I love doing site specific work. There is a special kind of relationship one must develop with the space. There is a predictability in theatre spaces as far as how light moves that does not exist in found spaces. There are common elements, sure, but in the end each one must be taken on its own terms.
My personal favorite spaces are ones that are run down or partially run down. Those that have a sense of old, a feeling of history. There is a wonderful sense of giving birth to something new out of the decay of the old. Reclaiming a space and giving it a new purpose. This is where my love of industrial spaces comes from. An old factory, or warehouse transformed into a living breathing entity that renegotiates its existence with the event it contains.
In a contemporary world where everything is prefabricated and disposable, it is an important act to recycle the old. To repurpose the dying for the new.
This is why I love Hip-Hop.
Specifically Graffiti art and Scratch DJ’s. These art forms are about taking found objects, public space or prerecorded music, and through ones art repurposing and transforming the artifacts into something new, vital and alive. Bansky is very popular these days, but my real love is for train pieces and other large scale work, like Tagging Air Force One.
The only answer, that I see, to the death of American Theatre is find a new framework within which to place the performance. The setting, which includes the theatre as much as scenery and lighting and other such elements, must be reconceived for the 21st Century. Theatre must enter into a larger socio-cultural dialog or it risks falling in on itself under the weight of its own self-referential inertia. Otherwise it will not wake up its sleeping audiences, and continue lumbering along, half-dead, and half-asleep.
Tags: graffiti, hip-hop, site specific, theatre
