Dr Dorita Hannah 

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

 

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Resisting Extinction Theatre Has Left the Building: Pursuing           the Theatrical ‘Real’

...the world has become a designed environment in which an array of global performances unfold – for better and for worse (Jon McKenzie, 2008).

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The notion of ‘performance’ complicates our daily lives, confronting us with ‘theatrical reality’ found in  deepfakes and alternative facts as we encounter socially mediated post-truth populism,  hyperconnectivity and artificial intelligence. It seems that lamenting theatre’s redundancy – as artistic  form and built artefact – is as old a song as maintaining that we live in unprecedented times. Yet, turn of-the-millennium precarity, heightened by global mediatisation, has led to performative revolution,  resistance and occupation that question the propriety of property, challenge authority and destabilise  the foundations upon which we perform our identities. Acknowledging architecture’s impossible task to provide secure housing for the arts, theatre has generally ‘left the building’ as a secure performance  space, suggesting the predictable architectural show is over and making way for more volatile spatial  performativity. This involves a perceptual shift from a static spatialisation of time (architecture as a  durable building) to the livelier temporalisation of space (constructed environment as dynamic action),  experienced through ‘fleeting’ actions within a public realm that is both material and virtual.  

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This meditation on radical spatial assemblages devised and enacted as performance design, therefore,  conflates theatre’s extinction with that facing contemporary civilisation to theorise emergent practices  responding to the raw ‘Real’ in the ever-present threat of catastrophe, collapse and epic failure,  disturbing the constructed insulation of an artificial universe and forcing the public to take  spatiotemporal action – in the name of ‘political love’ – as performance designers in their own right.