ABSTRACT
At the beginning of his influential book The Empty Space theatre practitioner Peter Brook famously announced that ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage’ (Brook 1972: 11). Brook was interested in work that might take place beyond the conventions of the proscenium arch theatre and looked to experiment with different performance sites. This chapter will address artists who choose to create performances outside theatre buildings and develop work that responds to the environment. It proposes that artists predominantly respond to a place from the perspective of an outsider and considers the problems and possibilities that this affords to the creative encounter. At the core of the enquiry is an examination of the place of the artist both literally in terms of the locations that they inhabit and philosophically and psychologically in terms of the social functions the artist may perform.
