Re-sensitizing to Place in Site-Specific Performance

Tara Khozein: Welcome to the third episode of Bridge Between Realities, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. My name is Tara Khozein. I’m a classical singer and theatre artist.

Martin Boross: My name is Martin Boross, theatre and filmmaker from Hungary.

Tara: We are the hosts of this podcast series, which documents what we are learning from our research project of the same name, Bridge Between Realities, which includes several workshop residencies and public theatre events across the US centering on contemporary theatre forms. Over the course of the project, we created this six-episode podcast series. We recorded this episode in Bath, Maine at the Chocolate Church Arts Center, where we invited Wanda Strukus and Matthew Glassman to talk to us about site-specific creation.

Martin: I would like to start this episode by sharing a few starting ideas and to offer a work of mine, Promenade, as an example, which was my first collaboration in the US. We brought the concept to Baltimore in 2017 and later to New Mexico in 2018, which is where Tara and I first met. The audience had a special position in this piece. They were sitting on a bus. They followed the action unfolding from station to station in a real-life set. They watched actors and passersby on the street while listening to a live edited soundscape through headphones. We guided them through special routes and neighborhoods, essentially turning the spectator into a tourist, a traveler in their own city.

Over the course of the project, we created this performance in five different cities, sometimes in a more political way, other times in a more poetic context. We have just completed a one-week residency in Bath, Maine. We worked with the theme “memory.” In this piece, Memory Bath, the audience also traveled from station to station, but this time through the spaces of the Chocolate Church, discovering the performance along the way. Beyond the dramaturgy of travel as an experience, we observed that memories tied to a place or the historical significance of the location itself can also become dramaturgical elements, almost taking on the role of a separate character. A walking performance is a physically immersive experience. By walking through routes, the audience takes part in a discovery, an investigation, and an act of creating their own experience. You cannot and should not try to focus their attention on a single point. The fascinating thing is the way they themselves contribute to shaping their own journey. They can drift, notice things that the creators did not place there. In a sense, the spectator also becomes a writer, composing their own version into the performance.

Tara: So I’d like to paint a picture of where we are specifically, site-specifically. We are in Bath, Maine, the day after our performance, Memory Bath, and we’re sitting in the Annex, which is the smaller of two performance venues in the Chocolate Church. There’s a disco ball hanging over our heads. There are some envelopes scattered around the room that used to house memories that we handed to our audience members. Memory Bath was a one-night-only immersive performance event created by a group of mostly local participants. 

So, we are joined today by Wanda Strukus and Matthew Glassman. They are two of the ten participants that we worked with during the week.

Martin: Wanda is a dance, theatre, and sound artist. She’s the co-founder of Two Roads Performance Project and has produced site-specific public art projects across many different media. She’s also a teacher and has produced, taught, and directed in all over New England, and was also the founding director of the BFA in contemporary theatre at Boston Conservatory at Berklee. In all her work, she emphasizes ensemble building, physical theatre, and interdisciplinary exploration. We saw her really shine as a performer and collaborative force last night in our production.

Tara: Matthew Glassman is an actor, writer, and director, as well as the executive and artistic director of the Chocolate Church Arts Center here in Bath, Maine. He’s also the founder of the UnNameable Children’s Project, which is a youth theatre lab inspired by Black Mountain College. He also spent twenty-two years at Double Edge Theatre where he was an ensemble actor and also co-artistic director. He brought a super strong atmosphere to his piece in the project and also led an inspiring mini workshop as part of the work that I think left everyone really wanting more. So Wanda and Matthew, thanks for joining us.

Matthew Glassman: It’s nice to be here.

Wanda Strukus: Happy to be here.

Martin: Can we try to define site-specific? And could you guys reflect on how it is present in your own practice? Wanda?

Wanda: I guess the most simple meaning for me is any work that is grounded in—it’s hard to talk about site-specific work without saying site and specific over and over again—but specifically grounded in a place, in a place. And that place’s history, that place’s use, that place’s past, present, and future. The ambience, environment, the qualities, all of those things of the space. For me, I really like to think that any work that is site-specific cannot be removed from that site. There’s site-adaptive and there’s site-adjacent and we have all these words for it, but to me, the excitement is when it’s site-specific and it happens there at that time, and that’s the only way it can happen with those people in that moment in that place.

Matthew: I would say since 2002, a year hasn’t gone by where I haven’t been researching, creating, or performing site-specific work. From 2002 until 2022, there were annual indoor-outdoor traveling performance spectacles, which was a mode of working I was a part of developing with Stacy Klein and Carlos Uriona at Double Edge Theatre. Those were our annual summer performances that we spent months researching on a hundred-acre dairy farm, indoors and outdoors, and the streams, and the trees, and across a really beautiful and special landscape in a beautiful and special town. And then that work evolved into touring site-specific and place-based work to three different countries and far-flung places all the way from inner city Springfield to the coast of Maine, to Norway and Poland. So, communion with place. And the communion between imagination and place is now just an organ of the work that I’ve been doing and I feel really close to.

Tara: And in that touring, how do you tour a site-specific project? Does that mean that you develop new content there and do you tour the format of the concept or is there content that travels from piece to piece?

The excitement is when it’s site-specific and it happens there at that time, and that’s the only way it can happen with those people in that moment in that place.

Matthew: In my experience, it is a combination of having content and some developed research that goes to the place, as well as an ethos around relationship to place that allows for an authentically co-creative aspect with the place. That’s the people, that’s the land, that’s the artists that host us. And that can take lots of different shapes, whether it’s an adaptation of Don Quixote, and that is a performance that then invites community into it as audience and co-creators, or whether it’s a series of questions about grief and mourning rights where then local community members are actual co-authors.

Tara: So you’re also thinking of site-specificity as that the site also includes the people that are participating in the content creation of the piece, not just the physical space.

Matthew: I think it can be fun to land in a place and do a parade-y processional thing. But no matter what, relationality is primary, no matter what. To me, there needs to be a deep sensitivity to the place in order to make any work there. And that’s the people, the passer-byers, the stewards of the place, the trees, the flora, the fauna. Yeah. You can plant yourself in a place and do your work, and you could call that site-specific. It doesn’t maximize the potentialities of real cultural development, I’d say. Community engagement in the best possible way.

Martin: Because you guys are relatively new to Bath, and I think it would be interesting to hear about where you are in the process of setting foot in Bath and reshaping, reforming Chocolate Church as an art center.

Matthew: Sure. This is a really special time for us. The us being myself and Jeremy Louise Eaton, who is the art director of the Chocolate Church and a co-leader of our artistic and community work here. We were both at Double Edge for over two decades, and we’ve been tasked and charged with leading a local art center that’s been around since 1977 in Bath, which is a historically working-class community with really wide varying political and socioeconomic strata. And we’re housed in a church that was built in 1847. And it’s a formative time to listen and learn about the community, the traditions that are important to them, the forms of artistic expression that mean a lot to them, as well as introducing our own sensibilities and imaginative passions. So we are in a beautiful formative stage where there’s high levels of sensitivity to the environment we’re in and the relationships we’re building.

And we are new stewards of a place that has had many stewards and whose origins were the founder, a guy named Jack Depp, who was very rigorous about making work, artistic work, Shakespeare, traditional theatre, and being really rigorous with the community and really respectful of it. So we see ourselves trying to carry that tradition on with some new approaches as well.

Tara: And Wanda, I know that you’ve taught and had a lot of your career around Boston and New England area. Tell me if this is true, but it seems like you’re also trying to find an artistic practice that’s more in Maine. I’m just interested in where you are in that journey or if that’s accurate.

Wanda: Yeah. No. That’s quite accurate. I was in the Boston area for almost two decades, I guess. And then three years ago, my partner and I moved to Maine to South Berwick, but I still have a foot in Boston. I still teach there a couple of times a week and I’ve had some opportunities to teach in Maine, but they’re two very different communities to have a foot in and introducing yourself or coming into a new place and finding your artistic collaborators and your partners and your projects there can be really challenging when you’ve been in another space for a long time. So yes. I would say that I am really looking now for, “Okay, what kind of work do I make here?” And I’ve always been really drawn to the landscape in general and the Maine landscape is, Southern Maine is spectacular. So how I fit into that, and what I can bring to it when I’m new—all of those questions revolve around place.

Tara: And how did the physical spaces of the Chocolate Church influence your ideating for this project?

Wanda: I had never been to the Chocolate Church before last Sunday, so I didn’t know. And I guess maybe I had in the back of my mind, “Oh, maybe we’ll be in some outdoor spaces.” But I really didn’t know. And then we were speaking of memory and seeds and memories. I think that most of my memory seeds, except for the Big E, were indoor spaces. I also think that probably part of my mind was thinking we have a week to do this, and once you go outdoors, there’s so many wonderful problems to solve, but maybe not in the time that we had. I think there was probably the logistical side of my mind thinking “stay indoors, stay indoors, small, smaller is better.” But then of course we had a dinner table with fifty people, so it wasn’t really small. But it was much easier to manage acoustically, I think.

Martin: If you look at our performance from last night, what were those motives in your opinion, scenes, images that fulfilled your criteria for site-specific work?

Wanda: I will say there was something really—I don’t know—that sense of overlapping time with George’s piece about Schooner Fare.

George McGinty: [in Memory Bath] Sing it with us. If you don’t know this, sing it with us. I see the light.

Tara: So one of our participants, George McGinty, who’s a visual artist and elementary school art teacher in Bath, created a reenactment of a concert that he attended at the Chocolate Church, just as the regulations were starting to let up around the pandemic. In our show, Memory Bath, the audience members were given masks and asked to observe social distancing, but the performance that they watched wasn’t the concert that George saw back in 2020. Instead, George was behind a screen where he had one of those old-fashioned overhead projectors with the transparencies. And he created this analog slide show of his experience of being there and of cracking open the shell of COVID and being around people for the first time. So, the audience got to experience the concert, but from inside of George’s head while they were sitting in the seats where George was sitting at the time.

Wanda: And he was connecting that to a time of nostalgia, a Bath that he knew, and at the same time, creating the Bath that he wanted to see. There was this—I don’t know—telescoping and expanding of time and memory and history and manifestation that, I don’t know how he did it, and there was no other way. You couldn’t do that in traditional theatre. I don’t have a history with Bath so I can only imagine for people who are from Bath and maybe remembered that concert, five years ago—I can’t, COVID time—how that would have landed. If I could sense that happening, I wonder as a community member how that felt.

Matthew: Well, Schooner Fare is coming to perform here.

Wanda: Oh!

Matthew: In a few weeks, and I’m going to invite everyone from this cohort to it. And I would like to talk to the artists of Schooner Fare about any way of incorporating what George made.

Tara: George’s piece.

Matthew: At their concert. And this might be their farewell concert. And they’ve played every single tour. They’ve been performing at the Chocolate Church for fifty years.

Tara: Oh my god.

Matthew: So yeah, these are meaningful and micro.

Tara: Another participant, Scott Halligan, who’s a cellist composer and sound designer, created this beautiful choral piece with the ensemble, which was based on the story of King Arthur where he transforms into a stag. It was a really personal story for Scott, and it was also one of the few pieces that involved the full group. I even got to sneak into the project as a singer at the last minute.

Matthew: With Scott’s “White “Stag,” original poem and composition staged in the Chocolate Church really beautifully by Martin and Tara, you have a piece of mythology of Arthurian legend, which is pagan and Christian mythology in an old seaside church with this music and poetry. That felt really beautiful and was really touching on metaphor. And then Phoebe made these beautiful, made up these lantern, what’d you call them?

Tara: Like illuminated organic shapes.

Matthew: Yeah. With branches and rice paper, she made these lantern pieces that when put together, created a ship. And we all were sailing this ship, and then at the time it would poof into all little pieces floating. Beautiful metaphor that relates to place. And Jenny’s narrative about the seals and about the Indigenous people, the Abenaki and Wabanaki people of this place. Again, these were seeds. This was not fully fledged, fully realized, as I don’t think it’s intended. It’s a one-week workshop, but seeds of really powerful potential.

Martin: So, the audience stands in the courtyard of the Chocolate Church, mesmerized by bubbles floating in the air, part of the opening scene, while Schubert duet for cello and voice plays. Suddenly the door of the Annex bursts open and the Polish mama starts yelling at us. It turns out we are late for a dinner we didn’t even know we were invited to. Urged on by her impatient tone, the crowd rushes into the first scene and it’s Wanda’s family memory.

Wanda: Okay. So, there’s a thirty-foot table stretched diagonally across the space, the annex, with fifty chairs around it. And there’s a group of fifty people outside and I throw open the door and I become this fusion of a Polish American mother and bossy director lady who orders the people to come in and sit down and find a seat and help set the plates and help with the napkins and help set out more tables and then some greeting people with a little bit of broken Polish and losing my baby and finding my baby. And then also just explaining that this is not my memory, that it’s an inherited memory. It’s a memory of my mother’s from her childhood that she conveyed to me. And I think about that a lot, what do I do with other people’s memories, especially when those people are gone? And trying to tell it and trying to do it justice, but also not pretending that it’s mine and not pretending that I have authority and that my Babci was not a bossy lady as far as I know, but I also didn’t know her when she was forty years old and had eleven children to wrangle. So maybe she was.

So anyway, so then we all sit down and we pass down pierogi and kielbasa and beets. Not really, but we do. And I tell a story about bread and then we sing Sto Lat and it’s over. It’s hard to tell, but that’s the framework of what we do. We gather, we gather as a big family. And I think as a performer, I felt really seen and I felt like I could see everybody, and I could see everybody in the audience feel seen. There’s that kind of exchange, I think in this immersive work that we don’t get as much of in a traditional theatrical setting and that lovely exchange, that communion, I think we feel.

Tara: We totally did. It was such a nice way to open the piece because it’s like, what’s more familiar than sitting around a table and like being told directly what to do and passing the plates out? It’s all things that we’ve done some version of. And so I think it was a really lovely way to welcome everyone into a space that’s like, “Now this is yours. Now we’re in this together and this will only work if you sit at the table.” And so it was, I think—without too many puns intended—it was a nice way to bring them to the table.

Wanda: And there’s a choice. You can see as the audience comes in, “Oh, I’m being told what to do, and am I going to sit here?” And some people looking for seats on the periphery so they don’t have to sit at the table, but there’s really no seats on the periphery, so you have to sit at the table with strangers and play.

Matthew: These traditions, the tradition that I come out of in terms of site-specific work is a really particular blend of Polish laboratory theatre, which is long-form, time-based ensemble work, very internal with Polish paratheatrical research, which is very much interested in how you involve community in the actors or artists research of going beyond the daily. With South American agitprop processional street theatre, which is a form of protest. And you think about laboratory theatre, and you think about outdoor work that is not happening in the context of a venue, a commercial venue. It adds all of these really important questions about how we encounter a place. As artists, how do we first encounter the place before we encounter the ideas that are being proposed to us? How does each person, whatever their method is, whatever their discipline, whatever their experience is, wander through a building and have an intimate relationship with it and have questions that lead to more questions? How do we meet the people and take them into our work in some ways that makes it extra-daily? The question of the erotic in terms of like how Audre Lorde talks about the erotic. Like, how do I find the deepest sense of sensitivity to what is important here, to the walls, to you, to the air and the wind?

Tara: So we didn’t really get into this during our interview, but as I was listening back to the recording I tried to understand the connection that Matthew was making to Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Erotic Is Power.” I discovered some interesting questions around the ethics of site-specific work, like how do we get ourselves to that feeling of heightened sensitivity and depth and freedom in a space that’s unfamiliar to us while also not falling into consumerist or colonialist dynamic with that space and also not with the community that occupies it? And for me, the underlying question is, how do we feel with a space and with a community? And how can we as artists come in as generous helpers and collaborators and supporters and not just use their stories and feelings and history and architecture for the success of our art projects?

Audre Lorde: [in a recording] To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feeling as we would use a Kleenex. And when we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in that experience with us and use without consent of the used is abuse.

Tara: So how do we get to that level of sensitivity or eroticism for our audiences? Matthew shared a moment where this really seemed to come together for him during a production he was doing with Double Edge.

As artists, how do we first encounter the place before we encounter the ideas that are being proposed to us?

Matthew: Our flagship site-specific work we did at Double Edge, basically the end of the performance, the audience was around a pond and I was hiding in the woods because my character disappeared. I had not bought into this idea of popular arts and spectacle and procession. I felt like it was watering down this like esoteric and intense actor methodology I was really interested in and it was a much faster process. And I was like, “This is too casual. I’m losing all of the deep spiritual blah, blah my pretentious self was craving.” But I was crouched in the woods, and I saw the audience under the stars by the pond, and they had all arrived there together, and they were strangers. And it ended and I saw them looking around at each other and seeing that they had arrived in a place that they had never been. They didn’t know how they arrived there at the pond and they had felt this deep sense of journey with the people next to them.

And I could feel, and this was like an epiphany, how intrinsic it is for us as human beings to have these experiences where we journey with one another. And then on the other side, we see one another as familiar and having, even just being in the audience and having a heightened sense of being alive.

Martin: Matthew shared a bit about how site-specific work has already been happening in Bath through the folk traditions and shared how Chocolate Church has integrated and supported the existing practices.

Matthew: Having the work of the artist seep into the community, into the public spaces, as well as inviting new ways of it traveling through here has been happening and will continue to happen. We’ve started by bringing those ways into existing programs. So, the city of Bath every year has had a lantern parade. People bring flashlights and they hand out—this is what they used to do—hand out things and they’d parade and end up somewhere and that was the end. And we partnered with them to create a whole arena of making lanterns here, using reuse objects and other things, using puppetry methodologies, making it free to the community, inviting in stilt walkers and other puppet artists and object artists to be a part of it and to really heighten the sense of parade and procession of the town and landing here at the Chocolate Church where we opened the doors—this is in February—and gave hot cider to everybody and welcomed everybody in. And then they would parade across the stage and dance with their lanterns across the stage and back through the audience. This is taking aspects of site-specific work and of folk traditions to have the spectator become creative, non-passive, activated people who are transforming the spaces that they’re traveling through with their creations and seeing one another’s. It’s actually a critical aspect of giving a sense of autonomy to people in their communities.

Tara: So, here Wanda described a dance festival in the woods that she co-created. In her words, “It was for people who love the woods but don’t know anything about contemporary dance, and people who love contemporary dance and who don’t know anything about the woods.”

Wanda: So the site-specific work changes the audience, but it also changes the space. And I like to imagine people still today hiking through the fells and remembering when someone rolled this enormous ball of yarn up this hill or when there was someone typing in this little, tiny rock garden. The space is marked differently. It has a new history. And I think that’s what it does in a community space too. It’s like, yes, that prossession passed, but no one can walk down that street without remembering the lights and the stilt walkers, and it changes the place.

Matthew: I think that’s part of the sensitivity is asking it what it needs and asking those who are tending to it what it needs. You mentioned the being in love with the practicalities. And I think that’s a super important part of the sensitivity component because if everyone is charged with together hosting a meal in a place or preparing it or cleaning it or you become one with it and those practicalities are super important.

Martin: I love logistics myself and I believe that the audience always feels this was taken into account and they can appreciate the generosity of the logistics, and they can punish us so much for the lack of sensitivity.

Wanda: And that’s our responsibility, right? We invite them into a non-traditional space. They are not going to get to sit in a comfy seat and watch. We’re going to ask them to do quite a bit and then we have to hold them and take care of them and they feel taken care of or they don’t.

Tara: Yeah. And I feel like both of you gave us permission to be present in the way that you were present with us and in the way that you were responding to just the reality of, “Oh, that’s more people than I thought it was going to be” or like, “Oh, how do I move this audience?” Or, “Oh, there’s this person that’s in the audience that has mobility issues that we have to accommodate in a new way.” I felt like both of you just dealt with those situations so masterfully in a way that made them not handicapped for the experience, but the point of the experience.

Matthew: Hospitality.

Wanda: Hospitality. Yes.

Tara: Yeah. Theatremakers as that. This leads into a question about the building. I think we can of course think about space in a million different ways. One maybe interesting or useful ways to think about it as a character, and I wonder, the Chocolate Church is a building that needs work. You’ve inherited a giant, giant project years and years and years of making this space everything that it wants to be, or that my sense of being in this building is that this space has a lot of dreams and you guys have a lot of dreams for it. I just feel like you’re already so much in, you used the word communion, one of you earlier, and in communion with what that is. And it’s like talking to us right now, the lights are flickering. It’s like, “You’re talking about me?”

Matthew: Help me.

Tara: Help me. Because of the state of the building, there were some spaces that I hope we can come back another time and use because they’ll be usable and safe to put actors or audience in them. I just also want to give a little bit of space for you to talk about this building and maybe plug any future fundraising that it might need, or just to tell us a little bit about what this project is about this space and how we can support the Chocolate Church.

Matthew: Yeah. I’ll try and say it succinctly, which is Bath is the city of ships. It’s a shipbuilding town. It’s a shipbuilding community. It is rural; it’s coastal. And it was built as a congregational church by shipbuilders who volunteered to create a vessel for spiritual journey. We’re no longer a church, a Christian church. Now we’re an art church that has the same interest and with the belief that these spaces are intrinsic to the health and the becoming of the place. Our goals for the future are simply to honor those sentiments and make this truly multigenerational, make it have the full wide range of artistic and programmatic possibilities and fix the building in order to house that vitality of spirit and imagination and togetherness. At a time where people can’t communicate, being together is the foundational step towards that communication, towards that collaboration, towards governance.

The tower needs work. It probably needs to be taken down and put back together. That could cost a lot of money. Our main sanctuary space is a beautiful three-hundred-seat space, needs to become four-season with cooling and proper heating. And our kitchen needs to be able to make food so we can really integrate food into the experiences here, which we’ve been doing because breaking bread is the way you create community togetherness. We’re not reinventing. We’re not inventing anything right now. It’s so important to remember this, especially as artists in this time, we’re carrying on certain things and we’re going back to these technologies that have molecular magic in them to bring us back to a shared sense of humanity, and the Chocolate Church is a great, special place to be doing that. Yeah. We got to fix this whole building up.

Our community got to have an experience of this building in a way they never have before, in a way that Jeremy and I are developing and are wanting to do and are doing and this project encapsulated a way of doing it that invited us, our artist community, and the community at large into seeing space and see presentation in a new way.

Tara: Thank you for listening to Bridge Between Realities. Each episode focuses on a theme that was a core element of our workshop series. Other episodes focus on immersive theatre, the devising process, the ensemble model, community involvement, and co-leadership.

Martin: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts, including on non-commercial open-source apps like Anytime Podcast Player and AntennaPod.

Tara: This project has been made possible thanks to the support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding. If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends.

Martin: You can find a transcript for this episode, along with lots of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com.