Landscapes for Performance: The Geographies of Deborah Warner

Abstract

In Peter Brook’s book, The Empty Space, he defines theatrical space as essentially being about the relationship between a performer and spectator in an empty space. In a simple sense, these are the basic components necessary to create theatre. However, it is also true that the notion of an empty space being void of anything is not the case, since any space contains a history, memory and multiplicity of meanings. In turn, those performances found and created in non-theatre spaces, which are using the theatrical element of space, imbue the spatial memory and meanings already inherent and embedded there. It is this that stimulates and prompts the audience to look inside themselves, so that the performance becomes subject to an individual’s truth of spectator reception, ‘When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself, then something in the mind burns. The event scorches onto the memory; an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell, a picture.’3