ABSTRACT
It is striking that, in this period of globalisation and cyber space, theatre practitioners are interested in rethinking how people relate to landscape and place. Spatial relationships have always been integral to performance-making; the configuration of performance spaces and their effects on actor-audience exchanges have been richly and variously investigated by practitioners across history and cultures. Spatial metaphors, however, are being used increasingly to describe the ways in which social identities are formed in this diasporic and globalised world. As time and space become compressed, there is recognition that contemporary perceptions of identity are formed by identifying with, and travelling between, different locations and multiple places. Metaphors of place and space – borders, margins, mappings, translocation, dislocation and so on – are frequently used as a critical device to explain how ideas of community and selfhood are experienced and understood. At a time when people are increasingly geographically mobile, either through choice or through enforced displacement, this metaphor is often associated with a political awareness of location in which ‘sites’ of power are ‘mapped’.
