In this section, you’ll find content about work created for and performed outside of conventional theatre spaces. Artists describe the reasons for making such work, and the challenges that come along with it. Consider starting with Anne Hamburger’s “The Why and How of Site-Specific” or Gab Cody’s essay on writing for immersive and site-informed experiences.
The Latest
Essay
The Tempest Crashes Ashore at Point Montara
by Nicole Gluckstern
18 February 2026
Podcast
Re-sensitizing to Place in Site-Specific Performance
by Tara Khozein, Martin Boross, Matthew Glassman, Wanda Strukus
20 January 2026
Essay
Choreographing Attention in Spatial-Relational Practices
Dávid Somló discusses key trends in the growing field of spatially focused transdisciplinary performances that center audience experience, highlighting examples across several potential directions for this work.
Teatru Malta’s 1881 infused immersive theatre with game design, all in a dark, castle-like setting. After witnessing 1881 and other Maltese performances, critic Jonathan Mandell is left questioning the evolving forms and definitions of immersive theatre.
Pluralism is inherent in community partnerships, whether hyperlocal or national. As the One Nation/One Project team built public arts partnerships in eighteen sites across the country, they sought pluralistic strategies to respond to a question of growing importance: What future is possible at the intersection of our increasing diversity and diminishing cohesion? And how do we reach it?
Bringing Together Key International Players for Dynamic Discussions on How to Imagine the Outdoor Arts of Tomorrow
Wednesday 28 May to Friday 30 May 2025
London, England
The program will explore the evolving landscape of outdoor arts, with a strong focus on placemaking and the theme of "situated and unannounced voices." Discussions will be structured around three key themes: Places, People, and Future.
Using Sarah Cameron Sunde’s 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, Dr. Una Chaudhuri articulates protocols for endurance—through performance, connection, and action—as we face the rising tide of climate emergency.
Liza Bielby and paris cyan cian are in Detroit and New Orleans, respectively, building the worlds they want to be in. They discuss their work in performance collectives, connections to community, and the places and relationships that undergird their work.
Alexandria Ramos shares about her experience of Rasgos Asiaticos, a site-specific performance installation. The performance installation shines a light on entangled histories of migration, colonialism, and displacement, and it highlights the forging of a Chinese Mexican identity in the United States-Mexico borderlands.
Palestinian performance artist Riham Isaac discusses her site-specific performances, which understand performance as a medium for change. She shares insights into her pieces like Stone on Road and the profound symbolism of resistance in Palestinian art.
Food Tank’s Little Peasants bridged theatre and advocacy by staging an interactive play set during a union vote at a fictional international coffee chain. Elena Morris discusses the play’s development process and its place in the theatre-based food systems advocacy strategies employed by the nonprofit Food Tank.
Tannis Kowalchuk, artistic director of Farm Arts Collective, shares about the project Dream on the Farm—a ten year project of climate change plays performed on Willow Wisp Organic Farm that grapples with the questions: How do we imagine our future? What are our dreams?
In this episode, Tjaša chats with director Igor Golyak of Arlekin Players about the power of virtual theatre and the experience of using technology that had never before been used for live performance. And if you were wondering why there was a twelve-foot robotic arm on stage, serving coffee and sweeping the floor in The Orchard at Baryshnikov Center, Igor thinks that’s what Chekhov would have wanted.
Rex Daugherty offers a guide for theatremakers who want to produce theatre in nontraditional spaces, sharing the experiences of Washington, DC’s Solas Nua.
Kristin Idaszak reflects on experiencing Theatre Du Polet’s Be Water, My Friend at the Prague Quadrennial. This protest art about Hong Kong’s fight for democracy in 2019, performed in the Czech Republic, crosses cultures, political regimes, and time periods.
Andy Field Talks about Forest Fringe—an Independent, Not-for-Profit Space in the Edinburgh Festival
Monday 5 June 2023
New York City
For over ten years as of this event, Forest Fringe has built a community of artists and playwrights. Each year they return to Edinburgh they experiment with different ways of doing things and new contexts to accommodate even the most unusual experiences. Meanwhile they’ve also started exploring beyond the festival, creating new projects across the UK and internationally, including a festival in an old cinema in the center of Bangkok, a series of performances on night buses across London, and a traveling library of audio experiences.
Documentary Screening With Tony Torn and Original Members of the Cast (NY)
Thursday 11 May 2023
New York City
Join us for a screening of Reza Abdoh’s extraordinary site-specific work Father was a Peculiar Man,an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov staged in New York City’s Meatpacking District in the summer of 1990. Produced by Anne Hamburger’s En Garde Arts, Father was a Peculiar Man showed how brilliantly Reza applied his specific site-based approach that he developed in Los Angeles to New York City’s urban infrastructure.
Gregory Moomjy and Marianna Mott Newirth share their approach to creating disability-affirmative opera productions in which disability artistry flourishes.
In this episode, co-hosts Bíborka and Zsófi are joined by visual and performance artist and environmental activist, Éva Bubla; dancer, choreographer, researcher, and founder of the performance research group SVUNG, Kinga Szemessy; and culture manager, event organizer, curator, founder of the PLACCC Festival, and the Hungarian liaison for the IN SITU Network, Fanni Nánay. Drawing from their individual experiences, they discuss the current climate crisis and how different artists engage with this complex issue.
Talia Rodriguez details the generative process for We Are Kin to the Cove, a site-specific, community-engaged performance exploring the historical and contemporary relationships water and humanity at a cove on New York’s East River.
International Theatre Forum Hosted by Shoshin Theatre Association in Cluj, Romania
Saturday 17 September 2022
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Shoshin Theatre Association in Cluj, Romania presented Out of the Frame International Theatre Forum livestreaming on the global, commons-based, peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Saturday 17 September at 7 a.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4) / 11 a.m. UTC / 2 p.m. EEST (Cluj, UTC +3).
In the first episode of PUHA (Performative Unity in the Hungarian Arts) podcast, co-hosts Zsófi and Bíborka, along with their guests, search for the meaning of the notion of “public space.” Through the experiences and experiments of interdisciplinary sound artist Dávid Somló; choreographer Flóra Eszter Sarlós; dancer and choreographer Gyula Cserepes; and theatremaker and performer Sarah Günther, this episode will take you on a tour of spaces, from Budapest to Denmark to London and more!
This episode is an interview with Addae Moon, the associate artistic director at Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta, Georgia. We discuss his journey as a theatre artist; his playwright development lab, Hush Harbor Lab; and his own artistry and creativity.
Artistic identities can be complicated, and many theatremakers work equally within two or more disciplines simultaneously. The most interesting work is rarely created in a vacuum. These multidisciplinary artists create diverse projects in all senses of the word, broadening our idea of what theatre can and should be. Today, two such multihyphenate artists, Denmo Ibrahim and Sarah Fahmy, converse about their multiple identities, how they reconcile and manage their myriad expertise, and the role of multihyphenate artists in today’s theatre landscape.
Gathering Ground Theatre—an Austin, Texas collective comprised of people with lived experiences of homelessness and allies—creates performances that aim to influence public opinion and local legislation. Anna Rogelio Joaquin sits down with Lisa Hoelscher to discuss Lisa’s experience as a co-creator and performer of works that expose issues like hostile architecture and camping bans, as well as the company’s current work on a memorial performance.
Site-specific performances have the possibility to truly make all the world a stage. To produce site-specific and devised theatre performances in the United States and abroad, artists must engage with the questions of the politics of any space, what communities inhabit or use it, and who is invited into it. Sahar Assaf, a Lebanese theatremaker and the new artistic director of Golden Thread Productions, and Zeina Daccache, an actor, director, and the founder of Catharsis: Lebanese Center for Drama Therapy come together to talk about site-specific and devised theatre pieces in Lebanon, the rest of the MENA world, and the United States.
