On “geopathology” + Site Specific Theatre (Guest visitor Joanne Tompkins, Professor of Theatre University of Queensland, Brisbane) November 2014 English.

On “geopathology”+ Site Specific Theatre

(Guest visitor Joanne Tompkins,Professor of Theatre University of Queensland, Brisbane)

November 2014English 3556E: 20th Century Drama

Nostalgia“The derivation of ‘nostalgia’ from the Greek nostos, to return home, links nostalgia to sameness, suggesting a desire to return to already known conditions of the past. Present uses of the word largely ignore or ironize the connection with pain (algia), but nostalgia was formerly understood as a medical condition triggered in soldiers or exiles by sensory reminders of home, susceptible of cure by returning (Hirsch: 257–8).” (Carlson 20)

Carlson, Marla. “Ways to Walk New York After 9/11,” In Performance and the City.

Ed. D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Source note

• Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.

“Geopathology”: definition

Geopathology defines “home” as a “longed-for stable container for identity” that turns out to be a place of entrapment and deep dissatisfaction (Chaudhuri 82).

Geopathology recognizes the dissatisfaction of an individual’s experience of a particular kind of “home” that is supposed to fit but doesn’t (for example, what Nora feels).

Chaudhuri writes:

“…an incessant dialogue between belonging and exile, home and homelessness” in the theatre (15);

“the double-edged problem of place and place as problem” (53).

What is “site-specific theatre”?

Suitcase (2008), Liverpool Street Station, London

Suitcase is a performance about the “Kindertransport” trains that brought Jewish children to London before WW2.

It was performed at Liverpool Street train station, where the original Kindertransport trains would have arrived in the 1930s.

Can “site-specific theatre” travel?

Other site-specific performances

• A Roving Soul: Walking the City with Walter Benjamin (Click here for the iTunes download, and try it around town this weekend!)

• And While London Burns (download the audio here)

Site specific theatre near you?• What kinds of site-specific theatre have you seen

here at Western, in London, or elsewhere in Ontario or Canada?

• What kinds of site-specific theatre can you imagine creating around you?

…Turn to your neighbours. Brainstorm together for a few minutes. What can you remember, or imagine, together?

Why make theatre this way? How do you make theatre

this way?• Do you have a specific relationship to a space that

bears exploring?• Rejection of large venues in which theatre is

traditionally made, and what they stand for• A response to the high cost of renting traditional

venues (many theatre companies today don’t own their own spaces!)

• What logistical problems might you face as you prepare your site-specific performance?

A final note, to take away…

• How might making, attending, or thinking about site-specific theatre affect the way we understand space – what space means, how space makes meaning – in more traditional theatre pieces?

• Could we, for example, imagine Antony Minghella’s film version of Play as a site-specific piece?

Joanne Tompkins’ work on theatrical space is extensive!• Theatre’s Heterotopias. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. (Hot off the presses!)• Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics,

Place, Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012 (with Anna Birch).• Unsettling Space: Contestations in

Contemporary Australian Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.• Space and the Geographies of Theatre.

Special issue of the journal Modern Drama, 2004.

…and she wrote a great article about Suitcase…

• "Theatre's Heterotopia and the Site-Specific Production of Suitcase." TDR 214 (2012): 101-112.• You can get this article in PDF format at

Western’s library; click here and follow the e-resource links!