In focus: Site-Specific Performance

This module will explore site-specific performance practice in relation to working with sites around Plymouth

Key to 21^st century contemporary theatre practice is the notion of site-based and site-specific performance work. This module will explore site-specific performance practice in relation to working with sites around Plymouth. Throughout the module, you will learn terms, ideas and discourses that will help you to develop your critical and creative practice as a practitioner of site-based work.

This 12-week course will be divided into 3 themes:

(Site: Performing Environments
(Bodies & Movement: Phenomenology and Walking practices
(Unearthing Story: Fictioning and Lively Ethnography

What's involved?

This specialist module comprises a workshop series that will survey key elements of sited performance in relation to three key themes: Site, Bodies and Story. Each of these themes contains key qualities, considerations and concerns central to a practical understanding of devising sited performance work, and although they are separated, they exist as an inter-connected web.

Our exploration will involve reference to practitioners, theorists and movements that have fostered the use of non-traditional performance spaces in theatre and performance. This work is interdisciplinary and touches on fields including visual art, architecture, anthropology, history and ecology alongside performance theory and practice.

This is a practical and diverse module. The majority of the workshop sessions will take place in non-traditional teaching spaces so students need to be prepared to be outdoors for long periods of time. Working in groups, we welcome students from all disciplines and will explore a range of creative and interdisciplinary approaches to working with site.

Sarah Blissett
Lecturer in Drama

Previous performance locations

Coastal

Brutalist architecture of the Barbican residential estate, City of London, UK

Urban

Students sitting outside the Students' Union

Campus

Academic staff

Sarah Blissett leads and teaches this module, which is connected to her research on how site-specific performance can engage with changing ocean ecologies at time of climate crisis.

Dr Sarah Blissett

Sarah Blissett is a lecturer in Drama at the University of Plymouth. Her current research explores ways of working with intertidal environments in performance and considers ecological narratives of human and algae entanglement. She is the guest editor of a forthcoming issue of CSPA Quarterly on ‘Intertidal Encounters’.

Recent work includes: the artistic research project Marking Tidetime (2022-present), the performance River Rememberings at Modern Art Oxford gallery (2022), How Nature Builds, an ongoing series of workshops at MAO (2019, 2022), Kelp Curing, a workshop series in Lofoten, Norway as part of the LIAF Kelp Congress (2019).