This thesis is located within the discourse of pedestrian performance, an area of research which has emerged from a recent proliferation of site-based works that are concerned with walking as an aesthetic and performative practice. However, my research seeks to expand the field beyond studies of site-based performances. Through placing emphasis on the action of walking itself within performance, I argue that pedestrian performance is an umbrella term for a host of performances that utilise walking. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, I present a mapped journey of pedestrian performance, with each chapter in my thesis acting as a waymarker. Each waymarker is shaped by a distinctive spatial arrangement, plotting a journey from the theatre to the site. Although there is a sense of chronology in this journey, its structure lies principally in the subtle shifting of the spatial arrangement of the performer and audience. The first waymarker is that of the theatre, where I examine the manner in which the journey has been staged and the kinesthetic empathy of a seated audience. I then move to the overlooked staging of promenade performance, exploring the varying tensions incurred by putting an audience on their feet. From here I investigate the familiar territory of site and how walking allows us to distinguish between site-specific and situation-specific performances. Finally I address the non-site, illustrating how this theory of land artist Robert Smithson, can enhance our understanding of a recent wave of pedestrian performances which involve journeys to sites that cannot be reached. I close this thesis by presenting a more cohesive illustration of pedestrian performance, illustrating its varying incarnations within an expanded field. Such an expansion of the landscape allows the pedestrian performance scholar to discern between the different ways in which walking and the journey motif has been utilised in performance. Furthermore, it also reveals a legacy of this mode of performance which predates its popularity in site-based works, enabling a dialogue to occur between scholars of both theatre and performance studies.

In this thesis, I explore applied theatre and site-specific performance workshops as methods for public participation in city planning. “The Ghosts of Waller Creek” program worked to foster interest in and facilitate dialogue around the redevelopment of an abandoned urban creek area in Austin, TX. I explore three guiding questions: How does an applied theatre practitioner foster collaboration with non-theatre artists on a creative project that achieves common goals? How can applied theatre and site-specific performance workshops and events foster place attachment and engage citizens in city planning? How does an applied theatre practitioner translate participatory, applied theatre workshops into an artifact that is useful to city planners? Using reflective practitioner research processes and qualitative coding methods, I examine these questions through an analysis of surveys, interviews, performances, discussions, field notes, and observations. I first explore the role that goals, communication, and reflection played in my partnership with an urban designer. I then use place attachment theory to examine how the workshops and events shifted participants’ interest in, and engagement with, Waller Creek and city planning. Next, I investigate how performative artifacts such as audio maps and interactive performances can communicate participants’ opinions about Waller Creek to city planners and to the general public. Finally I discuss how the project situates in the field of arts-based civic dialogue and address guidelines for future projects. This thesis invites applied theatre practitioners to consider how their work can contribute to arts-based civic dialogue in their own communities. / text

This dissertation develops a theory for analyzing the role of audiences as aesthetic resources in contemporary site-specific performance and relational art. Collaborating with three Canadian companies as a participant-observer, interviewer, and in some cases, documenter, I develop case studies that track flexible stage-audience relationships in public spaces. By analyzing how companies Radix Theatre Society, Bluemouth, and Mammalian Diving Reflex put spectators to work in sites like IKEA showrooms, disused warehouses, and theatres, I advance a method that attends to the doubled practice of the spectator as worker and witness. This framework, which I term bifold spectatorship, articulates how audiences constitute theatrical worlds through direct physical engagement with the cultural criticism and formal experimentation that artists stage. Folded into the event, spectators literally compose the scene of the action, and enter into what I call critical proximity with the discourses that shape the performance. As participants interact with and directly query the artistic expressions that they patron, they answer a challenge to perform that is typically reserved for professionals. Such novel participation begins with a hail that interpellates audiences into the action as subjects and even sites of performance. Adapting the concept of the casting call, or what I coin site-casting, miscasting, and central casting, I show how spectators are aligned with the exigencies of the site; “mis-placed” or miscast by artists (provoking performance anxiety in participants); or cast to play a role they already perform in their everyday lives. In addition to these critical frameworks, I challenge the established narrative of “liberating the audience” by forwarding a multi-sited genealogy of site-specific performance that confronts the romance of freeing spectators from stage conventions. In examining the ethical problems that arise when audiences are made responsible for representation, The Stagehands of Subversive Spaces extends debates within site-specific performance to wider conversations in performance studies about ethics, subjectivity, and audience reception.

This dissertation develops a theory for analyzing the role of audiences as aesthetic resources in contemporary site-specific performance and relational art. Collaborating with three Canadian companies as a participant-observer, interviewer, and in some cases, documenter, I develop case studies that track flexible stage-audience relationships in public spaces. By analyzing how companies Radix Theatre Society, Bluemouth, and Mammalian Diving Reflex put spectators to work in sites like IKEA showrooms, disused warehouses, and theatres, I advance a method that attends to the doubled practice of the spectator as worker and witness. This framework, which I term bifold spectatorship, articulates how audiences constitute theatrical worlds through direct physical engagement with the cultural criticism and formal experimentation that artists stage. Folded into the event, spectators literally compose the scene of the action, and enter into what I call critical proximity with the discourses that shape the performance. As participants interact with and directly query the artistic expressions that they patron, they answer a challenge to perform that is typically reserved for professionals. Such novel participation begins with a hail that interpellates audiences into the action as subjects and even sites of performance. Adapting the concept of the casting call, or what I coin site-casting, miscasting, and central casting, I show how spectators are aligned with the exigencies of the site; “mis-placed” or miscast by artists (provoking performance anxiety in participants); or cast to play a role they already perform in their everyday lives. In addition to these critical frameworks, I challenge the established narrative of “liberating the audience” by forwarding a multi-sited genealogy of site-specific performance that confronts the romance of freeing spectators from stage conventions. In examining the ethical problems that arise when audiences are made responsible for representation, The Stagehands of Subversive Spaces extends debates within site-specific performance to wider conversations in performance studies about ethics, subjectivity, and audience reception.

This dissertation considers the impact mobile media technologies have on the production and consumption of memory narratives and cultural memory discourses in Canada. Although this analysis pays specific attention to concepts of memory, heritage, and public history in its exploration of site-specific digital narratives, it is set within a larger theoretical framework that considers the relationship between mobile technology and place, and how the mobile phone in particular can foster both a sense of place and placelessness. This larger framework also includes issues of co-presence, networked identity, play, affect, and the phenomenological relationship between the individual and the mobile device. This is then considered alongside memory narratives (both on the national and quotidian levels) at specifically sanctioned sites of national commemoration (monuments, historic sites) and also in everyday urban spaces. To this end, this dissertation covers a wide range of augmented reality apps and forms of digital storytelling including locative media narratives, site-specific digital performances, social media and crowdsourced heritage archives, and urban mobile gaming and playful mapping. Despite common criticism that mobile phones only serve to distract us from our surrounding environment, I argue that mobile technology can generate deeper, more affective attachments to places by reformulating ways of perceiving and moving through them. They do this by insisting that place is more than just its material properties, but rather is composed of a fluctuating relationship between materiality, time, and affect. Following this framework, I also emphasize how mobile technology shifts the traditional mission of the archive to preserve and protect the past to something more playful, more affective, and more preoccupied with the circulation of the past in the present. Included in this analysis are crowdsourced archives created on social media platforms which, I argue, are particularly well suited to capturing the dynamic qualities of memory and living heritage practices. A contributing factor in this is the mobile phone’s position as a site of intimacy and co-presence, which situates it in a long history of communication technologies that employ rhetorical and technological strategies of co-presence, immediacy, and intimacy. Chapter one examines the role that locative media narratives play at official sites of memory in Canada’s capital region from app-based historical tours to more playful narrative encounters, through the lens of the archive and the repertoire. Chapter two then considers the digital site-specific performance piece, LANDLINE, to unpack how mobile media foster everyday place memories in urban spaces through the mobile phone’s position as a site of intimacy for geographically distant, but virtually co-present, individuals. Chapter three analyzes my own experimental method, Maplibs, which follows a mobile game structure to encourage participants to engage in acts of playful placemaking and collaborative storytelling in order to highlight an alternative process of engaging with place that carries the past forward in meaningful ways. And finally, chapter four analyzes the social media group “Lost Ottawa” to explore how collaborative memory communities mobilize through social media platforms like Facebook and create new forms of participatory heritage. In all of this, place is understood as a dynamic assemblage of stories and memories that the mobile phone, through its ubiquitous impact on social practices, plays a key role in shaping.

This project examines contemporary performances that disrupt normative understandings of time/history. I argue that the complimentary regimes of heterosexuality and capitalism produce the temporal logics that create the psychic and material conditions under which U.S. queer subjects experience everyday, national, and transnational trauma. These logics include the construction of time/history as linear, teleological, and progress-oriented, and the idealized citizen as similarly straight, productive, and amnesic. I then analyze the ways in which queer performance can resist and transform chrono-normativity by creating "time slips": worlds in which past and present are given permission to touch; history/memory to repeat; and the future to reside in the now. Case studies include Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom's Geyser Land (2003); floodlines (2004-2010), which I conceived and directed; and Peggy Shaw and The Clod Ensemble's Must: The Inside Story (2011). I situate my analysis against the backdrop of a post-9/11 security state that makes these performative disruptions particularly vital at this historical moment. / text