MEDITERRANEAN SPACING Those We Carry with Us Carry Us

Περίληψη

July 2024. It is high summer on a beach in the eastern Peloponnese of mainland Greece, where twenty fully-clothed artists – performers, architects, landscapers and theatre-makers – stand next to white plastic chairs lining the shore, before unexpectedly taking them into the sea while locals are enjoying the last sunrays of the day. In this moment, site-responsive performance merges with everyday life, spontaneously assembling all those on the beach to communally witness the ensuing sunset. Such ‘taking place’ is an event of ‘Mediterranean Spacing’ formulated in a workshop for the Performing Space conference. Through action research, participants explored regional understandings of how communities assemble in order to debunk long-held assumptions on sites for cultural expression. It builds on notions of Performance Space and Spatial Performativity, to outline a theory of Performative Spacing as an active and activating means of shaping and experiencing events and environments within and beyond theatre architecture. This deliberately undermines architecture’s traditional role as a fixed, durable object designed to order space and those who inhabit it. Because spatiotemporal paradigms – i.e., how space performs and performance is spatialised – are culturally inflected, performative spacing provides a means of dismantling and decentring theatre architecture’s status quo in order to halt a continual deferral to conventional venues This acknowledges epistemological diversity as foundational to local and indigenous spatial thought, encouraging design thinking that acknowledges and accommodates a multiplicity of worlds.  Performance space is therefore approached as a pluriversal phenomenon in which interconnecting worlds coexist as spatiotemporal constructs – as spacings.