ABSTRACT
From its very beginnings, theatre has been both an art and a public space, shared by actors and spectators. As a result, its entity and history is intimately tied to politics: a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, of spatial appropriation and utopian concepts. This collection examines what is at stake when a theatrical space is created and when a performance takes place; it asks under what circumstances the topology of theatre becomes political.
The book approaches this issue from various angles, taking theatre as a cultural paradigm for political dimensions of space in its respective historical context. Visiting the political dimensions of theatrical space in both theatre history and contemporary performance, the volume responds to the so-called spatial turn in cultural and historical studies, and questions a politics of aesthetics that is discussed in continental philosophy. The book visits different levels and linkages between aesthetic theory and geography, art and sociology, architecture and political theory, and geometry and history, shedding new light on theatre, politics, and space, thereby transforming this historically intertwined triad into a transdisciplinary theme.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|114 pages
Placements and Bounderies
chapter 3|20 pages
What Time is This Place?
chapter 4|15 pages
Performing Like a City
chapter 5|19 pages
What is Sydney about Sydney Theatre?
chapter 6|14 pages
Thresholds of Tolerence
chapter 7|13 pages
“Set in Poland, That is to Say Nowhere”
part II|89 pages
Utopia and Heterotopia
chapter 12|18 pages
Opéra Pagaï's Entreprise de Détournement
part III|80 pages
Strategies of Spatial Appropriation