In this section, you’ll find content about work created for and performed outside of conventional theatre spaces. Artists describe the reasons for making such work, and the challenges that come along with it. Consider starting with Anne Hamburger’s “The Why and How of Site-Specific” or Gab Cody’s essay on writing for immersive and site-informed experiences.
Tannis Kowalchuk, artistic director of Farm Arts Collective, shares about the project Dream on the Farm—a ten year project of climate change plays performed on Willow Wisp Organic Farm that grapples with the questions: How do we imagine our future? What are our dreams?
A Twelve-Foot Robotic Arm, Like Chekhov Would Have Wanted
25 January 2024
In this episode, Tjaša chats with director Igor Golyak of Arlekin Players about the power of virtual theatre and the experience of using technology that had never before been used for live performance. And if you were wondering why there was a twelve-foot robotic arm on stage, serving coffee and sweeping the floor in The Orchard at Baryshnikov Center, Igor thinks that’s what Chekhov would have wanted.
Rex Daugherty offers a guide for theatremakers who want to produce theatre in nontraditional spaces, sharing the experiences of Washington, DC’s Solas Nua.
Performance, Pro-Democracy Protest, and Activism Across Cultures
13 November 2023
Kristin Idaszak reflects on experiencing Theatre Du Polet’s Be Water, My Friend at the Prague Quadrennial. This protest art about Hong Kong’s fight for democracy in 2019, performed in the Czech Republic, crosses cultures, political regimes, and time periods.
Andy Field Talks about Forest Fringe—an Independent, Not-for-Profit Space in the Edinburgh Festival
Monday 5 June 2023
New York City
For over ten years as of this event, Forest Fringe has built a community of artists and playwrights. Each year they return to Edinburgh they experiment with different ways of doing things and new contexts to accommodate even the most unusual experiences. Meanwhile they’ve also started exploring beyond the festival, creating new projects across the UK and internationally, including a festival in an old cinema in the center of Bangkok, a series of performances on night buses across London, and a traveling library of audio experiences.
Documentary Screening With Tony Torn and Original Members of the Cast (NY)
Thursday 11 May 2023
New York City
Join us for a screening of Reza Abdoh’s extraordinary site-specific work Father was a Peculiar Man,an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov staged in New York City’s Meatpacking District in the summer of 1990. Produced by Anne Hamburger’s En Garde Arts, Father was a Peculiar Man showed how brilliantly Reza applied his specific site-based approach that he developed in Los Angeles to New York City’s urban infrastructure.
Gregory Moomjy and Marianna Mott Newirth share their approach to creating disability-affirmative opera productions in which disability artistry flourishes.
In this episode, co-hosts Bíborka and Zsófi are joined by visual and performance artist and environmental activist, Éva Bubla; dancer, choreographer, researcher, and founder of the performance research group SVUNG, Kinga Szemessy; and culture manager, event organizer, curator, founder of the PLACCC Festival, and the Hungarian liaison for the IN SITU Network, Fanni Nánay. Drawing from their individual experiences, they discuss the current climate crisis and how different artists engage with this complex issue.
We Are All Kin to the Cove Brings Climate-Engaged Community Performance to Queens, New York
22 September 2022
Talia Rodriguez details the generative process for We Are Kin to the Cove, a site-specific, community-engaged performance exploring the historical and contemporary relationships water and humanity at a cove on New York’s East River.
International Theatre Forum Hosted by Shoshin Theatre Association in Cluj, Romania
Saturday 17 September 2022
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Shoshin Theatre Association in Cluj, Romania presented Out of the Frame International Theatre Forum livestreaming on the global, commons-based, peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Saturday 17 September at 7 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4) / 11 a.m. UTC / 2 p.m. EEST (Cluj, UTC +3).
In the first episode of PUHA (Performative Unity in the Hungarian Arts) podcast, co-hosts Zsófi and Bíborka, along with their guests, search for the meaning of the notion of “public space.” Through the experiences and experiments of interdisciplinary sound artist Dávid Somló; choreographer Flóra Eszter Sarlós; dancer and choreographer Gyula Cserepes; and theatremaker and performer Sarah Günther, this episode will take you on a tour of spaces, from Budapest to Denmark to London and more!
This episode is an interview with Addae Moon, the associate artistic director at Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta, Georgia. We discuss his journey as a theatre artist; his playwright development lab, Hush Harbor Lab; and his own artistry and creativity.
Artistic identities can be complicated, and many theatremakers work equally within two or more disciplines simultaneously. The most interesting work is rarely created in a vacuum. These multidisciplinary artists create diverse projects in all senses of the word, broadening our idea of what theatre can and should be. Today, two such multihyphenate artists, Denmo Ibrahim and Sarah Fahmy, converse about their multiple identities, how they reconcile and manage their myriad expertise, and the role of multihyphenate artists in today’s theatre landscape.
Humanizing Homelessness: An Interview with Lisa Hoelscher of Gathering Ground Theatre
19 May 2022
Gathering Ground Theatre—an Austin, Texas collective comprised of people with lived experiences of homelessness and allies—creates performances that aim to influence public opinion and local legislation. Anna Rogelio Joaquin sits down with Lisa Hoelscher to discuss Lisa’s experience as a co-creator and performer of works that expose issues like hostile architecture and camping bans, as well as the company’s current work on a memorial performance.
Site-specific performances have the possibility to truly make all the world a stage. To produce site-specific and devised theatre performances in the United States and abroad, artists must engage with the questions of the politics of any space, what communities inhabit or use it, and who is invited into it. Sahar Assaf, a Lebanese theatremaker and the new artistic director of Golden Thread Productions, and Zeina Daccache, an actor, director, and the founder of Catharsis: Lebanese Center for Drama Therapy come together to talk about site-specific and devised theatre pieces in Lebanon, the rest of the MENA world, and the United States.
Learning from Sources: Performance and Climate Crisis in Four Brazilian Works
20 April 2022
In Martin Domecq’s contribution to the Climate Emergency series, he puts four Brazillian performance art pieces in conversation to draw upon the poetic, political, and civic lessons they offer. These performances—which range from installations to solo and group performances—model possible paradigms that work against ecological crisis.
Side-yard: On the Commons, the Neighborhood, Grief, and Not Making Theatre While Still Making Theatre
15 March 2022
Play House is a collectively stewarded performance space near the border of Detroit and Hamtramck that has become a place of convening and creation for the neighborhood. Richard Newman, a co-manager of the space and co-director of The Hinterlands ensemble, traces connections between creative practice, community, grief, and an outdoor ramp at Play House.
Jonathan Mandell reflects on his experience of A Dozen Dreams, an art installation that began when twelve New York City-based women playwrights were asked: “What are you dreaming about right now?”
Virginia Grise’s Stage Adaptation of Helena Maria Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them
17 March 2021
Manuel Muñoz reflects on Virginia Grise’s adaptation of Their Dogs Came with Them, which took place in fall 2019 under the colossal concrete freeway ramps of the I-10 freeway that dissect South Tucson from the edge of the Sonoran Desert.
Caroline Sprague reflects on Shey Rivera Ríos’s recent piece, Fire Flowers and a Time Machine, transformative justice, the nonprofit industrial complex, and more.
Making Site-Specific Theatre About Climate Change that Could Be Threatened by Climate Change
17 December 2020
Playwright and environmentalist Alice Stanley Jr. shares her experience of Capital W’s newest immersive theatre piece, Fire Season—a play about climate change that took place in the Santa Monica Mountains during this year’s wildfires.
Several months after Pittsburgh’s Quantam Theatre programmed The Gun Show, there was a mass shooting at a synagogue in the city. TJ Parker discusses how the company responded to the crisis, both through the play and through community engagement.