Reflective Practitioner: More thoughts on space

I have been doing some more reading to see if I can find a solution to my seating problem but everything that I have looked at really confirms my own thoughts, Bert O States remarks, ‘that theatre is a license for a remarkable exercise in group imagination.’ I am inclined to agree, however, I will not be asking the audience to silently fulfil their role and accept their agreement to collaborate with the fiction but instead I will be asking them to actively engage with the performers, to materially take part in an exercise of group imagination and creation. My intention is to embody that exercise of group imagination and make it something visceral and tangible.

In making my creative decisions, this is my key objective and it seems that spatiality plays a huge role in offering the audience the chance to take up their creatorly role within Siren Song. Stanton B Garner also affirms the centrality of space when he suggests:

‘Bodied Spaces is a book about two of drama’s mot essential and elusive elements: spatiality, though which plays establish fields of visual and environmental relationships, and the human body, through which these fields receive their primary orientation. It is also a book about theatrical watching, and about the spatial conjunction of bodies, objects and other performative elements that constitute at once the object of such watching the fields in which it takes place.’

Although both Garner and States are concerned with drama, I want to suggest that their theoretical strategies have application within the wider arena of performance. Space it would seem is a central idea to the idea of creatorly participation whether it be material or conceptual.