- Auckland, New Zealand
- +64-21-741511
Dorita Hannah
University of Newcastle NSW, School of Architecture and Built Environment, Department Member
- Auckland University of Technology, School of Art and Design- Architecture, Department MemberThe University of Auckland, NICAI - School of Architecture and Planning, Department MemberThe University of Surrey, Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences, Department Memberadd
- Theatre Architecture, Public Space, Performance Studies, Museums and Exhibition Design, Spatial Justice, Scenography, and 11 moreVirtual Scenography, Scenography and Architecture, Interactive Multimedia, Physical Theatre and Dance, Architecture, Interior Design, Postcolonial Studies, Social Innovation, Scenographic Strategies, Gender and Performance, and Architecture and urbanismedit
- Dorita Hannah is an architect, scholar and trans-disciplinary designer with expertise in shaping contemporary cultura... moreDorita Hannah is an architect, scholar and trans-disciplinary designer with expertise in shaping contemporary cultural environments: particularly the dynamics and fabrications of theatre architecture and urban scenography. She collaborates with artists, designers and cultural organisations to co-conceive, design and direct events, installations, exhibits, objects and constructed environments. Hannah also focuses on postgraduate research centred on performance practices and socio-political design. She has published extensively on Performance Design and Event-Space, while designing, curating, and directing exhibitions, installations, events, feasts, symposia, and workshops. These projects – framed through a critical spatial practice – have been regularly selected for exhibition in World Stage Design and the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design & Space ,for which she was Architecture Commissioner (2011) and Theory Curator (2015), as well as Chile’s Architecture Biennale (2017). Hannah currently co-chairs the Performance+Design Working Group for PSi (Performance Studies international) and co-convenes the Theatre & Architecture Working Group for IFTR (International Federation of Theatre Research).edit
Selection of Creative Projects
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Outline of Theatre Architecture & Performance Design Consultancy with Selected Projects.
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As the Oceanic region’s contribution to PSi’s Fluid States, OPB 2015 linked into FLUID STATES, a year-long globally dispersed festival of events in 2015 convened by Performance Studies international (PSi). Sea-Change: Performing a Fluid... more
As the Oceanic region’s contribution to PSi’s Fluid States, OPB 2015 linked into FLUID STATES, a year-long globally dispersed festival of events in 2015 convened by Performance Studies international (PSi). Sea-Change: Performing a Fluid Continent asked how Pacific-oriented practices can disturb, provoke and extend thought and action in relation to the seascape and its attendant social and biotic communities. Over three days, Rarotonga (the island and community) hosts a series of public events, in which performance acts as a lens through which to ‘see change’ via a public presencing in which the ocean is explored as origin, immersive medium, life-support system and mirror.
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Site-Specific Installation on Lapland’s Kemijoki River (Rovaniemi, Finland) in Sites & Situations exhibition for Floating Peripheries Symposium. Three garlanded inner tubes are situated in relation to each other and due North to presence... more
Site-Specific Installation on Lapland’s Kemijoki River (Rovaniemi, Finland) in Sites & Situations exhibition for Floating Peripheries Symposium. Three garlanded inner tubes are situated in relation to each other and due North to presence the Pacific Islands of Kiritimati, Manus and Nauru, which serve as detention centres set up by the Australian Government to incarcerate refugees attempting to reach its shores by boat.
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PhoneHome was developed for Chile's Architecture & Urbanism Biennial on ‘Unpostponable Dialogues’, which invited architects, artists and activists to reflect on critical contemporary issues about the built environment. It engages... more
PhoneHome was developed for Chile's Architecture & Urbanism Biennial on ‘Unpostponable Dialogues’, which invited architects, artists and activists to reflect on critical contemporary issues about the built environment. It engages architecture’s role in housing those without home and homeland. The intermedial installation critiqued architecture’s complicity in detaining ‘alien’ bodies while recognising the smartphone’s role in resisting such detention. Miniature refugee cabins house phones playing videos by artists and correspondents from Iran, Kurdistan, Russia, Greece, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, which are apprehended through mediating elements of the models’ barred windows and headphones.
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Dedicated to Iraqi asylum seeker Omid Masoumali, who self-immolated while in detention on Nauru Island (April 2016), this installation detains visitors's bodies at the threshold while withholding their view of a fiery figure wrapped in an... more
Dedicated to Iraqi asylum seeker Omid Masoumali, who self-immolated while in detention on Nauru Island (April 2016), this installation detains visitors's bodies at the threshold while withholding their view of a fiery figure wrapped in an emergency blanket who stands on the fossil cliffs on Maria Island looking into the rising sun.
'Island Icarus' was created for the Remanence exhibition, which examined how fire shapes the Tasmanian landscape and impacts on the psyche of people whose homelands are affected by its ravages.
'Island Icarus' was created for the Remanence exhibition, which examined how fire shapes the Tasmanian landscape and impacts on the psyche of people whose homelands are affected by its ravages.
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This book gathers together a group of international artists, architects, scenographers, performers, and theorists to establish Performance Design as a fluid and emerging field, which explores the speculative and projective acts of... more
This book gathers together a group of international artists, architects, scenographers, performers, and theorists to establish Performance Design as a fluid and emerging field, which explores the speculative and projective acts of designing performance and performing design.
Research Interests: Design, Performance Studies, Theatre Architecture, Interdisciplinary Studies, History and Theory of Scenography, and 6 morePerformance Spaces, Performance Art and Public Spaces, Performance Design, Theatre and the everyday, performance politics and civic intervention, urban architecture and sites of spectacle, Expanding Scenography, and Scenography and Architecture
Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant-garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory of ‘performative architecture.’ ‘Event’... more
Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant-garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory of ‘performative architecture.’ ‘Event’ was of immense significance to theatre’s revolutionary agenda, resisting realism, naturalism and, simultaneously, the monumentality of architecture itself. This book analyzes a number of spatiotemporal models central to that revolution, in order to both illuminate the history of avant-garde performance and inspire contemporary approaches to performance space.
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Research Interests: Art and Exhibition
The opening decades of this new millennium are haunted by spectacular events associated with political upheaval, conflict, contamination, climate change, pandemics and the plight of those seeking refuge from such threats. How do these... more
The opening decades of this new millennium are haunted by spectacular events associated with political upheaval, conflict, contamination, climate change, pandemics and the plight of those seeking refuge from such threats. How do these extended moments in nature and civilisation impact environments housing cultural events, which, as performative spacing, are themselves events and integral drivers of experience? No longer safe nor sound, architecture’s inveterate association with continuity, coherence and autonomy has submitted to the exigencies of time, action and movement, revealing an impossible task to provide secure containment for inherently uncontainable bodies. This chapter therefore reverse-engineers the cautionary tale of The Three Little Pigs, which privileges the value of building one’s house out of stable bricks, rather than rickety sticks or even more volatile straw. It exposes significant shifts for the environment housing theatre: from enduring standalone monuments of the 19th century; to more experimental sites of the 20th century; to ephemeral and transitory locations of the early 21st century, in which a deliberate homelessness reinforces the community itself as house. Like Elvis, ‘theatre has left the building’, suggesting a death of sorts to enduring forms of theatre architecture. This makes way for more dynamic spatialities seen in seminal contemporary European venues that proffer alternatives to the persistent cookie-cutter models of proscenium stage and black box studio.
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As a spatiotemporal method for understanding and shaping performance, dramaturgy could be considered a form of evental spacing, recognising that performance environments themselves are resonant with environmental performativity. However,... more
As a spatiotemporal method for understanding and shaping performance, dramaturgy could be considered a form of evental spacing, recognising that performance environments themselves are resonant with environmental performativity. However, our globalised worldview still tends to regard time and space as separable and absolute, generally oblivious to spatial dynamics in daily environments, including the theatre itself. Considering Polynesia's navigational approach to the Pacific Ocean as a "liquid continent," this article proffers Moana Nui spacing as an emerging dramaturgical methodology-spatiotemporally focussed, ecologically calibrated and specifically oceanic-applied to the conception and realisation of Performance Studies international's Fluid States project in 2015.
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Fluid States Pasifika addresses the role played in PSi’s 2015 Fluid States project by the Pacific region: a vast and generally disregarded oceanic territory that has radically transformed over the last 250 years through colonial... more
Fluid States Pasifika addresses the role played in PSi’s 2015 Fluid States project by the Pacific region: a vast and generally disregarded oceanic territory that has radically transformed over the last 250 years through colonial encounter, settler culture, militarization, migrations, global capitalism, and climate change. "As a liquid continent, the region tends to image itself through the ocean, te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa : a connective space of currents, vortices, drifts, suspensions, sediments, tides, foams, and flows that resists fixity; performing in-flux" (Hannah et al. 90). Representing a fluid, enmeshed, and immersive dramaturgical condition, its Moana /Ocean culture complicates the recent emphasis on a performative interweave with that of fluctuating entanglement just above and below an unpredictable atomized surface.
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Research Interests: Engineering, Aesthetics, Art, Architecture, Geopolitics, and 10 morePerformativity, Scenography, Performance and performativity, Flexibility in engineering design, Borders and Borderlands, Cityscape, Architecture and Public Spaces, Laundry, Theatre Design and Early Modern Performance, and Spatial Process of Democratisation
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This chapter, acknowledging the stage as a liminal space existing both before, through and beyond language, proffers it as a site for designing inter-textual, intercultural and interdisciplinary Shakespearean utterances liberated from the... more
This chapter, acknowledging the stage as a liminal space existing both before, through and beyond language, proffers it as a site for designing inter-textual, intercultural and interdisciplinary Shakespearean utterances liberated from the burden of an ‘original’ language. Interlaced with statements contributed by scenographers in Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Holland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore and Venezuela, the text explores how the spatio-visual dramaturgy of scenography contributes its own language as performative (active and abstract) rather than connotative (descriptive and mimetic) utterances. This furthers J.L. Austin’s argument in How to Do Things With Words, where ‘speech acts’ expand beyond language into action itself – saying can be enacting rather than describing. If within the illocutionary act of speaking something is being done, which constitutes action itself, then within the illocutionary act of designing something is being done through constructing and crafting thought. Just as statements can be active rather than descriptive, the material, gestural and spatial elements that accompany them also contain a performative force, suggesting How To Say Things Without Words, or in the case of this chapter, How Scenography Does (With and Without Words).
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HOLD: Pop-Up Event-Space and Containerization in the Time of Contagion The 2010s saw a proliferation of pop-up venues for performance, especially through the utilization of shipping containers. Born out of economic necessity, such... more
HOLD: Pop-Up Event-Space and Containerization in the Time of Contagion
The 2010s saw a proliferation of pop-up venues for performance, especially through the utilization of shipping containers. Born out of economic necessity, such flexible, fast and low-cost solutions repurposed vacant sites to temporarily accommodate nomadic theatres, restaurants, bars, clubs and shops: leading to innovative ways of gathering and participating in public space through anti-commercial urban regeneration. However, as a revitalizing phenomenon, the pop-up was quickly coopted by commerce to normalize insecure conditions, while operating as short-term gentrifying agents that glorify precarity for longer-term capitalist ends. This was most prevalent in shipping container architecture; constructed out of endlessly reproducible, aesthetically impoverished and globally ubiquitous elements designed for the efficient trafficking of commodities, including human beings. By the end of the 21st century’s second decade, the covid-19 pandemic both revealed and radically destabilized globalization, with the restless movement of goods and humans across borders indefinitely curtailed. What does this mean for spaces of (and as) events? Covid-19 has shown us that contaminants can be neither controlled nor easily contained: that they evade borders, invade bodies and propagate silently, quickly and without prejudice. What therefore pops-up in relation to dramatic architecture in-motion? Inquiring into the challenges and promises of such mobility, this paper critically presents and discusses the problematics of container architecture.
The 2010s saw a proliferation of pop-up venues for performance, especially through the utilization of shipping containers. Born out of economic necessity, such flexible, fast and low-cost solutions repurposed vacant sites to temporarily accommodate nomadic theatres, restaurants, bars, clubs and shops: leading to innovative ways of gathering and participating in public space through anti-commercial urban regeneration. However, as a revitalizing phenomenon, the pop-up was quickly coopted by commerce to normalize insecure conditions, while operating as short-term gentrifying agents that glorify precarity for longer-term capitalist ends. This was most prevalent in shipping container architecture; constructed out of endlessly reproducible, aesthetically impoverished and globally ubiquitous elements designed for the efficient trafficking of commodities, including human beings. By the end of the 21st century’s second decade, the covid-19 pandemic both revealed and radically destabilized globalization, with the restless movement of goods and humans across borders indefinitely curtailed. What does this mean for spaces of (and as) events? Covid-19 has shown us that contaminants can be neither controlled nor easily contained: that they evade borders, invade bodies and propagate silently, quickly and without prejudice. What therefore pops-up in relation to dramatic architecture in-motion? Inquiring into the challenges and promises of such mobility, this paper critically presents and discusses the problematics of container architecture.
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“If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames.” (Antonin Artaud: Theatre & its Double) These... more
“If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames.” (Antonin Artaud: Theatre & its Double)
These words of urgency from Antonin Artaud’s treatise on a Theatre of Cruelty (1938) conjure an affecting image indelibly linked to the silent film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), where he plays a young monk who, in the final smoke-filled scene, compassionately raises a crucifix towards Joan of Arc as her body begins to burn on the pyre. Embracing the cruel and tragic as a means of affirming life, Artaud’s theoretical and theatrical practice was in line with Renato Poggioli’s reference to the avant-garde adopting the role of tragic victim-hero; immolating themselves to an art of the future. Drawing on Artaud’s call for artists and audiences to vividly communicate and experience the intensity of events, this chapter refers to Island Icarus (2016-7): an iterative and collaborative art project provoked by a more recent image of immolation; that of Omid Masoumali, a 23-year old Iranian refugee who set himself on fire in April 2016 on the Pacific island of Nauru. As a protest against detention by the Australian government, Masoumali’s fatal act was recorded on mobile phones by fellow detainees and posted on social media. How do we deal with such confronting images, which are streamed 24/7 on our screens? How can we, as artists in a highly mediated world, speak out against the inhumanity of incarcerating those in exile who seek refuge from the war, persecution and famine of their homelands? In its three iterations – as landscape event, site-specific installation and intermedial exhibit – Island Icarus utilised bodies, video and the screen itself to enact a visceral engagement between image, space and action through what Artaud calls “an inspired shudder,” the reverberations of which outlive both political and aesthetic event.
These words of urgency from Antonin Artaud’s treatise on a Theatre of Cruelty (1938) conjure an affecting image indelibly linked to the silent film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), where he plays a young monk who, in the final smoke-filled scene, compassionately raises a crucifix towards Joan of Arc as her body begins to burn on the pyre. Embracing the cruel and tragic as a means of affirming life, Artaud’s theoretical and theatrical practice was in line with Renato Poggioli’s reference to the avant-garde adopting the role of tragic victim-hero; immolating themselves to an art of the future. Drawing on Artaud’s call for artists and audiences to vividly communicate and experience the intensity of events, this chapter refers to Island Icarus (2016-7): an iterative and collaborative art project provoked by a more recent image of immolation; that of Omid Masoumali, a 23-year old Iranian refugee who set himself on fire in April 2016 on the Pacific island of Nauru. As a protest against detention by the Australian government, Masoumali’s fatal act was recorded on mobile phones by fellow detainees and posted on social media. How do we deal with such confronting images, which are streamed 24/7 on our screens? How can we, as artists in a highly mediated world, speak out against the inhumanity of incarcerating those in exile who seek refuge from the war, persecution and famine of their homelands? In its three iterations – as landscape event, site-specific installation and intermedial exhibit – Island Icarus utilised bodies, video and the screen itself to enact a visceral engagement between image, space and action through what Artaud calls “an inspired shudder,” the reverberations of which outlive both political and aesthetic event.
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This paper examines a paradigmatic interior from the 20th century, the ‘black-box theatre’, associated with a fundamental rejection of the potential role played by the built-form within the art-form. Material space is denied in order to... more
This paper examines a paradigmatic interior from the 20th century, the ‘black-box theatre’, associated with a fundamental rejection of the potential role played by the built-form within the art-form. Material space is denied in order to establish an apparent void-space. This perceived emptiness is reflected in a paucity of architectural and theatrical discourse surrounding the model. However an investigation of its physical and discursive absences suggests its apparent ‘lack’ veils a surplus of meaning. Such gaps and their associations with theatrical production reveal complicated links to the space of human reproduction and its attendant excesses which, in turn, leads to a distinctive link between the black-box and Plato’s notion of ‘chora’. This uncovering of material through the im-material, proposes a more embodied and performative approach to theatre space and to readings of the interior.
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This paper approaches the emergence, over the 20th century, of a public architecture that occupies sights/sites once associated with industry and social alienation, in this case the conversion of London’s Bankside Power Station into the... more
This paper approaches the emergence, over the 20th century, of a public architecture that occupies sights/sites once associated with industry and social alienation, in this case the conversion of London’s Bankside Power Station into the Tate Modern Art Museum. Utilising Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary theories on performance, the celebrated architecture of Herzog and De Meuron is investigated alongside ‘Double Bind’, an installation by the late Spanish artist Juan Muñoz whose work highlights the quality of isolation in the contemporary metropolis. In investigating architecture and installation, a space is opened up between the art and architecture revealing a performativity that engages with 20th century trauma and the crisis of the modern. This spatial dynamic forms an architecture of alienation where the participants are estranged from the environment, rendering them strangers, even within familiar environments ... tourists in their own land.
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Architecture provides the site for this exploration of the relationship between museums and performance, which focuses on the Jewish Museum of Berlin. Between 1999 and 2001 the Jewish Museum operated solely as a venue for architectural... more
Architecture provides the site for this exploration of the relationship between museums and performance, which focuses on the Jewish Museum of Berlin. Between 1999 and 2001 the Jewish Museum operated solely as a venue for architectural tours. Rather than housing static objects it became a location where the experiential body on the move was central to its existence. This was particularly apparent in June 1999 when the Sasha Waltz Dance Company performed ‘Dialogue ’99 II’ within the museum as a response to, and exploration of, the provocative and haunting interior architecture of Daniel Libeskind. This paper examines the interiority of the museum as a performative site activated by dancing and spectatorial bodies. It posits that its ‘emptiness’ held a greater plenitude for memorialising, constituting a radical moment for museum architecture.
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While we speak of going to the theatre, the etymological roots of venue lie in the French word venir as ‘to come’. So, what are we coming to and what is theatre itself becoming as both art form (action-in-space) and built form... more
While we speak of going to the theatre, the etymological roots of venue lie in the French word venir as ‘to come’. So, what are we coming to and what is theatre itself becoming as both art form (action-in-space) and built form (space-in-action)? This article acknowledges a contemporary impulse to defy the limits of a globally ubiquitous Western-centric stage and auditorium; exploring instead the varying locales of cityscapes, landscapes and mindscapes, which lead to new spatial forms and relationships that integrate fabricated performance worlds with the material sites of the real. Such research was played out as performance practice in the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design & Space (PQ) via the architecture section titled NOW/NEXT: Performance Space at the Crossroads. In my role as PQ’s Commissioner of Architecture, I conceived, curated and designed NOW/NEXT as a 10-day exhibition and durational event; inviting spatial artists, architects and visitors to present and witness varying scenarios that expand ‘theatre architecture’ into the more extensive realm of ‘performance space’ - as performative spacing -and to grasp a greater potential by engaging more broadly, radically and experimentally with what the forms and functions of theatre could be as cultural civic site.
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This co-authored chapter presents collaboratively produced 'dance-architectures' that explore what happens when the slow time of the built environment intersects with the varying temporalities of historical, aesthetic and... more
This co-authored chapter presents collaboratively produced 'dance-architectures' that explore what happens when the slow time of the built environment intersects with the varying temporalities of historical, aesthetic and embodied daily events. Conceived as spaces of encounter, dance-architectures aim to shift an understanding of two disciplinary fields from being object-centred (the making of a performance or a building) to being subject-centred (about relationships and interconnections between people). As a series 'Tongues of Stone' provides a means of giving voice to the unspeakable with each iteration responding to political events as well histories and mythologies of specific sites -- taking place over and over again.
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This chapter on Architecture and Violence focuses on the 2003 Moscow Theatre Siege, in which terror literally took to the stage: shifting the Dubrovka Theatre from a site of entertainment to a site of warfare. No longer an arena for... more
This chapter on Architecture and Violence focuses on the 2003 Moscow Theatre Siege, in which terror literally took to the stage: shifting the Dubrovka Theatre from a site of entertainment to a site of warfare. No longer an arena for fleeting acts of entertainment, the 1100-seat auditorium held captive over 800 spectators, performers, theatre workers and terrorists in a three-day standoff that became a significant historic event ending in tragedy when Russia’s Spetsnaz soldiers stormed the building, having filled it with a narcotic gas, which killed over 170 people. The auditorium was revealed as a carceral space for all its occupants, emphasizing its intrinsic disciplinary nature and disclosing architecture's inherent violence, found in its conformity rather than its radicality. Akin to Foucault’s “events of thought” such incidents summon something new through the unexpected, unforeseeable, singular, unique and transformative. Here, investigating the spatial ideas of Antonin Artaud’s manifestoes for the Theatre of Cruelty, we can suggest an alternative approach to the archetypal modernist theatre that was besieged in October 2002, and which continues to proliferate internationally as a disciplinary architectural model.
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While we speak of going to the theatre, the etymological roots of venue lie in the French word venir as ‘to come’. So, what are we coming to and what is theatre itself becoming as both art form (action-in-space) and built form... more
While we speak of going to the theatre, the etymological roots of venue lie in the French word venir as ‘to come’. So, what are we coming to and what is theatre itself becoming as both art form (action-in-space) and built form (space-in-action)? This article acknowledges a contemporary impulse to defy the limits of a globally ubiquitous Western-centric stage and auditorium; exploring instead the varying locales of cityscapes, landscapes and mindscapes, which lead to new spatial forms and relationships that integrate fabricated performance worlds with the material sites of the real. Such research was played out as performance practice in the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design & Space (PQ) via the architecture section titled NOW/NEXT: Performance Space at the Crossroads. In my role as PQ’s Commissioner of Architecture, I conceived, curated and designed NOW/NEXT as a 10-day exhibition and durational event; inviting spatial artists, architects and visitors to present and witness varying scenarios that expand ‘theatre architecture’ into the more extensive realm of ‘performance space’ - as performative spacing -and to grasp a greater potential by engaging more broadly, radically and experimentally with what the forms and functions of theatre could be as cultural civic site.
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This contribution to Performing Architectures revolves around the influential part played by late-nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in rethinking the potential of theatre architecture as action rather than object.... more
This contribution to Performing Architectures revolves around the influential part played by late-nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in rethinking the potential of theatre architecture as action rather than object. Generally recognized as the 'philosopher of the avant-garde' and original postmodern thinker, Nietzsche fiercely opposed the abiding model of the highly decorated, multilayered, baroque auditorium with its framed technological stage, which the nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie had appropriated for performing their new-found post-revolutionary status. Calling for a rebirth of theatre almost a century and a half ago, he believed Wagner would unite dramatic and architectural forms in order to face joyfully the catastrophic forces of modernism. However, the maestro’s Festspielhaus failed to fulfil his acolyte’s demand for an undermining of monumental structures and apollonian aesthetics in favour of a new performative spatiality, which recognizes unstable terrain, advocates the real over the representational and integrates performers and audience in a choric ground designed to unite performers and audience as opposed to the distanced view of the stage and the trickeries of its machinery. This chapter therefore probes Nietzsche’s spatial speech in order to rework Jacques Derrida’s question “What might be a Wagnerian architecture?” as “What might be a Nietzschean architecture for the artwork—as both event and space—which the philosopher had hoped Wagner would fulfil?”
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Acknowledging that media has always been a part of theatre, this chapter reflects on how the performative screen can scenographically operate as a spatial, social and politicized element for practicing artists, designers and... more
Acknowledging that media has always been a part of theatre, this chapter reflects on how the performative screen can scenographically operate as a spatial, social and politicized element for practicing artists, designers and performance-makers to critique and engage with the pervasive geo-cultural, geo-mythical and geo-political issues of our time. No longer the planar surface upon which light, still and moving images are ‘thrown’, the screen has become an extension of the body and lived space as well as a contemporary site for reiterating and/or challenging worldviews: inside and outside theatre’s proper sites
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Considering the impact of evental thinking as spacing, this chapter focuses on the influence of Europe’s historical avant-garde on theater architecture: whereby sceno-graphy as spatial scripting – initially predicated on a centralized... more
Considering the impact of evental thinking as spacing, this chapter focuses on the influence of Europe’s historical avant-garde on theater architecture: whereby sceno-graphy as spatial scripting – initially predicated on a centralized view of the Monarch’s immobile all-seeing-eye standing in for the all-seeing-I of God – could no longer be contained within geometrically constructed vistas on the prescribed stage; resulting in new spatial models that undermined architecture’s will to fixity, stability and endurance. In concentrating on modernism’s philosophical, political and perceptual revolutions I identify three distinctive attitudes to performance space – loosely cohering around the avant-garde movements of symbolism, constructivism and surrealism – that emerged between 1872 and 1947.
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Fluid States Pasifika outlines the role played by the Pacific in Performance Studies International’s 2015 Fluid States project: a yearlong globally dispersed festival of events. Focussing on the three-day event, Sea-Change: Performing a... more
Fluid States Pasifika outlines the role played by the Pacific in Performance Studies International’s 2015 Fluid States project: a yearlong globally dispersed festival of events. Focussing on the three-day event, Sea-Change: Performing a Fluid Continent (Rarotonga, Cook Islands, July 5-8 2015), this article considers the enmeshed, and immersive dramaturgical condition of the Pacific region and its Moana/Ocean culture, which complicates the recent emphasis on a performative interweave with that of fluctuating entanglement just above and below an unpredictable atomised surface. As the heart of borderless Oceania, this “liquid continent” embodies “oceanic” spacing – relating to both ocean and Oceania – in which we find ourselves, productively, “all at sea.”
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Principal author: Margaret Werry, reviewing Sea-Change: Performing A Fluid Continent (Rarotonga, Cook Islands July 2015) for which Dorita Hannah was a Co-Director and Event Dramaturg. Includes Curatorial Statement by Dorita Hannah,... more
Principal author: Margaret Werry, reviewing Sea-Change: Performing A Fluid Continent (Rarotonga, Cook Islands July 2015) for which Dorita Hannah was a Co-Director and Event Dramaturg.
Includes Curatorial Statement by Dorita Hannah, Amanda Yates and Ani O'Neill
This visual essay documents the 2015 Oceanic Performance Biennale and Performance Studies international Fluid States meeting, ‘Sea-Change: Performing a fluid continent’ (Rarotonga, the Cook Islands, 8–11 July)—an event that reflected on the social, cultural and political ecologies of Oceania from a performance perspective.
Includes Curatorial Statement by Dorita Hannah, Amanda Yates and Ani O'Neill
This visual essay documents the 2015 Oceanic Performance Biennale and Performance Studies international Fluid States meeting, ‘Sea-Change: Performing a fluid continent’ (Rarotonga, the Cook Islands, 8–11 July)—an event that reflected on the social, cultural and political ecologies of Oceania from a performance perspective.
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Research Interests:
This article articulates how an expanded conception of scenography is capable of critiquing our built environments in order to disclose architecture’s role in reinforcing power structures, socially sanctioned behaviours and geopolitical... more
This article articulates how an expanded conception of scenography is capable of critiquing our built environments in order to disclose architecture’s role in reinforcing power structures, socially sanctioned behaviours and geopolitical cartographies. As an interdisciplinary practice, travelling between discursive fields, performance design casts a performance studies lens on scenography, thereby broadening its scope and capability of confronting and reimagining our lived reality, especially within a globalized condition of proliferating borders that reduce, control and deny mobility for bodies and information. By adopting a ‘broad spectrum approach’ we are able to recognize that those constructing our world – the architects, planners, engineers, builders, technicians, manufacturers, suppliers and politicians – tend to be complicit in spatially suppressing our motility, flexibility and expressivity. Through such spatial performativity, the built environment reinforces a contemporary barricade mentality, curtailing our freedom of movement and expression in the very name of ‘freedom’. And yet the borderline – more than a simple dividing line between us/here and them/there – thickens into a complex geographical and metaphysical terrain that inhabits us just as we inhabit it. Scrutinizing our contemporary borderline condition, alongside constructed and deconstructed barricades created by artists, designers and architects, unearths a critique of how our public performances are limited and controlled. Positing the barricade as an architectural and social formation allows us to consider its shifting political implications seen in public artworks that are aligned with Rubió Ignaci Solà-Morales’ concept of ‘weak architecture’ as a productively scenographic approach to spatial analysis and its mediation.
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The word ‘costume’, like ‘design’, connotes both artefact (noun) and action (verb), highlighting costume design as an active practice and activating object, capable of dynamically intervening between the body and space. This article looks... more
The word ‘costume’, like ‘design’, connotes both artefact (noun) and action (verb), highlighting costume design as an active practice and activating object, capable of dynamically intervening between the body and space. This article looks to the affective
and effective impact elicited by highly performative quotidian garments outside the theatre and how, linked to ancient mythology, human history and current sociopolitical events, they have been critically adopted for live performance. Focusing on
the universally beguiling red dress, referred to by Anaïs Nin as capable of ‘alarming the heart with the violent gong of catastrophe’, the costume is discussed as a spatial
body-object, disrupting and charging social environments to reveal their ‘evental’ nature: calling up monumental moments, productive aesthetic encounters and multiple daily experiences. This reiterates the complexity of our contemporary condition,
in which we cannot separate the theatrical from the sociopolitical: something Jon McKenzie maintains could be understood through the critical tool of ‘performance design’ – a constructive means of drawing upon and critiquing the proliferation
of manifold events played out in the new century. Referencing my own research-informed practice (created and often articulated in collaboration with choreographer/dancer, Carol Brown), this article will theorize costumes as spatial body-objects as well as active and activating agents that are integral to complex spatiotemporal webs, particularly in relation to our highly mediated reality.
and effective impact elicited by highly performative quotidian garments outside the theatre and how, linked to ancient mythology, human history and current sociopolitical events, they have been critically adopted for live performance. Focusing on
the universally beguiling red dress, referred to by Anaïs Nin as capable of ‘alarming the heart with the violent gong of catastrophe’, the costume is discussed as a spatial
body-object, disrupting and charging social environments to reveal their ‘evental’ nature: calling up monumental moments, productive aesthetic encounters and multiple daily experiences. This reiterates the complexity of our contemporary condition,
in which we cannot separate the theatrical from the sociopolitical: something Jon McKenzie maintains could be understood through the critical tool of ‘performance design’ – a constructive means of drawing upon and critiquing the proliferation
of manifold events played out in the new century. Referencing my own research-informed practice (created and often articulated in collaboration with choreographer/dancer, Carol Brown), this article will theorize costumes as spatial body-objects as well as active and activating agents that are integral to complex spatiotemporal webs, particularly in relation to our highly mediated reality.
Research Interests:
Her Topia is a collaborative project in-motion questioning the relationship between the fleeting events of performance and architecture’s monumental stasis through themes of mourning, memory and ecstatic release. It began in Athens... more
Her Topia is a collaborative project in-motion questioning the relationship between the fleeting events of performance and architecture’s monumental stasis through themes of mourning, memory and ecstatic release. It began in Athens (October 2005) at the Isadora and Raymond Duncan Dance Research Centre where designer (Dorita Hannah) and choreographer (Carol Brown) were commissioned to create a performance with multi-media artists and 14 dancers. As the first in a proposed series of site-sensitive works it takes Isadora Duncan’s notion of dance as an expression of freedom and asks: what is it to dance freedom at a time when wars are being waged in its name?
Research Interests:
Scenography-a word that goes back as far as Aristotle, Vitruvius and Serlio-once provided the bridge between real and imagined worlds by utilizing the perspectival image to unify art, architecture and theatre. In the 16th century it was... more
Scenography-a word that goes back as far as Aristotle, Vitruvius and Serlio-once provided the bridge between real and imagined worlds by utilizing the perspectival image to unify art, architecture and theatre. In the 16th century it was celebrated as a mimetic practice that integrated the science and craft of construction, scenery and painting into a combined stage and auditorium, which in turn influenced the planning of buildings, cities and landscapes. Moving beyond stage scenery scenography came to permeate a range of fields from urban and architectural design to fine arts and public spectacle. However, over the next four centuries, a unified world picture was philosophically called into doubt, challenging and destabilizing the role theatre played in architecture. Modernism's distrust of representation and its emphasis on authenticity demoted the role of the "theatrical", commonly defined as false or exaggerated in architectural discourse. However, with recent concepts such as "event-space" and "spatial scripting", "situated technologies" and "behavioral structures", architecture as a performative medium has returned to the discursive stage; allowing us to consider it an active and activating entity within our daily lives and creative constructions. This issue on contemporary scenographies returns to the broad and dynamic role performance can play in the built environment; from sites as active public events (performative architecture); to spaces specifically designed to house the event (performance architecture); to aesthetic events that integrate art and architecture (performing architecture).
Research Interests:
This co-authored chapter presents collaboratively produced 'dance-architectures' that explore what happens when the slow time of the built environment intersects with the varying temporalities of historical, aesthetic and embodied daily... more
This co-authored chapter presents collaboratively produced 'dance-architectures' that explore what happens when the slow time of the built environment intersects with the varying temporalities of historical, aesthetic and embodied daily events. Conceived as spaces of encounter, dance-architectures aim to shift an understanding of two disciplinary fields from being object-centred (the making of a performance or a building) to being subject-centred (about relationships and interconnections between people). As a series 'Tongues of Stone' provides a means of giving voice to the unspeakable with each iteration responding to political events as well histories and mythologies of specific sites -- taking place over and over again.
Research Interests:
This book chapter in The Senses in Performance outlines the design of the central thematic exhibit for the 2003 Prague Quadrennial.
Research Interests:
Arguing that the space housing an event, is an event itself, Dorita Hannah examines the notion of Space as Event and asks us to consider the frame of theatre architecture in our understanding of performance itself. She argues that we need... more
Arguing that the space housing an event, is an event itself, Dorita Hannah examines the notion of Space as Event and asks us to consider the frame of theatre architecture in our understanding of performance itself. She argues that we need to acknowledge the way that all spaces perform and that an awareness of the spatial context existing prior to the performance event is essential. This understanding of space not only provides a starting point which might then be adapted through scenographic intervention, but also provides a basis for the radical re-evaluation of performance practices by challenging accepted models of existing performance architectures.
Research Interests:
Published as a refereed book chapter in Back to the City: Strategies for Informal Urban Interventions edited by Steffen Lehmann Theorizing architecture as a complex and active player in our daily lives, this paper establishes spatial... more
Published as a refereed book chapter in Back to the City: Strategies for Informal Urban Interventions
edited by Steffen Lehmann
Theorizing architecture as a complex and active player in our daily lives, this paper establishes spatial performativity in the city through the intricate and varying forces of the event (historical, aesthetic and quotidian) with its constitutive elements of time, movement and action. The discussion is specifically sited in New York City where the spectacle of everyday life is dramatically played out on its streets and avenues as well as in the global imaginary. This dramatic quality was heightened with the catastrophic historic event of 9/11, which called into doubt the notion of architecture as a stable, enduring form, attempting to elude the complexity of time and the unpredictabilities of social and individual bodies it seeks to contain. Incorporating the evental in spatial discourse establishes 'event-space' as a third term that can be applied to the urban environment in order to activate it as a dynamic space of public play, here applied to a proposal for NYC's Fourth Street Arts Block.
edited by Steffen Lehmann
Theorizing architecture as a complex and active player in our daily lives, this paper establishes spatial performativity in the city through the intricate and varying forces of the event (historical, aesthetic and quotidian) with its constitutive elements of time, movement and action. The discussion is specifically sited in New York City where the spectacle of everyday life is dramatically played out on its streets and avenues as well as in the global imaginary. This dramatic quality was heightened with the catastrophic historic event of 9/11, which called into doubt the notion of architecture as a stable, enduring form, attempting to elude the complexity of time and the unpredictabilities of social and individual bodies it seeks to contain. Incorporating the evental in spatial discourse establishes 'event-space' as a third term that can be applied to the urban environment in order to activate it as a dynamic space of public play, here applied to a proposal for NYC's Fourth Street Arts Block.
Research Interests:
Performance theorist Peggy Phelan has notably written: "Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once... more
Performance theorist Peggy Phelan has notably written: "Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance" (Phelan 1993: 146). Taking this ontology of performance as unrepeatable disappearing acts, our paper looks to design as a means of either reconfiguring the remains of performance or allowing the lived experience to persist in exhibition. In delineating the performative aspects of the presentational, representational, and re-presentational, it asserts strategies that call on spontaneous communal encounters and encourage the creation of new unique productions, thereby complicating Phelan’s assertion that representation is ‘something other than performance’.
Through exhibiting performance, designers as curatorial provocateurs create specific conditions in which viewing privileges and power relations can be challenged and in which meaning is continually questioned.
The paper will (re)present a range of performance design exhibitions we have initiated, curated, and designed: Fragments Out of the Dark (1998), Landing: 7 Stages: Aoteroa (PQ, 1999), Srdce: The Heart of PQ (2003), Dis-Play: re-Membering a Performance Landscape (2004) and Now/Next: Performance Space at the Crossroads (2011). Each project attempts to incorporate the spectator as participant and invites the exhibitor to approach the exhibition site as a found-space for communal action and re-action.
Through exhibiting performance, designers as curatorial provocateurs create specific conditions in which viewing privileges and power relations can be challenged and in which meaning is continually questioned.
The paper will (re)present a range of performance design exhibitions we have initiated, curated, and designed: Fragments Out of the Dark (1998), Landing: 7 Stages: Aoteroa (PQ, 1999), Srdce: The Heart of PQ (2003), Dis-Play: re-Membering a Performance Landscape (2004) and Now/Next: Performance Space at the Crossroads (2011). Each project attempts to incorporate the spectator as participant and invites the exhibitor to approach the exhibition site as a found-space for communal action and re-action.
Research Interests:
This paper examines a paradigmatic interior from the 20th century, the ‘black box theatre’, associated with a fundamental rejection of the potential role played by the built-form within the art-form. Material space is denied in order to... more
This paper examines a paradigmatic interior from the 20th century, the ‘black box theatre’, associated with a fundamental rejection of the potential role played by the built-form within the art-form. Material space is denied in order to establish an apparent void-space. This perceived emptiness is reflected in a paucity of architectural and theatrical discourse surrounding the model. However an investigation of its physical and discursive absences suggests its apparent ‘lack’ veils a surplus of meaning. Such gaps and their associations with theatrical production reveal complicated links to the space of human
reproduction and its attendant excesses which, in turn, leads to a distinctive link between the black box and Plato’s notion of ‘chora’. This uncovering of material through the im-material, proposes a more embodied and performative approach to theatre space and to readings of the interior.
reproduction and its attendant excesses which, in turn, leads to a distinctive link between the black box and Plato’s notion of ‘chora’. This uncovering of material through the im-material, proposes a more embodied and performative approach to theatre space and to readings of the interior.
Please cite the chapter published in The Senses in Performance edited by Andre Lepecki and Sally Banes (Routledge Press, 2006) This chapter outlines a performance design for the Prague Quadrennial's central thematic exhibition in 2003:... more
Please cite the chapter published in The Senses in Performance
edited by Andre Lepecki and Sally Banes
(Routledge Press, 2006)
This chapter outlines a performance design for the Prague Quadrennial's central thematic exhibition in 2003: an international collaboration with over 50 artists that explored alternative spatial models for performance through live action within a sceno-architectural installation.
edited by Andre Lepecki and Sally Banes
(Routledge Press, 2006)
This chapter outlines a performance design for the Prague Quadrennial's central thematic exhibition in 2003: an international collaboration with over 50 artists that explored alternative spatial models for performance through live action within a sceno-architectural installation.