Writing, texts and site-specific performance in the recent work of Deborah Warner

Abstract

This article examines three site-specific performances by British theatre director Deborah Warner that took place in London in the 1990s. Its main premise is that site-specific performances, even those without a written text, are mediated by a complex and fluid array of other texts, intertexts and textual effects. Comparing Warner's production of Eliot's The Waste Land with two text-free productions offers a way to chart how these performances interpenetrate, while a consideration of spectatorial subjectivity and cultural frames of reference reveals how wider issues of cultural competence and aesthetic criteria impact on the work. A detailed analysis of the critical responses to these performances demonstrates their marked creative dimension, accounted for in some part by a thematics of secrecy and a self-consciousness about how to figure the spectator's own key role in the construction of the performances' meaning.