Not All Site Specific Theatre Is Created Equal

The San Francisco Opera will be showing their season opener at PacBell Park (or whatever it's called now).
http://bit.ly/1Sqx3N

How's that for site unspecific? The singers aren't even in the same site as the audience!

i'd agree that the term "site specificity" gets bandied about far more than it should, often quite thoughtlessly (or, worse, as a marketing ploy...). this past spring, i saw susan marshall's terrific "adamantine" at montclair state university (whose peak performances series is the most underrated ticket in the new york area), and i wasn't much convinced by attempts to label the work "site specific"--almost all the arguments emphasized the theater's technical aspects, which hardly seem "specific" in any meaningful way...

miwon kwon's work on site specificity (first published in short for in october and later in book-length form as "one place after another: site specific art and locational identity": http://books.google.com/books?id=s8KviDnz1SwC&dq=miwon+kwon+one+place+after+another&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=F2otSVVfpk&sig=D5D05D0ZFzVM7UyMO9ezxHduScA&hl=en&ei=pW6VSt2gCsfYlAf1j-2vDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false) is well worth considering here...

Well this is a rich vein indeed. I personally like the precision of narrow definitions like J's definition of "site specific theatre". However, I would argue that since any work of performance art exists only in the moment of performance, each performance is in some sense a new work, created freshly in a new "site" and therefore "site specific" for that performance.

Of course I understand what you're getting at with the narrow definition, and J is probably thinking of "environmental theatre" troupes like Reial Companyia de Teatre de Catalunya or Walkabout, and indeed it's difficult to imagine such productions mounted outside their original "sites". However, in the case of canonical "works" like Hamlet or Dido that you mentioned, I question the privileging of the original performance circumstances, in spite of the fact that I spend my life mounting "historically informed" performances.

I think "around" this issue all the time, as most of the music that Magnificat performs was "site specific" when it was composed and, in fact, there was never a thought at the time that it might be performed again, much less in another site. So every concert involves a reinvention, shaped to some degree by the environment - not only the venue of course, but the specific performers, the time of day, the audience, etc.

For example, I'm preparing now for a production of Francesca Caccini's La Liberatione di Ruggiero, a musical setting of a libretto by Saricinelli written to celebrate the visit of the Crown Prince of Poland to Florence for Carnival in 1625. The work (called a balletto by Saricenelli and Caccini, usually called an opera these days) served as an extended prologue to a "ballet" involving the "audience" of courtiers, which in turn was followed by a horse ballet. The performance of La Liberazione took place in the recently renovated Villa Imperiale outside Florence in a room with frescoes depicting heroic scenes of women from Scripture and Classical literature. The frescoes complimented the political motivations of the libretto: to reassure the Florentine nobility about the co-regency of the Grand Duchess Maria Magdalena and her mother-in-law Christine of Lorraine. Saricinelli's retelling of the story of Ruggiero's liberation from the island of the sorceress Alcina, emphasizes the agency of strong women, both bad - Alcina - and good - Melissa, and even involves the cross-gendering of the latter (she appears as the male sorcerer Atlante at the cucial point of Ruggiero's "liberation"). The equine ballet took place in the massive courtyard of the palace, so the audience moved outside. All very "site specific".

So is a performance anywhere other than the Villa Imperiale with it's thematically-related frescoes a valid performance? I would argue that even if such a performance were mounted, it would still be fundamentally anachronistic and would fail as an exercise in "authenticity". But that's not really the point of performance.

Performance is always a re-invention, a birthing - in important ways, every performance is a premiere and a final show in one, since outside of the moment of performance the "work" is only a concept.