offering Confection?s audience and the texts? numerous readers not a functional knowledge of butchery but instead a glimpse into the cultural ethos that values and preserves the language. As the carving list resists use, so too, does the genre of the early modern cookbook at large. The recurrent presence of the carving list in these texts speaks towards a larger literary practice in which cookbooks are not simply cooking instructions, but serve also as memory keepers, literary works, and aspirational texts.84 Understanding the ways in which archival materials, like recipe books, articulate a food culture and a way of being within it helps develop a more complex sense of place that is not dependent on what was, but also, what could be. 81 Interview with Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, September 27, 2019. 82 It appears in The Gentlewoman?s Companion (1673), The Accomplish?d Lady?s Delight (1675) and The Compleat Servant-Maid (1677). Though these texts are attributed to Woolley, most historians believe that they were not written by her. 83 Scott-Warren and Zurcher, Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader, 21. 84 Wall, Recipes for Thought. 228 Early modern cookbooks cultivate fantasy through food, they are brimming with the potential upward mobility and the pleasure of consumption. As literary critic Wendy Wall argues, cookbooks are not ?snapshots of what people concocted in their homes in the past? and should not be used as an easy tool in the project of ?historical recovery.?85 Instead, recipes participate in a fantasy world and are often aspirational. The distinction Wall draws may feel counter-intuitive, as it differs from the happy parallel oft-conceived between a recipe and a play script, two texts are brought to life through practice. However, recipes are not only instructions or documentation, but ?represent heterogeneous practices continually in flux and subject to adaptation.?86 In this capacity, the cookbook should be seen less as a prescriptive object and more as a register of an early modern structure of feeling. Early modern cookbooks featured extraordinary banquet-style dishes, elaborate sugar work, meals with rare ingredients, all items unlikely to be consumed at home, alongside more common dishes and apothecary recipes. Evidenced through such a composition of recipes, the cookbook did not serve a singular function in the early modern period, simultaneously presenting medical cures, offering a rich fantasy life, sometimes blurred with the potential for social mobility, and a memory book, among numerous other functions. Wall suggests that recipes, rather than simply documenting practice ?testify to ways of speaking, persuading, and thinking.?87 Consequently, texts like Hannah Woolley?s The Queen-Like Closet; Or, Rich Cabinet: Stored With All Manner Of Rare Receipts For Preserving, Candying & Cookery Very Pleasant And Beneficial To All Ingenious Persons Of The Female Sex (1670) offer insight into how the Early Modern English cook perceived her place in the world and the world in her place. 85 Wall, Recipes for Thought 5. 86 Ibid., 197. 87 Ibid., 5. 229 Rather than simply providing a food analog, cookbooks like Woolley?s provide a sense of place that is based on feeling, rather than fidelity to a given cuisine. It is this distinction that the carving list interrogated. At first, the carving list seemed as if it offered a taste of early modern cuisine, providing insight into both the techniques used in creating a dish and its constituent ingredients.88 In this capacity, the list offers a superficial engagement with the archive, as if it simply relays an uncomplicated history. However, understanding it as a part of a larger literary tradition that participates in building a placial sensibility and a cultural imaginary, a new, more complex, use for the archive emerges. Where audiences sought an authenticity that hinges on accuracy to serve up a kind of settled, homogenous interpretation of place, the carving list offers an authenticity that emerges in unmitigated intricacies. To this, I consider the swan. To Eat a Swan The swan serves as a means of thinking about how the ingredient, the recipe, and the meal are presented in the archive. The unusual poultry is uncommonly consumed both in the early modern period and in the subsequent centuries. And yet, as a foodstuff, it looms large in the British imaginary.89 According to popular belief, ?only the Queen can eat swans.? This narrative is a strongly held belief among many, proliferating into novelty mugs,90 vampiric cartoons,91 and 88 Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe, 166. 89 ?We Eat Chickens, Ducks and Geese, but How Come Swans Evade Our Dinner Plates? | Notes and Queries | Guardian.Co.Uk,? accessed February 8, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,- 21273,00.html. 90 ?#ieatswans Hashtag on Instagram ? Photos and Videos,? accessed November 19, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/ieatswans/. 91 Jim?ll Paint It, ?Here?s the Queen Eating a Swan as Requested by Jake. Happy Birthday Mrs Queen. Https://T.Co/4WUs7NByIL,? Tweet, @Jimllpaintit (blog), April 21, 2016, https://twitter.com/Jimllpaintit/status/723200840803094528. 230 numerous people cyberbullying the Queen on Twitter.92 While more recent iterations of this narrative have turned comedic, others have taken the statement more seriously. In 2007, performance artist Mark McGowan ate a swan to protest the Queen, suggesting that he could be arrested for his actions because ?only the monarch was allowed to eat swan.?93 McGowan was not arrested, as it is not, in fact, only the monarch who may eat swans. The belief, however, likely originates from centuries of laws designed to restrict the consumption of swans. In 1482, a new ordinance declared that only landowners had a claim to mark swans and that all unmarked swans belonged to the crown.94 Consequently, access to the bird was severely limited. The preservation of the swan?s exclusivity not only prohibited ownership but also criminalized its meat.95 As such, eating a swan was not simply a question of royalty, but instead one of class. Swan was a popular item at feasts, as an ostentatious centerpiece that could feed a crowd under the pretense of elegance. Samuel Pepys was once served a swan pie, with a roasted swan following it mere days later.96 The Townshend family, landowners in Norfolk, also regularly supped on luxury foods that included roasted swan, but they did not extend this menu 92 LASERCLOWN, ?THEY SAY ONLY THE QUEEN CAN EAT A SWAN I DONT KNOW IF THAT TRUE BUT IVE ONLY MANAGED ABOUT A THIRD OF THIS ONE,? Tweet, @LASERCLOWN1 (blog), December 18, 2012, https://twitter.com/LASERCLOWN1/status/281007232970276865; pixelatedboat aka ?mr tweets,? ??Whose Dick Do I Have to Suck to Eat Some Fucking Swan around Here?? The Irate Queen Screams at the Hospital Cafeteria Staff,? Tweet, @pixelatedboat (blog), May 2, 2015, https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/594425649269379072; Ben Bagguley, ?@Queen_UK at What Point Will You Allow Me to Eat the Swans That Live Close By?,? Twitter, accessed November 19, 2020, https://twitter.com/benbagguley/status/1240382571466436608. 93 mark ive, MARK MCGOWAN ARTIST EATS A SWAN..CHANNEL 4 NEWS, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CtTLZQFCo0; ?Swan-Eating Man Protests Queen,? Metro (blog), January 15, 2007, https://metro.co.uk/2007/01/15/swan-eating-man-protests-queen-564485/. 94 ?The Fascinating, Regal History Behind Britain?s Swans,? Smithsonian Magazine, accessed February 8, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fascinating-history-british-thrones-swans-180964249/. 95 Joe Marczynski, ?Why Don?t We Eat Swans?,? The Outline, accessed February 8, 2020, https://theoutline.com/post/8164/why-dont-we-eat-swans. 96 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys ? Complete (Good Press, 2019), January 10, 12, 1663-1664. 231 to their household officials and servants.97 The fact that swan was consumed by a certain class nearly exclusively recognizes that a place does not have a homogenous food culture. The irregular consumption of swan by the population at large is exemplary of how a place?s quintessential meal is distinguished and held separate from the daily fare. The same can be said for the blue crabs of Maryland or the half-smoke of D.C., neither of which are staples of everyday eating. Unlike these more familiar and accessible dishes, the inaccessibility of swan meat has shifted the idea of its consumption from luxury to one of debauchery within the placial imaginary. The eating swan represents a certain idea of England, one that upholds class boundaries and perverse decadence, long after the ?fishy? tasting meat fell out of fashion.98 . Despite its lack of regular consumption outside of the gentry, swan appears as a protein throughout early modern cookbooks. Recipes for swan, whether boiled, roasted, baked into a pie, or made into a pudding, are found in both Woolley and May. We might recall that the carving verb list is concerned not with the consumption of swan but with its preparation. Approaching the swan from the perspective of preparation rather than consumption underscores the ways in which the carving verb list cannot be taken as part of a prescriptive text that indicates what its reader ate, but instead, illuminates the ways in which its reader navigated the socio-economic contexts in which they lived. The figure of the swan in early modern cookbooks resembles that of the wolf in in MFK Fisher?s 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. Fisher wrote for the disadvantaged home cook of World War II, who is looking for thrifty solutions to stretch meat, making do without butter, and economizing to keep food on the table. While the ?wolf? Fisher teaches her readers to cook, is, 97 Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500-1760 (London?; New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007) 84-85. 98 Marczynski, ?Why Don?t We Eat Swans?? 232 of course, the one at the door, she is less concerned with staving off starvation, as she is feeding the spirit. Fisher understood that home cooks were inundated with tips to survive but recognized that one is not fed by food alone. Instead, she allowed her readers to luxuriate in hope, desire, and humor, sending up the wolf that terrifies them on a platter. The figure of the wolf, here transformed into a fantasy course, presses upon the possibility of culinary class mobility, where delicious cuisine can be savored by anyone. Rather than holding starvation at bay, the figure of the swan the participates in a rich imaginary that offers another means of escaping the situation at hand. In the instance of ?lifting the swan,? as in ?cooking the wolf,? both offer instruction that presents as practical advice by way of the fantastic. A reader of Woolley is as unlikely to carve a swan as Fisher?s is to cook a wolf. The inclusion of the swan, however, suggests the vibrant potential of upward mobility. It is here that the carving list, with its words and practices unlikely to have been used, offers its most ?authentic? appeal towards a sense of place. The peculiar poultry speaks not only to the distinct palate of a place but how also to how it is situated within a culinary landscape. As a foodstuff, the swan is simultaneously both eaten/uneaten, practical/fantastic, prepared/unprepared. The authenticity of the carving list ebbs and flows. It originates outside of the early modern time period and yet was popularly published within it. It guides us to understand what was consumed but also brings about larger questions about who was consuming these items. It serves both practical and aspirational functions. The carving list simultaneously offers in/authenticity, dismissed from its original claim only to claw back a more complex reckoning with an evanescent sensibility that guides sense of place away from the material and into the experiential. 233 There is an impulse to draw comparisons between baking and performance. We see parallels in the recipe book and the script, mixing and baking and rehearsing, finding ever more parallels in a consumable final product. However, perhaps we should better use this version of the early modern cookbook, the recipe book as a fantasy to illuminate the scripting of site- specific work. Instead of a prescriptive text, the script for a site-specific work illuminates a relationship it hopes to have with the place, with the spectators who occupy it, and the fantastical congruence and transformative potential that awaits. The Sucrovore?s Dilemma: Colonialist Consumption and Race True to its name, sugar was ever-present in Confection. Gilded by a baroque version of ?Sugar, Sugar? by the Archies, the saccharine performance made way for its rotten interior, corrupted by its own sugarcoated veneer. A monologue entitled ?Measure of a Man? lay at the heart of Confection, a lynchpin that is one of the few scenes to appear in every track of the performance. A fervent rebuke of the horrors of slavery, the speech evoked Martin Luther King Jr. to confront the exploitation of man for the sake of sugar. In his 1963 book Strength to Love, King assessed that, ?The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.?99 In Confection, the formulation ?measure of a man? became a means to calculate the human labor that allowed for an English sweet tooth. In this capacity, the monologue thematically ruminated on an earlier spoken question, ?When does a body become a thing fit to be consumed?? 99 Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King, Strength to Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2019), 26. 234 Justin Lynch, a Black dancer originally from Jamaica, performed the ?measure of a man? monologue in an alcove at the end of the Sedgwick-Bond Reading Room, a research wing that opened in 1982 and designed in a starkly modern style. Despite the minimalist aesthetic set in contrast to the Paster Reading Room?s transportive Old World style, the reading room was intimate, bathed in dim warm light. Lynch, dressed in a teal velvet frock, stood in front of a table adorned with an elegant tablecloth, tiered cakes, bowls overflowing with sugar, and a five-foot croquembouche, a tower composed of individual choux pastries covered in white frosting. On the table lay Joshua Dutton-Reaver, a white performer who played the performance?s ?servant? role, who earlier was wheeled out under a giant dinner cloche. Here, he lay shirtless, wearing only khaki shorts, exhausted and despondent. Scattered around the table were shipping crates and bags of sugar, staging the transformation of the commodity from plantation to table. Testing the measure of a man, Lynch exemplified how Black bodies were oppressed at the behest of white tastebuds, providing the audience with the exact quantity of sugar produced on Caribbean sugar plantations through one man?s labor. Together, Before ?Farm to Table? researchers and Third Rail Projects devisors calculated this figure to render the toll and toil explicit. Then, the number was transformed, no longer pounds of sugar but jars of marmalade; an obscene amount of sugar turned into a tiny quantity of preserved fruit.100 Rather than reveling in the decadence of Early Modern England, this scene striped it naked, asking the audience to witness its violence, without replicating it on the bodies of Confection?s Black actors. The ?Measure of a Man? scene occurred in the exact center of the track I saw, serving not only as the thematic heart but also the literal center. Confection makes clear that one cannot speak (or taste) 100 Interview with Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, September 27, 2019. 235 of Early Modern English cuisine without acknowledging the brutality that permitted its development. As such, I offer a brief history of sugar and the transatlantic slave trade. The Influence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on British Palates Though England was not the first European power to partake in the sugar trade via the New World, it quickly dominated the market. Unlike the Portuguese who built plantations in Brazil, England began to cultivate plantations on so-called ?sugar islands? in the Caribbean.101 Beginning with the colonization of Barbados in 1627 and later Jamaica in 1655, England became the primary producer and consumer of sugar within Europe, producing 7,000 tons of sugar in Barbados alone.102 Sugar became a central commodity, surpassing all other colonial imports combined by 1660. In the second half of the 17th century, England produced 25,000 tons of sugar out of the Caribbean.103 England operated as a top sugar producer to satisfy the increasing domestic demand. While many might imagine the primary consumer of English sugar to be the upper echelon, represented in Confection through delicate pastry and sugar work, it is important to not forget the purchasing power of the housewife and, more broadly, the middle class. During the second half of the 17th century, sugar became readily available at grocers across England and was transformed from a luxury into a multipurpose, everyday ingredient.104 It was used variously as a medicinal ingredient to treat digestive complaints and coughs, as means of lavish decoration as seen in Robert May?s elaborate sugar landscapes, as a preservative in jams and marmalades, 101 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 53. 102 James Walvin, Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity, First Pegasus Books hardcover edition (New York: Pegasus Books, 2018) 40. 103 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 37, 44. 104 Jon Stobart, Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England 1650-1830., 2016, 33. 236 and as a condiment.105 Its variety of uses increased its desirability across class lines, catapulting the demand in an already hungry market. In particular, the white English housewife, an emblem for the nationalism and femininity that is often associated with sugar, was responsible for major economic shifts towards regular sugar consumption.106 In response to the increase in sugar consumption and the product?s ultimate profitability, England significantly increased its use of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people on its sugar plantations.107 As such, England developed what has been called a triangle of trade, connecting the British Isles with Africa and the Caribbean, in an attempt to commodify human beings as a means of creating wealth in the Americas.108 The number of enslaved individuals forced into labor on sugar plantations is difficult to quantify. In 1645, one individual claimed that a thousand enslaved people had been brought to Barbados from Africa in the year alone, while other figures cite 252,000 enslaved people brought to the island over course of the 18th century.109 Forced labor became a vital part of England?s ?success? in the sugar trade, perpetuating a taste for sugar in Great Britain built on the backs of hundreds of thousands of enslaved laborers. As Confection ruminated on the economies of sugar, the performance repeatedly drew parallels between food and the body. Considering sugar, Lynch conveyed a hierarchy of its consumption: highly processed and refined white sugar is consumed by ?fine? white bodies, dark muscovado and molasses are consumed by brown bodies.110 Aligning the body with what it eats, Lynch evidenced the ways in which the body was always already constructed to be consumable, 105 Stobart, Sugar and Spice, 32. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 78. 106 Kim F. Kim F. Hall, ?Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century,? in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge [England]?; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 107 Mintz, 61. 108 Andrew F Smith, Sugar: A Global History, 2015, 36. 109 Mintz, 53. 110 Confection, Third Rail Projects, Folger Shakespeare Library, March 15, 2019. 237 with unidirectionality exacerbated by race. Muscovado sugar was also put to use by white bodies, illustrating the ways in which brown bodies are up for general consumption, a violent act that does not extend both ways. The human body, in particular that of the enslaved African, was increasingly positioned as an object of cannibalistic consumption, as both a metaphor and a disposable resource for economic gain, a meal fit to be devoured. In this capacity, it recalled bell hooks construction of ?eating the Other? that identifies the white supremacist fantasy through which contact with the Other elicits delight and danger simultaneously.111 We have previously seen the ways in which sugar is linked to pleasure, however, it also is a means of exerting power and control to navigate the perceived titillating danger of difference. Furthering hooks? formulation, Gitanjali G. Shahani argues that food associated with the Other offer ?a means of categorizing and sampling the other on one?s own terms, without a real threat to homogenous identity.?112 Rather than being a threat to a homogenous identity, the cultivation and consumption of sugar present ways of concretizing an English nationalism, bolstering imperialist aims and white supremacy. The Taste of Place Recalling Stuart Hall?s assertion, ?I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea,? eating the Other is a durational act that has as much to do with the body as it does with the politics of place. Through the image of the teacup, Jamaican-born Hall simultaneously places enslaved labor and its afterlife in the Caribbean at the heart of a quintessentially English practice. Hall evidences the ways in which the idea of England is constructed through its relations with 111 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (London, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 21-22. 112 Shahani, Tasting Difference, 4. 238 other places. In this instance, we are reminded that no place is singular but instead constructed through its dealings with other places.113 In Hall?s image, the contact zone, which Mary Louise Pratt theorized as a space in which people geographically and historically separated meet, 114 is moved from a physical space of encounter to the mouth.115 Where Pratt describes this relationship as unbalanced and coerced, the contact zone?s violence can be imagined as the gnashing of teeth and the activities of digestion. In the mouth, the Other is experienced in absentia, teasing the possibility of tasting and knowing inaccessible places. Toponymic labeling extends the fantasy of eating the Oher into the consumer experience. Place names appear frequently in the names of early modern foods, as means of conveying flavor, variety, and quality.116 Not only did these names refer to distant places (Virginian tobacco, Jamaican pepper, Turkish Coffee), but domestic ones as well (Cheshire Cheese, Yorkshire Puddings, Pontefract cakes). Places names offered a means of declaring provenance, a form of verification interested in the veracity of ingredients that provides us greater insight into the authenticating impulses of the early modern period. Foods labeled with toponyms relies on a familiar form of authenticity that guides the consumer into accepting the item as ?real,? stabilizing the tenuous connection between food and place. At the grocery stores, consumers used place names as part of their decision-making process, contextualizing flavor and quality.117 For instance, Barbados more regularly produced muscovado because of the lack of available timer on the small island impeded the refinement process.118 In this capacity, toponyms 113 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, ?Beyond ?Culture?: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,? Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 6?23. 114 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London?; New York: Routledge, 1992) 6. 115 Here, I continue the work of Shahani and Parama Roy in Alimentary Tracts (2010) who build a theoretical foundation of a culinary contact zone. 116 Stobart, Sugar and Spice. 117 Ibid., 60. 118 Ibid. 239 function on behalf of the consumer, allowing them to make educated choices with their money, while also enticing them to experience far-off lands while strengthening a sense of English identity. After all, what is empire-building if not an effort in placemaking? Peculiarly, sugar is in many ways the exception to this toponymic strategy. Rather than being named after its place of origin, sugar was more often referred to by the place in which it was refined. Sugar was by no means the only good England grew in the Caribbean, with spices and coffee being exported in high quantities, yet the other commodities do not follow this pattern. Historian John Stobart argues consumers knew where sugar was grown, but intervening domestic places layered on additional, more relevant meaning.119 Rather than exemplifying the fantasy of eating the other, perhaps sugar offers a much later stage in which the other has already been digested and integrated into the national body. Digestion offers a certain ease of consumption, under which the labor that produced the food can be divorced from the product, a desirable quality for produced by enslavement. Disregarding the origins of sugar in favor of the part played by local labor in the refinement process, sugar becomes increasingly white, in both product and identity. Too often, place is presumed to be autonomous, as its hierarchical power relations are concealed. As I have previously argued, place is instead composed relationally, as a never- ending project of localized networked practices. In the instance of refined sugar where the foodstuff inexplicably and endlessly aligned with the English palate, we can see how food can exacerbate the appearance of a singularity of place, in which domestication works to obscure its foreign origin.120 Stobart points towards layered meaning in food, however, it is the meaning of a singular place that rises to the top. In this capacity, we look not at foodways but quintessence, a 119 Stobart, 61. 120 See Mintz, Smith, and in particular Walvin as examples of this association. 240 final relationship to place that usurps all others. Forgotten are the ways in which food networks, present and historic, are complex connecting many locations before arriving on the tongue. In many respects, the development of a sense of place prefers the latter. The simpler model that ties food to one location is far easier to represent, to authenticate, to indulge as part of the ?true? essence of a place. But in actuality, of course, to represent Early Modern English cuisine, as Confection attempts, is to stage the foodways between England and the Caribbean. Throughout the performance as a whole, and in particular, through the ?Measure of a Man? speech, Confection exposes the labor practices and racism practiced in the name of empire and indicts white supremacy and imperialism that brought it about. Recognizing that food is both process and product, necessity and commodity, here and there, Confection works to contextualize the bite within a landscape of power without negating its visceral pleasures. In staging the foodways, the ?Measure of a Man? speech connected not only England and the Caribbean but also England and Washington D.C. In the double meaning of the ?Measure of a Man? in which one might mean how much sugar his labors produce, we turn to King?s original context, in which the measure of a man is where he stands not in moments of comfort, but how he stands up to challenges. As such, we look not at the measure of the enslaved African, but the measure of the Englishman who repeatedly accepted luxury and comfort at the expense of human life. In the intervening centuries and across the ocean, this relationship with sugar has shifted. Today, sugar no longer suggests luxury and wealth but instead implies poverty. Now highly processed and inexpensive, sugar, like high-fructose corn syrup, is readily available in food- insecure areas that often lack access to or cannot afford fresh alternatives. Reconfigured and yet unchanged, sugar still overwhelming shapes how a place eats. The question of comfort at the 241 expense of others still persists, with its eyes now focused on us. The audience, too, is measured, in an effort to unsettle our own food behaviors that favor comfort over dignity and justice. A Moveable Feast: Experiencing Place on the Tongue Confection ends with a feast. The audience tracks were reunited around the long banquet table at the center of the Paster reading room. As the audience gathered for the final feast, they re-encountered many of the ingredients that composed their experience of the performance, a reminder of Confection?s internal horizon of expectations. Where once lay Sandford?s illustrative plate lay dining plates covered with cloches. Now cast as guests, we were asked to sit, a clear reversal for those who were previously cast as the non-eating spectators at James II?s coronation banquet. Over the course of the performance, the audience learned one of two games, though one lucky track learns both. The game I encountered ?The Beggar?s Feast? game in the card catalog, in which we were instructed to ?Keep or Share? an unknown amount of candy with the other members of our track. At the feast, additional plates and serving utensils were placed between diners, suggesting the game?s resurgence at the table. As I did not encounter the other game, it was surprising for me when half the audience followed a similar set of implied instructions and began to bang their cutlery. Both games instigated embodied practices that script a spectator?s experience of the final meal. The internal horizon of expectations primed the performance?s full transformative effect upon the spectator. This transformation occurs as the spectator had their first taste of food, the culminating effect of the dramaturgies located in on the plate, itself. 242 The cloches were lifted, revealing that each spectator has not received the same ?goodie,? as one critic exclaimed.121 Beneath the domes, three treats were served on newspaper print. The first is a small bite of molasses brown bread. Next, a delicate macaron, filled with spiced buttercream and a ginger jam. Lastly, a decadent multi-tiered cake slice covered with spiced buttercream and a passion fruit drizzle, completed with a candied orange slice, the earlier macaron, and meringue flowers. At last, in this much anticipated moment of consumption, the audience feels the effects of their newly developed sense of place as their forks and teeth sink into the sumptuous sponge or despaired at their meager plate. The dramaturgical aim of Confection, to experience a place long absent, was only successful in its gustatory dramaturgy. This aim becomes successful when second-hand knowledge was replaced with first-hand experience, when the bite, simultaneously both part of the performance and real, was melting in the spectator?s mouth. It is, perhaps, no surprise, that that illusion was completed upon the audience?s first encounter with the real within the performance. If the site-specific performance has long stagged what Patrick Duggan calls mimetic shimmering, the indecipherability between the real and the representational, the act of eating tilts the scale, offering an authentic, bodily experience to help guide the spectator to a satisfactory resolution. The authenticity of eating was tautologically applied to other experiences within the performance?s frame. The architecture was then perceived as authentic.122 During a talkback, an 121 Page-Kirby, Kirsten. The Washington Post. ??Confection? is about the (mostly) sweet side of life? 122 Allie Goldstein, ?Wander Forbidden Rooms, Sneak Some Dessert, And Learn Some History At Folger?s Immersive Show ?Confection,?? The DCist, March 6, 2019; Meaghan Hannan Davant, ?Review: Confection, a Sumptuous, Sugary 17th Century Banquet and Its Cost,? DC Theatre Scene (blog), March 12, 2019, https://dctheatrescene.com/2019/03/12/review-confection-a-sumptuous-sugary-17th-century-banquet-and-its- cost/; Jennifer Georgia, ?Review: ?Confection? by Third Rail Projects at the Folger Shakespeare Library,? DC Metro Theater Arts, March 8, 2019, https://dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2019/03/08/confection-third-rail-folger/.Goldstein, Diliberto, and Theatre, ?Wander Forbidden Rooms, Sneak Some Dessert, And Learn Some History At Folger?s 243 audience member revealed how effective the illusion had been for her. She pointedly remarked to the performers: ?You [were] no longer modern. You [were] that era.?123 The most significant and regularly deemed authentic example is unsurprisingly the three desserts. Numerous audience members expressed their belief that these were baked from authentic early modern recipes. I, too, thought this during the performance. It is worth pausing to interrogate this wide-spread erroneous belief and its effect on the experience of place within the performance. The three desserts were provided by Lupin Baking Company, a one-woman bakery located in Washington D.C. In conjunction with the Folger Shakespeare Library (rather than Third Rail Projects), Lila Miller concocted each recipe and baked for each performance. For Lila, this was a labor-intensive contract, a full month of 14-hour days, near-daily drop-offs of baked goods to guarantee freshness and re-executions of tricky macarons, which have a failure rate of one batch in three. Over the course of 41 performances, Miller served 3,645 mini-cakes, 3,078 macarons, and nearly as many portions of brown bread.124 Miller?s desserts offered a suggestive taste of British fare, more than a reproduction. Rather than using archival provided from the Before ?Farm to Table? exhibit, Miller developed her flavor profiles by considering the culinary history of the period. Diverging from the modern image of desserts based around chocolate, Miller wanted to highlight the history of the spice trade, flavoring her buttercreams with cardamom and ginger. She used fruits that would have been hard to come by, like passion fruit and orange. Considering the politics of food, Miller worked practically and conceptually: she sourced primarily local, fair trade ingredients and concocted recipes to represent the varied types of early modern eaters. For the brown bread, Immersive Shodw ?Confection??; Davant, ?Review: Confection, a Sumptuous, Sugary 17th Century Banquet and Its Cost?; Georgia, ?Review.? 123 ?Exploring Third Rail Projects? Confection at the Folger Shakespeare Library - YouTube.? 124 Personal correspondence with Lila Miller, February 6, 2020. 244 representing the food of the lowest class, she picked flavors and ingredients familiar in Jamaican cuisine, like all-spice and molasses.125 Miller?s baking recognizes the ways in which places are intrinsically networked, combining on the palate. Though her primary places of inspiration were England and the Caribbean, her own New England origins were never quite forgotten. Her steamed brown bread made with molasses is evocative of a staple Boston dish, a third place that is added to the gastronomic landscape, reminding us that the relationship between food and place is never singular. What it was about the three desserts that audiences perceived as authentic, whether that marker emerged from the taste or the meal?s framing, is worth further examination. The central paradox of authenticity, as described by Jonathan Culler, suggests that in order for something to be perceived as authentic, it must be marked as authentic, however, it is exactly this mediated quality that disturbs our expectations of authenticity.126 At first glance, Confection seemingly defies this paradox, convincing its audience that it contains authentic components without ever labeling them as such. It made no direct claims to authenticity. Upon second consideration, however, one can see how the development of a sense of place relies heavily on the assumption of authenticity. Much of this work is completed through the presumed authority of the archive, a stable source of written documentation believed to convey an accurate history, an accurate sense of ?how it was.?127 The implied label of authenticity does less to disturb the expectations of authenticity than an overt label. Ultimately, perceiving something as authentic has all to do with its framing, rather than its integral qualities. 125 Interview with Lila Miller, October 29, 2019. 126 Jonathan D. Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, 1st ed, Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, v. 3 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988) 164. 127 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 19. 245 This can be seen in application in a reconsideration the brown bread. For spectators who recognized the smokey depth of molasses in the bread, they may have cast their minds to the refinement process long associated with the Caribbean (or the Great Molasses Flood, with a smell that is said to still permeate the streets of Boston over 100 years later.) Alas, many spectators had difficulty identifying the brown bread by its flavor or texture. The taste eluded identification, with spectators reporting that it was ?a small piece of brownie,? ?a bite of chocolate cake? or in perhaps a moment of telling displeasure ?a piece of hard, unsweetened gingerbread.?128 Though the last spectator comes the closest to identifying the sweet before her, she still misjudges its core ingredients, mistaking all-spice for ginger, assuming it was unsweetened when it was indeed sweetened by molasses, and declaring it ?hard? when instead it was steamed (which is renders a bread quite soft) and not stale, having been delivered fresh earlier in the day. The indiscernibility of the brown bread allows for a reconsideration of the role of taste plays within the experience of place. To the naive palate, all-spice is indecipherable from chocolate when it lacks prior identification. But considering the contextual evidence, the resemblance is clear: the other two items were sweets, a familiar sweet is cake or brownie, the gaps left by tasting were filled by the mind through the visual. Blind taste testing is notoriously tricky, even for experts.129 Despite the struggle of recognition, none of the spectators who were unable to identify the morsel as brown bread understood the food as less authentic. The 128 Dave Mancini, ?Sugar, Flour, Butter: Baking a Better Society one Confection at a Time,? Unpublished, American Society for Theatre Research Working Group: A Matter of Public Taste(s), November 9, 2019, 9. Interview with audience member, September 23, 2019. Interview with audience member, March 16, 2019. 129 Calvin Trillin, ?The Red and the White,? The New Yorker, accessed December 4, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-the-white; Alin Gruber and Barbara Lindberg, ?Sensitivity, Reliability and Consumer Taste Testing,? Journal of Marketing Research 3, no. 3 (1966): 235?38, https://doi.org/10.2307/3149898. 246 supposition that these bites are authentic hinges on the complex experience of food and meaning- making. The act of eating still offers an authentic experience, not reliant on taste alone. If taste is the integral quality of food, it accentuates rather than defines the perception of authenticity as experienced through bodily sensation. Not only is the experience of place conveyed through the act of eating, but the affective experience of commensality. The shared dining experience provides an opportunity for spectators to participate in a broader food culture. With three economically distinct desserts, the pivotal scene of the feast was purposefully and decidedly inequitable. One spectator relayed his interaction with his neighbor, noting that she asked if her brown bread ?crumb? was a joke, clearly demonstrating her disappointment at her randomly assigned dessert.130 But, random is the point, as producer Beth Emelson points out, in an effort to illustrate the injustice of food disparity. Many audience members did not respond well to the feeling of being cast as ?less than.? Performer Marissa Nielsen-Pincus noted a few spectators complained to the house staff about receiving the small dessert.131 Recalling the early game, many eagerly shared their desserts with the spectators around them, an act of commensality that also demonstrates they have learned this lesson. Now firmly cast in the role of guest, sharing becomes an act of placemaking, playing by the established of the world, working to build a better one. One spectator remarked, ?The person across from me was so busy sharing food they didn?t share the serving utensils so I could share [my food] with the people near me.?132 Another commented: ?Since the women across from us had already given [sic] cake to everyone around us, we didn't have to share.?133 The woman next to me who 130 Interview with audience member, March 15, 2019. 131 Interview with Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, September 27, 2019. 132 Interview with audience member, March 20, 2019. 133 Interview with audience member, September 23, 2019. 247 had received the small bite of brown bread tried to split it, too. The feast effectively conveyed a visceral experience of food discrepancy, a quality integral to the sense of place developed through Confection?s rumination on class that its audiences are eager to rectify. As such, Confection pivots from offers a sense of place as a tourist might hold, to that of a lived sense of place, the routine experience of daily life that offers. The authenticity of food is not limited to its consumption but also resides in a nexus of historical, social, economic, and cultural factors that also assert a challenge to its ultimate authentication. After all, it is important to remember that food culture is complex in its experience, not a simple luxuriation in the pleasure of a bite, but also the sensation of a hungry stomach, and the politics that brought about this dichotomy. Derrida offers the notion of the performative interpretation, which suggests that ?the interpretation transforms the very thing it interprets.?134 As a performative interpretation, interpreting a bite as authentic transforms it to be authentic. Little care is cast to the provenance of the ingredients, the accuracy of the baking technique, the fidelity to a recipe, or the quintessence of a meal. The allowance of a non-authentic authenticity speaks towards the muddled status of the concept as a whole: it is a valuable feeling that is determined less by truth and more by perception. As Scott Magelssen has helpfully characterized Rebecca Schneider?s argument in Performing Remains, ?the most authentic moments in re-creations of the past, the closest one might get to the ?touching of time,? are the moments of slippage, of failure, or of deliberate error.?135 The same, too, can be said for experiencing a place. Authenticity emerges from what is expected, not what was. 134 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 1. publ, Routledge Classics (New York: Routledge, 2006) 63. 135 Scott Magelssen, Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning (Ann Arbor, UNITED STATES: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 12. 248 In the summer after Confection closed, producer Beth Emelson received a call from the staff of the Reading Room asking her to retrieve her book. Perplexed, Emelson crossed the street from the production offices to the main building of the library, unsure what book it could be. There, she was handed a book and told to open it. When she did, candy spilled out from its hollowed-out pages. The prop book had been sitting on the library shelf unnoticed for four months, a remnant of a time when ?books? were eaten in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Passing as a piece of their storied archive, the prop book with its candy center highlights a moment of mimetic shimmering, the indecipherability that refuses resolution, that allows the experiences of two places to be held simultaneously. Consider the Orange: ?Preserving? Authenticity In my small kitchen in Takoma Park, Maryland, 17th century England reappears in the form of orange marmalade, a gossamer experience of the past in the present. The recipe was a version of one from The accomplish?d ladies delight by ?Hannah Woolley,? published in 1670.136 It was modernized for audiences of Confection by Marissa Nicosia, an early modern food scholar. Following an Early Modern English receipt inherently feels authentic, embracing the unfamiliar curves of long-forgotten techniques that leave you with a marmalade more tart than sweet. As I cook ?Hannah Wooley?s? orange marmalade, perhaps instead, I am ?cooking? authenticity, rather than ?authentically? cooking. With food, we find ourselves so eager to preserve authenticity, as I have the pulp of an orange: in sugar. To preserve authenticity, then, is a desire to hold simultaneously the ability to experience something as authentic, and the 136 Hannah Woolley is quotes here as The accomplish?d ladies delight is one of the texts commonly acknowledged to be published under her name, but not written by her. 249 knowledge which deems it to be authentic. However, ?preserving,? as a concept must be contended with. When the orange is preserved to become marmalade, it is transformed. It keeps the flavor and loses the shape, texture, and consistency. Just as orange marmalade is not the orange, preserved authenticity takes on new textures while hoping to retain its flavor. Figure 6: Hannah Woolley's Marmalade, in Process and Completed, Photos by the Author When seeking authenticity in orange marmalade, one requires a metamodern palate. In the kitchen, preservation seeks to keep the essence of a piece of fruit by ?extracting it from nature,? transforming it completely in the process.137 The orange and the orange marmalade may be related, but they are not the same. The orange has 11 times as much vitamin C than does orange marmalade.138 The marmalade contains not only the orange, but sugar, apple, and lemon. One can similarly claim that this recipe is extracted from a nature of its own and fundamentally changed. Nicosia employs creative interpretation to transform Woolley?s marmalade into something that can be easily ?recreated? in the modern kitchen. Seville oranges would likely have been used in Woolley?s recipe, as those were common in England during the early modern period.139 Simply writing ?oranges? in the recipe, the implied ?Seville? separates the place of 137 Wall, Recipes for Thought, 185. 138?FoodData Central,? accessed October 3, 2020, https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food- details/168819/nutrients; ?FoodData Central,? accessed October 3, 2020, https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/fdc- app.html#/food-details/786559/nutrients. 139 Clarissa Hyman, Oranges: A Global History (Islington, London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 34. 250 origin from the place of consumption, a now-familiar trick of British cuisine. Today, this bitter taste defines the flavor of the quintessentially British condiment. However, today in the United States, they are hard to come by. Nicosia salvages the tart flavor (and its essential ?Britishness?) by adding a lemon, counteracting the navel orange?s sweetness.140 But of course, even a Seville orange would have evolved over the 350 years since the recipe?s publication, meaning that the true flavor will always be evasive. There are many more obstacles in determining the authenticity of the recipe, of course. To call it ?Hannah Woolley?s Orange Marmalade? suggests that it came from her hand, assuming the connotation of authorial authenticity. However, it appears in a text attributed to Woolley, but is commonly believed to have been written without her consent.141 Additionally, like the carving list, the same marmalade recipe was printed in numerous other texts earlier in the 17th century; a nearly identical version can be found in the first edition of Plat?s work published in 1600, 75 years before the publication of The accomplish?d ladies delight.142 Trying to authenticate the recipe through use comes up against familiar questions about the purpose of cookbooks during the period. For everyday cooking, a cookbook was not needed. Wall turns towards the material evidence contained in the archived copies: grease stains, annotations, and other marginalia. In a 1684 copy of The accomplish?d ladies delight held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, evidence of readership can be found on the title page.143 Questions like 140 Marissa Nicosia, ?Making Marmalade with Hannah Woolley,? Cooking in the Archives (blog), February 27, 2019, https://rarecooking.com/2019/02/27/making-marmalade-with-hannah-woolley/. 141 Margaret J.M. Ezell, ?Cooking the Books, or, the Three Faces of Hannah Woolley,? in Reading and Writing Recipe Books: 1550-1800, ed. Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell (Manchester: Univ. Press, 2013). Wall, Recipes for Thought, 40-41. 142 Hugh Plat Sir, 1552-1611?, Delightes for Ladies, to Adorne Their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distillatories. VVith, Bewties, Banquets, Perfumes and Waters. Read, Practise, and Censure.., Early English Books, 1475-1640 / 2300:10 (At London,?: Printed by Peter Short., [1600?]., 1600). 143 Folger Shakespeare Library, ?Woolley, Hannah. The Accomplish?d Ladies Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery.,? accessed June 6, 2020. 251 these are useful for historical research, but in terms of assessing authenticity, are a bit like playing musical chairs. Any kind of truth in authenticity is ultimately unknowable, but the experience of it is not. I made ?Hannah Woolley?s? marmalade twice under the conditions of a pandemic. I am an avid cook and was eager to approach early modern food through a new means, in a place with a distinctly different architecture from that of the period. My first attempt coincided with a time in which many of my food practices had suddenly changed. Still in the early days of the pandemic, duration became a key culinary requirement: how long will the meat last in my freezer, how can I make perishable ingredients stretch? I assembled my ingredients for my marmalade through a variety of different (and unusual) foodways: navel oranges from the Giant grocery store, apples and lemons from my new community-supported agriculture (CSA) box, and sugar mailed from my mother in Florida because baking-fever had taken hold during the lockdown and the shelves at the grocery store were completely barren. The recipe called for an equal weight of fruit to sugar, 1.35 pounds. Given the present scarcity, using this much sugar felt indulgent. By complete accident, the ingredients were procured through starkly different foodways, the conglomerate, the local farmer, and the postal service, making the many places of my marmalade highly visible. Marmalade both takes and gives time. It took two and half hours from start to finish but will last for a year canned in my pantry, later to be used as the marinade for chicken, the swirl in ice cream, and the condiment to pandemic-induced homemade bread. Working against decay, marmalade was a necessity in the early modern period, extending the fruit season all year round. Preserving authenticity similarly works against decay, rebuking fidelity in favor of the perseverance of a structure of feeling. Authenticity?s connotations have long privileged ?source,? 252 a quality found in originality, essence, and authorship. Critic Virginia Richter points toward these supposedly ?pure origins? as the reason postmodernism has disposed of authenticity.144 From a metamodern perspective, authenticity still has use beyond an impossible reliance on origin, offering the feeling of the authentic, while admittingly acknowledging its contested state. The difficulty of locating the supposed source of authenticity does not mean that one does not experience a 17th-century orange marmalade as authentic. The desire for long-lasting food and the conditions of scarcity that informed my experience of making the marmalade felt authentic, as if that was the closest I might be to experiencing early modern food culture in any significant way. But of course, as I describe my ?harrowing? concerns about getting research related sugar, I also assume the role of the Early Modern English housewife who shared my concerns, while relishing a jar of marmalade despite food insecurity on the rise. Due to COVID-19, in the Washington D.C. area, there are over 650,000 people who are food insecure, a significantly higher amount than in the previous year.145 The pandemic has essentially caused a major collapse in the supply chain for the Capital Area Food Bank, with fewer suppliers and community partners still operating, social distancing mandating fewer volunteers working simultaneously, and more demand than ever. The question of authenticity is a luxury in and of itself, whereas the politics of place, its food, and who gets to eat it beats ever on. 144 Virginia Richter, ?Authenticity: Why We Still Need It Although It Doesn?t Exist,? in Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze- Engler and Sissy Helff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 60. 145 Interview with Mary Beth Healy of Capital Area Food Bank, August 31, 2020. 253 Conclusion ?Go Where You Wanna Go? Introduction In the lobby of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, the 60?s pop song ?Dreamin?? by the Cascades wafted through the air. Unexpectedly (for most present), two groups of students walked out, forming a line across the lobby. As the song played, each struck a ?power pose? each time the John Gummoe of the Cascades sang that he was ?dreamin?? or ?searchin?.? In these power poses, they stood frozen with their hands raised in celebration or their fists in the air. Their faces expressed the ecstasy and joy that might accompany the poses. This was in stark contrast with the neutral faces and posture they resumed in the musical moments between ?dreamin?s? and ?searchin?s.? Six months later, in Brookfield Place, a palm tree filled mall in New York City, new dancers struck the same poses to the same tune. The dancers in Days Go By emerged not from classrooms and side hallways, but down escalators and out of storefronts. But their faces were just as exuberant as they punched the air. In 2019, Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz De Viteri workshopped this dance sequence with the students of my site-specific performance course as part of their preparation for Days Go By. The New York-based Monica Bills Barnes & Company is known for its choreography, ?full of alternating stillness and propulsion.?1 Founded in 1995, the company?s motto has long been ?bringing dance where it doesn?t belong.?2 One way to interpret this motto is as a testament to their interest in site-specificity. Many of their works are site-specific, such as 1 Marc Strauss and Myron Nadel, Looking at Contemporary Dance: A Guide for the Internet Age (Hightstown, UNITED STATES: Princeton Book Company, 2012), 159, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umdcp/detail.action?docID=3015282. 2 ?Monica Bill Barnes & Company,? Monica Bill Barnes & Company, accessed May 4, 2022, https://www.monicabillbarnes.com. 254 their 2017 performance The Museum Workout, where spectators conducted a dance/work out through the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another way to interpret the motto is as an indication of their commitment to interdisciplinarity and innovation. In this capacity, the company has danced radio stories with This American Life?s Ira Glass and turned a dance concert into a happy hour office party.3 Essentially, the company creates dance performances by realizing ?the zaniest idea[s] that totally work? whether those ideas are about site or form.4 During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company amended their motto so it now reads ?bringing dance where it doesn?t belong (including your computer screen!?)5 This addition reminds us that virtual space is, indeed, space. Nearly two years after Days Go By, in April 2021, dancers of the Monica Bill Barnes Company returned to Brookfield Place. This time, they performed in It?s 3:07 Again, a choose- your-own-adventure style digital performance. The same palm tree grove of Brookfield Place?s atrium was now filled with characters that the spectator was invited to speculate about as if they were people watching. Brookfield Place served as a sort of menu, allowing spectators to click on a person in the scene, which would redirect them to a previously recorded dance sequence. Each dance was a rumination on this speculation, a glimpse into the dancer?s interior life. Often, it was also a glimpse into the interior of their homes. These sequences were filmed in apartments, on street corners, and even in a physical therapist?s office. The final dance number occurred in 3 ?Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host,? Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host, accessed November 21, 2019, http://3acts2dancers1radiohost.com/; ??Happy Hour? Is Much More than Entertainment for Monica Bill Barnes & Co.,? Vanyaland, March 11, 2019, https://vanyaland.com/2019/03/11/for-monica-bill-barnes-co-happy- hour-is-much-more-than-entertainment/. 4 Jennifer Stahl, ?ZANIEST IDEA THAT TOTALLY WORKED: Monica Bill Barnes? The Museum Workout,? Dance Magazine 91, no. 12 (December 2017): 83?83. 5 ?Monica Bill Barnes & Company.? 255 Brookfield Place. The individuated dancers transformed back into an ensemble in order to dance to ?Sound and Vision? by David Bowie. By way of a conclusion, I turn to these three ?sites? to consider the site-specificity that passes between them. Where the first ?site,? The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, and the ?second,? Brookfield Place during Days Go By, share the same performance across two distinct spaces, the second and third ?site,? Brookfield Place during It?s 3:07 Again, share the space across different performances. These three sites are particularly valuable, as they allow me to return to many of the themes and formal characteristics that appeared throughout the dissertation, including voyeuristic spectatorship, the privileging of the now, and relational geography. In bringing my theoretical threads together, I suggest that while performance may be intimately connected to a site, experiencing place is not limited by geography or material practice. Now and Then One of the most salient qualities of Days Go By is its people-watching function, which is reminiscent of the similar qualities in The Subway Plays and Promenade: Baltimore. It also shares this quality with It?s 3:07 Again. Serving as narrator, Saenz De Viteri directs the audience (who hear him through headphones) to gaze upon particular individuals in the atrium. He humorously muses about what their day must have been like and what their future will hold. It is not always clear who belongs to the performance, and who is merely a bystander. However, sometimes it is obvious. Perhaps the ?tell? is a person?s rhythmic walking. Or one might suspect that the man nodding head his head to the music will soon throw his body into it, too. Monica Bill Barnes is recognizable through the signature red carnation on her lapel. A spectator might even peer out at the dancers and incredulously ask themselves, ?Is that 256 television?s Danny Pudi playing the air guitar?? (Yes.) In these instances, Days Go By?s characters are highly recognizable. Perhaps these prominent figures demonstrate a misalignment of site (as a familiar actor might). Other times, it is far harder to tell. Since it?s a public space, surely people will be caught in the theatrical frame. As one reviewer noted, ?Sometimes it is hard to know if the narrator is talking about a member of the show or just someone who happens to be passing by ? it?s even funny to see their reaction, trying to understand what?s going on.?6 Bystanders appear to be shocked when dance breaks out next to them. Take for instance a woman who sat on the other side of a palm tree from a young man. In a series of production photos, one can track her surprise as he begins to dance. She incredulously looks over her shoulder, as if to ask, ?Is this really happening?? However, the most remarkable feature of Days Go By is that while it appears like these bystanders were surprised to see dancing break out in the atrium, time after time they were, indeed, part of the performance. One person sat on a bench watching the performance for nearly twenty minutes before joining in. A couple ordered food, ate at a side table near the restaurant. However, once their meal was consumed, they started dancing. Even children were ensemble members. One spectator remarked to me that he remembered seeing people on the next level of Brookfield Place and saying to himself, ?oh, well they can?t possibly be in it.?7 But of course, they were. If the prominent characters serve as a misalignment, bystanders-who-are-performers offer a sense of transparency that only reveals itself after you have assumed it was not there. No matter whether people were milling about, minding their own business, or ignoring the performance completely, chances were high that these seemingly ordinary people were, in 6 Downtown Magazine, ?Review: Days Go By, an Innovative Dance Perform...,? Downtown Magazine (blog), October 5, 2019, https://www.downtownmagazinenyc.com/review-days-go-by-an-innovative-dance-performance- at-brookfield-place/. 7 Spectator Interview, October 5, 2019. 257 actuality, part of the company of Days Go By. In a sense, they served, as Saenz De Viteri put it in It?s 3:07 Again, as ?New York City?s supernumeraries.?8 This offers a radical revision of the people-watching function found in Promenade: Baltimore, in which bystanders were not the designed object of the spectator?s gaze but caught in the theatrical frame nonetheless, and in The Subway Plays, which suggests voyeurism is just part and parcel of riding the subway. Days Go By spectacularly dramatizes people watching. Instead of placing bystanders in the theatrical frame, it stages performers outside of it. Perhaps this approach is a more ethical one, as it does not place non-consenting people under the gaze of an audience. However, whether or not it is more ethical, the people-watching function of Days Go By has the same ideological goal of orienting the spectator towards the present moment. It's 3:07 Again takes this even further with an extreme take on the present moment. The central conceit of the dance returns the spectator to the same minute, over and over. It asks them to consider another person in the same scene before being pulled away into their dance sequence, elsewhere. Each time the spectator returns to the menu that is Brookfield Place, Saenz De Viteri?s narrator chirps ?It?s 3:07 again!? before directing the audience?s attention to a different set of people-watching options.9 Choosing means that the spectator will inevitably miss something, another product of ?being in the moment.? It is only when the performance ends that time begins to pass once more. Though the performance is about the now, it also is deeply aware that a place is an event, that the people caught in this moment will soon be gone: ?Because the minute moves on. It?s 3:08.?10 8 It?s 3:07 Again, Monica Bill Barnes & Company, April 12- May 2, 2021, Digital. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 258 Like Days Go By, It?s 3:07 Again?s emphasis on the present emerges through and for the sake of its people-watching function. Unlike Days Go By, it is clear that everyone within the frame belongs in the frame. Most people on the scene represent options for dances that are available to the spectator. Each time the performance returns to the Brook Field Place ?menu? the audience is given three choices, three people whose interior lives they can see explored via dance. Once this scene is complete, the spectator will return to the menu, where those three options do not appear again. Though the one-minute scene will replay with new narration, Saenz De Viteri directs the spectator toward three new people in the scene. Every choice brings the spectator to a new location, a central conceit that allows the performance to delve deeply into the interior lives of the everyday characters who populate Brookfield Place. As they momentarily depart from Brookfield Place, the spectator experiences the atrium and their new location in relation to each other and creates meaning through that relationship. Here and There Theatrical space is often assumed to be singular. Birgit Wiens calls this the ?spatial exclusiveness? of theatre.11 What I am suggesting here is that rather than leaning into this belief, we approach places as networked together. Our experience of a place (or a site) is dependent on its links to other places. We might be reminded of Gupta and Ferguson, who argue that place, as a social construct that is continuously being produced, is an experienced condition that is connected to but separate from physical space.12 This is certainly clear in Confection, in which the taste of Early Modern England is wholly dependent on the flavors and techniques borrowed 11 Birgit Wiens, ?Spatiality,? in Mapping Intermediality in Performance, ed. Sarah Bay-Cheng et al. (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 91?96, http://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9789048513147. 12 Gupta and Ferguson, ?Beyond ?Culture?: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.? 259 or stolen from other parts of the world. Seeing place as an interconnected phenomenon allows for a diverse set of spatial logics in which place only has meaning relationally. There are many ways we can think about relational geography in site-specific performance. There are two that I will attend to here. The first is through the spatial dramaturgy of a performance like It?s 3:07 Again. The juxtaposition between the places in the performance (between Brookfield Place and wherever the dancer is) creates a new map that sees these geographically distinct areas as connected. Technology has been criticized within digital performance because it does not allow for the ?essential? theatrical condition of shared space between the audience and the performers. While technologies have allowed access to other spaces vis-?-vis telecommunication software for some time, this has been rejected through a belief that the technological reproductions were incongruent with the material realness of theatre, meaning a shared space. It becomes apparent that for many the spatial dynamic of theatre is viewed as a limitation, a factor that relies on immediacy and intimacy, but that is unable to expand beyond its proximal confines. The relational geography suggested in It?s 3:07 Again offers an alternative to this perceived limitation. The interconnected dance sequences of It?s 3:07 Again perhaps articulate a new meaning to Foucault?s comments on space: ?We are in the age of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered.?13 The dancers create a network of geographical locations that are simultaneously distanced and proximal. They feel connected even when they are far away. Juxtaposing the locations builds new geographies that do not contour to the physical world, but instead extend our spatial imaginings through intermedial technologies. As Wiens argues, ?The intermedial stage affords the exploration of performative configurations 13 Michel Foucault, ?Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,? in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 350. 260 between here and other spaces, and experiments with simultaneous actions at different (locally or geographically separated) locations.?14 Technology has allowed for spaces to be weaved together against the restrictions of geographic proximity. While intermedial space efforts to replicate proximity, it also invites the possibility of heterogeneous space coexisting and asks the spectator to navigate a new map. Spaces are playfully connected, despite their geographical distance. Imagine a patchwork quilt as a map, in which the arrangement of the patches became a new geography. In this way, the intermedial space approaches what Bertie Ferdman has referred to as ?off site? performances.15 ?Off site? signals a connection between spaces and situates it as the primary concern of its dramaturgical spatial practice: ?An off-site is not so much about the specific space where it is, as much as it is about where and when it is not.?16 In this capacity, off site creates a ?betweenness? that operates to connect absent locations in performance. Approaching site as topological expands what places can be gathered under it. The second approach to relational geography in site-specific performance is through a consideration of how the performance itself networks places together. Beginning in a rehearsal room, Barnes and Saenz De Viteri taught my students simple choreography to ?Dreamin?? by the Cascades. With triumphant fists, the choreography was representative of the company?s style: intense jubilation in the form of athletic dancing that is simultaneously precise and unrestrained. After they learned the choreography, they performed it in several different locations around the Clarice. This exercise was intended to reveal how the same performance is transformed (for both the spectator and the performer) in different spaces. First, students performed the same routine 14 Wiens, ?Spatiality,? 94. 15 Ferdman, Off Sites. 16 Ferdman, 25. 261 on stage, a seemingly more appropriate environment to dance in. However, notably, this was not the Clarice?s Dance Theatre. They danced on stage at the Dekelboum Concert Hall, a space designed for music that many of the theatre students and all the non-majors had never been in before. Next, they left the stage for the house, dancing amongst the rows of seats. This gesture subverted the typical spatial arrangement found in traditional performance venues. Finally, the students performed in the lobby (before being asked to leave by the front-of-house staff). Figure 7: ?Site-Specific Performance? students power pose on the stage of the Dekelboum Concert Hall at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, while Barnes and Saenz De Viteri watch. Photo by the Author. These four locations (including the rehearsal room) operate on a spectrum from typical performance spaces to ?where dance doesn?t belong,? from conventionally staged performance to site-based. It simultaneously recognizes that performance is influenced by the location in which it occurs while bucking the traditional connection to a singular, specific place. Likewise, for the performers, the exercise asks them to measure their experience of performing in a place through iteration. In so much, the impact of place upon the choreography is never singular, but the cumulative effect of all the places in which was performed before. 262 When ?Dreamin?? is danced in Brookfield Place, does it retain the patina of the places it was danced in before? Does it preserve the ways in which the architecture of the Clarice pressed into its formation? Perhaps, but perhaps not. After all, it is danced by different performers. Likewise, the space of Brookfield Place had its own effect on the performance, transforming it from an unexpected dance in the lobby of a performing art center to what a reviewer described as ?Like a barely controlled tantrum, the mob culminates in punchy, rebounding unison.?17 However, for me, as a spectator, the gesture evidenced the linked nature between the two sites, the Clarice and Brookfield Place. The air punches that punctuate the ?Dreamin?? choreography appear throughout the performance, harking back to other places. In one sense, some might be reluctant to call Days Go By site-specific because it was, in part, workshopped elsewhere. However, this perspective limits the potential of both site and place. Experiencing place as relational allows for a much more capacious engagement with it. Turning towards relational geography moves further away from site?s attachment to a singular location by animating a place?s existing networks and investing in its own existing spatiality. Days Go By and It?s 3:07 Again were performed in the same place, Brookfield Place?s palm-tree filled atrium. The most noticeable difference in use is in their spatial orientations. Days Go By situated the audience so that it faced the atrium?s floor to ceiling windows that overlook the Hudson River. It?s 3:07 approached the space from the side, so that the windows (which are covered by curtains) are nearly out of view of the camera. However, both performances utilize the same quotidian purpose of Brookfield Place, seeing it as an intersection for all walks of life. It is through this use that both shows animate their people-watching function, as if to say, ?here 17 ?IMPRESSIONS: Monica Bill Barnes & Company?s ?Days Go By? at Brookfield Place,? accessed November 21, 2019, http://www.dance-enthusiast.com/features/impressionsreviews/view/Monica-Bill-Barnes-Days-Go-By-at- Brookfield-Place. 263 is a place in which you can find New Yorkers being New Yorkers, take a look!? As both performances animate similar qualities of the same place through the company?s unique style of dance, are they utilizing the same site? Or is site uniquely created for each performance? Through this dissertation, I have demonstrated that site is a compelling but under- theorized concept. While site offers us compelling strategies for revealing and highlighting place, it also illuminates the ethically dubious and thorny consequences of intervening in place. As such, I have argued that the way that an audience experiences place in site-specific performance is of vital consequence because it shapes the perspective and material reality of the place beyond the confines of the theatrical frame. Site-specific performance is a world-building tool. It is always networked, always informed by other places, always formed relationally. Site-specific performance has for so long been concerned with being ?here,? attending to it as if it could be held in isolation. As Tim Cresswell points out, however, place is always constructed in relation to the outside, for after all ?here? is distinguished as ?not there.?18 Both operative terms in ?site- specific? already suggest a selection process, a choice between here and there (and there and there). Technology has tasked us to imagine new spatial arrangements between here and there. The distance between ?here? and ?there? is not quite what it once was, and we must adjust our spatiality accordingly. We can extend this task to site as a creative tool to animate the experience of place, wherever that might be. If site is conceived topologically, it is no longer concerned with place as singular. In so much, perhaps site-specific performance is less about ?here,? than it is about here, and here, and here, and here. And here. 18 Cresswell, Geographic Thought a Critical Introduction, 221. 264 Bibliography @amy_bower_bahr. ?Surrealism + DC expression. Hirshhorn Ball. What. A. Night.? Instagram, June 16, 2019. https://www.instagram.com/p/BywgHM5hsuT/. @marygcorpus. ?Thrilled to have had the opportunity to assist @liubolin with a live performance at #HirshhornBall where @kyartcow @_nomu.nomu_ and I camouflaged him into a Rene Magritte painting. 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London, UNITED KINGDOM: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umdcp/detail.action?docID=1058315. Baltimore Sun. ?HAIL AT OWN RISK.? Accessed January 9, 2022. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2009-09-15-0909150013-story.html. Hall, Kim F. ?Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century.? In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, edited by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan. Cambridge [England]?; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hannah, Dorita. Event Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde, 2019. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk& AN=1781041. Vanyaland. ??Happy Hour? Is Much More than Entertainment for Monica Bill Barnes & Co.,? 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Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. 33. print. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2013. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen J?rs-Munby. Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2006. Levin, L. Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage and the Art of Blending In. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umdcp/detail.action?docID=1765643. Library, Folger Shakespeare. ?Woolley, Hannah. The Accomplish?d Ladies Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery.?: Containing, I. The Art of Preserving, and Candying Fruits and Flowers, and the Making of All Sorts of Conserves, Syrups, and Jellies. II. The Physical Cabinet, or Excellent Receipts in Physick and Chirurgery, Together with Some Rare Beautifying Waters, to Adorn and Add Loveliness to the Face and Body: And Also Some New and Excellent Secrets and Experiments in the Art of Angling. III. 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Accessed June 6, 2020. https://collections.folger.edu/detail/woolley-hannah-the- accomplish%27d-ladies-delight-in-preserving-physick-beautifying-and-cookery-- containing-i-the-art-of-preserving-and-candying-fruits-and-flowers-and-the-making-of- all-sorts-of-conserves-syrups-and-jellies-ii-the-physical-cabinet-or-excellent-receipts-in- physick-and-chirurgery-together-with-some-rare-beautifying-waters-to-adorn-and-add- loveliness-to-the-face-and-body-and-also-some-new-and-excellent-secrets-and- experiments-in-the-art-of-angling-iii-the-compleat-cooks-guide-or-directions-for- dressing-all-sorts-of-flesh-fowl-and-fish-both-in-the-english-and-french-mode-with-all- sauces-and-sallets;-and-the-making-pyes-pasties-tarts-and-custards-with-the-forms-and- shapes-of-many-of-them/cc8d0898-f615-4078-9462-934e97617282. 274 Lindsay-Herrera, Flora. ?One City for All? The Characteristics of Residential Displacement in Southwest Washington, DC.? 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Interview by Kelley Holley, September 8, 2019. Washington Post. ??Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater.?? Accessed December 1, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/11/shouting-fire- in-a-crowded-theater/. Single Carrot Theatre, and Stereo AKT. Promenade Baltimore. June 2, 2017. Performance. Smith, Andrew F. Sugar: A Global History. Islington, London, England: Reaktion Books, 2015. Smith, Randy. ?Food Access in D.C Is Deeply Connected to Poverty and Transportation.? D.C. Policy Center, March 13, 2017. https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/food-access- dc-deeply-connected-poverty-transportation/. Smithson, Robert. ?Toward the Development of An Air Terminal Site.? In Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 95?96. The Documents of Twentieth- Century Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Snouwaert, Jessica. ?13 Photos of New York City Looking Deserted as the City Tries to Limit the Spread of the Coronavirus.? 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