What Time is This Place?

Focusing on the politics of space, this volume of essays deploys the linked concepts of topology, location, and boundary-marking to situate theatre and other performative practices in particular places. While several contributors attend to changes in their chosen locations, none appears to address directly the politics of time. The politics of time—conflicts between continuity and change; battles about preservation, renovation, or radical demolition; and the ideological weight of claims for the apparently timeless character of particular sites—require attention if we are fully to comprehend the space for and the place of performance. In What Time Is This Place? urbanist Kevin Lynch highlights the temporal dimension of spatial practices that shape our experience of space and our sense of the durability or transience of that space. In his view, the past cannot be simply excavated, uncovered, or reconstructed “as it really was” rather “the past must be chosen and made in the present” the preservationist desire to “arrest the past” by “restoration” alone “cannot easily reconstruct the circumstance that created it.” ¹ Although Lynch addressed his book primarily to architects, urban planners, and lay as well as professional preservationists, his call to choose the past on which to construct the present speaks to performance practitioners, researchers, and audiences as well, especially those engaged not only in excavating traces of past performances but in reanimating those traces and their places in the present and the future.