Introduction: Theatre, Space, and World-making

Abstract

In Theatre&’s Heterotopias, I isolate and examine space in performance. ‘Space’ might include the imaginative setting created with and through a narrative, the scenic space of a production&’s design, the contribution to meaning that the architectural, cultural, or historical surrounds of a venue might offer, and/or the efficacy of an unconventional venue. I seek to provide a specific interprétational means by which we can analyse the space of performance, not just in its own immediate performative context but also in relation to its physical and historical community: I propose the concept of heterotopia for this project. Heterotopia (related to Utopia, the better known aspirational ‘topos’) is a location that, when apparent in a performance, reflects or comments on a site in the actual world, a relationship that may continue when audiences leave a theatre.¹ It may even act as a foil for how we understand spaces and structures beyond a performance. I chart the ways in which theatre can create what Kevin Hetherington calls &’spaces of alternate ordering’ (1997, p. viii). Heterotopias are alternative spaces that are distinguished from that actual world, but that resonate with it. Heterotopias have the capacity to reveal structures of power and knowledge: a potential outcome of a study of heterotopias is, then, a more detailed examination of locations in which cultural and political meanings can be produced spatially.