Off Sites: Contemporary Performance Beyond Site-Specific

Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific rethinks current definitions of “site-specific performance”—a genre of theatre that adopts spaces outside of traditional theatre buildings and uses the experience of space, place, and situation as an integral component to the structure and content of a theatrical work.
This book looks at key productions of artists working in this genre, including Private Moment by David Levine and Geyser Land, conceived and directed by video artist Mary Ellen Strom and choreographer Ann Carlson.

This incredibly rich and vital part of theatre in the past several decades has become diverse enough that the term “site-specific” has ceased to adequately describe it. Contextualizing site-specific practices in both visual and performing arts discourses, author Bertie Ferdman traces the evolution of that term from an experimental staging practice to an engaged situational event. Substituting the term “off-site,” she illustrates the ways in which a new generation of artists have challenged the disciplinary frameworks of site-specific theatre.
She focuses on five distinct ways in which these artists do that: 1) blurring the traditional boundaries between the fictional and the real; 2) changing how the audience and actor interact with each other and whether they are physically together or apart; 3) fabricating sites from physically bound, conceptually constructed, or virtual spaces; 4) establishing live situations in real vs. fiction; and 5) challenging our preconceived notions of time and space.
The first chapter outlines the book’s primary goals, traces the genealogy of site-based work through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and presents the theoretical groundwork for the book. Each subsequent chapter focuses on a particular type of “off-site”: Disciplinary Sites, Spectator Sites, Temporal Sites, Urban Sites, and contains several case studies.

Main questions asked by this study include: How are artists and performances engaging with site? What sites do contemporary theatre practices engender? How does live performance negotiate such sites?


About the Author :
Bertie Ferdman is Associate Professor at Borough Manhattan Community College at the City University of New York. Her essays have appeared in TDR, Theater, PAJ, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Performance Research, and HowlRound. She is co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Companion to Performance Art, forthcoming in 2019. She is also co-editor of a Special Issue on Performance Curators for Theater and guest editor of a special section titled “Urban Dramaturgies” for PAJ.

Review :
"This timely and highly readable book, based in large part on personal experiences of spectatorship and astute readings of the work of often unfamiliar artists, is an essential guide to ways in which technological advances, neoliberal globalization, and environmental crises are impacting the form and function of contemporary performance."--Mike Pearson, author of Site-Specific Performance

"Ferdman's work documents--with clarity and articulate purpose--a major shift in performance/theatre that is ongoing and under way, and it succeeds in articulating a method of analyzing and understanding the wide range of performances that take place outside and beyond conventional building-based theatre spaces."--Lesley Ferris, coeditor of Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-first Century

"Off Sites stages a valuable intervention into discourses of site and space, both within and beyond artistic contexts. Perhaps the book's most important contribution--in a world with a renewed interest in policing borders of specific locations--is in its claims for the political potential of a focus on 'off sites.'"--Fiona Wilkie, author of Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage

"This thorough, engaging, and wide-ranging study deftly argues for the significance of 'off site' as a means of reinvesting a critical edge in the form of site-specific performance and demonstrates how the concept of off site (inflected by technology, the global economy, and environmentalism) presents an insightful way of interpreting contemporary performance that takes place outside conventional theatre venues and for which place is a fundamental feature."--Joanne Tompkins, author of Theatre's Heterotopias: Space and the Analysis of Performance

"This new work from CUNY theatre professor Bertie Ferdman looks at site-specific-theatre--theatre that is created for a specific non-traditional space rather than a typical theatre venue--and what makes it so vital. Specific productions discussed include David Levine's Private Moment, Mary Ellen Strom and Ann Carlson's Geyser Land, Jim Findlay's Dream of the Red Chamber, and Lola Arias' Mi Vida Despues."--Logan Culwell-Block, Playbill