Unstable Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place
Gay McAuley asks “What can performance do, that other discourses cannot to shape our understanding of places?” (in Dwyer 2006: 187). This enquiry may be subsumed into two fundamental reflective discourses that the book Unstable Ground: Performance and Politics of Place is seeking for: What is the relevance of place in the discourse of performance? What is the relevance of performance in a discourse of place / space? Edited by Gay McAuley, the book is a collection of essays emerging from a working-group seminar at the University of Sydney. Members of this group are interested in performance vis-à-vis the space / place and in particular that lived reality and / or embodied reality of a place. Consisting of 13 essays, McAuley divides the book into three categorizations as she emphasized in her introduction: aesthetics, cultural-historical, and dramaturgical strategies.
The 13 authors (sic, members of the working group) generally provide a multi-modal and/or multi-disciplinal paradigm in understanding space / place in connection with performance. Armfield interrogates the relationship of the aesthetics of space with two performances in Darling Harbour (Cloudstreet and Harbour). Maxwell connects acoustics and music (hip-hop) with space particularly suburb Australia. Cohen argues a performance of the nation-state (i.e. imagined community, imagined fantasy, and the physical geographical sketch that is Australia) in the Sydney 2000 Olympics opening ceremonies. Tompkins provides a closed-reading of Ghost Trilogy grounded within the notion of counter-monuments as utilized in various locales. Hollege and Moore tour us in an installation museum at Drill Hall in Adelaide through their “thick” description of the event. Goodall links the aesthetics of the Western theatrical traditions with other performative activities in Australia in relation to place. Shafer and Watt interrogate performance of heritage and identity through the performativity (or the “staging”) of the city of Newcastle. McAuley links trauma, social memory and history to place and performance. Schlunke explicates the performance of memorilisation of the massacred aboriginal people in Myall through the frames of ethics and history. Dwyer talks about the embodiment of protests that may link the past to the present and even to the future (effective historical consciousness). Brown, Snow, and Grant (with de Quincey) provide dramaturgical strategies on performances and/or instillations where space / place appears at the core. An afterward by J. Lowell Lewis is provided at the end of the book discussing a summation and / or intersections of these various essays with emphasis on the interrelatedness of memory, imaginations, politics, place and space.
Over-all, these essays explore the epistemology, performativity, phenomenology or even the metaphysics of place specifically that of place-making and place-taking. For the longest time in performance discourse (and analysis), space is often considered to be only supplementary to performance per se. In other words, a space is always a subject to the totality of performance (i.e. setting). In this book, place is highlighted as ubiquitous to performance if not the most important phenomenon in a performative activity. In these essays, place is marked not as a setting but as an independent entity, which has its own life, its own embodiment, its own politics (sic its own relationship), and its own performativity. As anthropologists Nancy Schepher-Hughes and Margaret Lock suggest about the body, a place has sociality, physicality and polity.
Implicitly grounded within these sociality, physicality and polity, I have earlier pointed out that these essays playfully interrogate space and action, which the title Unstable Ground truly suggests. The essays explicate that every time we talk about space, we at the same time are discussing geography (i.e. Goodall’s haunted places, Schaefer and Watt’s discussion on Nobby and Newcastle), landscape (Goodall’s haunted spaces talk about landscape, Tompkins’ notion of memorilisation deals with landscape and aesthetics), relationship (since we cannot talk about places or spaces without reference to individuals, it is tantamount to situate individuality as being-in-participation), politics (relationships are always about power relations), economy (power relations and economy are most of the time intertwined), history (Cohen and the national stadium, Auley’s discussion on the narratives of the Hyde Park, Villawood Immigration Detention Center, and Darkie Point) and ethnology (i.e the interrelatedness of the Aboriginal / Indigenous people and the Whites vis-à-vis Space / Place).
As these essays discuss issues on place-making and place-taking, performative actions / activities are also speculated. Nonetheless, the most critical offering of this book is its insight on the role of performance in the construction of the life, the epistemology, the narratology, the performativity of a space. For instance, a place becomes a valuable historical site because of the different performative incidents that may have occurred in that given place (like the Villawood Immigration Centre of Darkie Point in McAuley’s essay or the Tent Embassy in Dwyer’s). However, the book also explores that a space or a place in one way or another is also constructed for pragmatic and performative reasons (like the National Stadium, and the Drill Hall).
However, a sort of criticism in this revolutionary interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and/or multimodality of the book is the misused of anthropological enquiry albeit a minor one (especially the afterword, which weaves all essays in anthropological grounding). I am not disregarding its attempt to situate the understanding of places based on how various communities perceive them to be (or perform them). This is a very important articulation in the phenomenological method of anthropology. Majority of the “voices” in the essays are coming from these authors yet most of them are talking about the specific experiences of the Aboriginal people or as Dwyer puts it “these Aboriginal citizens.” Albeit, these authors passionately address the issues and affirming the rights of their fellow-Aussies, these Indigenous Australians’ / Aboriginal Australians’ own narratives (histories, performativities, anxieties, etc.) are still apparently silenced. It is still predominantly the authors speaking (like representing the Indigenous as if they are completely aware of their world-view, microcosm, narratives, and what not).
On a final note, the book implicitly suggests that there is fluidity in meaning-making in terms of space vis-à-vis performance. The essays bring forth the exposition on how performance may influence a space and how a space may invoke a performance. Above all, these performances in these spaces create and recreate memory and forgetting in the communities. At the same time, spaces are there to serve either as memory or forgetting.
