Nomadic Theatre. Staging Movement and Mobility in Contemporary Performance

Abstract

This study concerns performances that attempt to (physically) mobilise the spectator and rethink the conditions of the stage. Spectators are engaged in promenade performances or walking theatre, for instance, or they traverse the city by bike; they are driven around in wheelchairs or drift across labyrinthine performance installations. Alongside the mobility of the spectator, performers forsake the usual centre-stage position and turn into guides, tour-operators, or voices on an audio-tape. Contrary to the usual conflation with a theatre building, theatre spaces emerge in and as the process of performance, and as temporary situations. This study investigates how ambulatory performances and performative installations stage such movements and in turn mobilise the stage. This leads to enquiring into why some theatre practitioners prefer these mobile forms of theatre making, how these forms address and position the spectators in performance, how mobility is staged and effects the stage, and subsequently, how such movements best can be described.

Both physical and theoretical movements are examined through a specific and newly invented concept: nomadic theatre. Nomadic theatre is employed as an analytical and mobile concept, and involves the encounter of the nomadic, mainly as it has been theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the theatre. This study explores the potential of nomadic theatre, by putting the concept to work in relation to performances by Dries Verhoeven, Rimini Protokoll, Ontroerend Goed and Signa, next to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s nomadology and various disciplines in the humanities, such as media theory, urban theory, cartography, architecture, and game theory. Instead of primarily aligning the nomadic with physical movement or the absence of boundaries, the nomadic is understood as a particular mode or attitude that concerns the disturbance or undoing of territories. Deleuze and Guattari describe these disturbances in terms of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.

This study employs the method of ‘thinking through practices’ which treats performances as theoretical objects and performance analysis as the creation of affirmative assemblages. The concept of nomadic theatre firstly is put to use to investigate what kind of territories are in play, in ambulatory performance and performative installations, and which patterns of de- and reterritorialisation do emerge. Secondly, the concept is employed to describe how these processes are staged, that is, how acts of de- and reterritorialisation are organised or composed, how they position or address the spectator, and what emergent dramaturgies arise from these open-ended processes. Throughout, this study enquires into what the concept of nomadic theatre is able to do, with regard to theorising contemporary performance. This study demonstrates that not only theatre materialises differently as a consequence of the encounter with the nomadic; similarly the nomadic is ‘contaminated’ by the theatre, which manifests itself notably in the emphasis on embodied, situated and local operations.