ABSTRACT
The history of Esgair Fraith is the story of just two families, of two sets of biographies. For almost fifty years Esgair Fraith lay deep in the Clwedog Forest, planted by the Forestry Commission between 1956 and 1959 in two adjoining parishes, and composed mainly of non-indigenous sitka spruce, with some pine. But it was never quite hidden. Everything at Esgair Fraith has recently changed. The cash-crop timber has been harvested, and the finds of this fellinga kind of excavation in itselfare spectacular: across this hillside a dozen similar derelict farms have emerged. Contemporary performance makes no attempt to re-enact the million, million things that have happened here; it may even in theoretical architect Bernard Tschumis terms be as much ambivalent to, or indeed in conflict with, the site as much as congruent or reciprocal with it; the relationship between the found place and the fabricated performance scenography may be assymetrical, one dominating the other.
