Place
by Sally Mackey

This page says a little more about ‘place’ – why it’s important, what might be meant by ‘place’, where some of the theory-around-place comes from and offers more information about the award that led to this website.

Why is place important?

For many years, I have been interested in the importance of ‘place’ in people’s lives. We live at a time of global instability, movement and deterritorialism on the one hand and, on the other, sometimes unwelcome embeddedness because of poverty, detainment or age, for example. Our relationship with ‘place’ can be uneasy as a result.

Applied theatre, community drama, drama and theatre education or socially engaged performance practices have an important and useful role to play in involving people with place. This might be to ease difficult locations, see everyday dull places in a new light, create ‘special’ places in transient lives, challenge unhappy perceptions of previously known sites or celebrate shared places with a view to engaging further understandings of that place. Performance practices can provide opportunities for encouraging individual (and shared) pleasure in physical locations and associated operations.

Place

I differentiate place from site and space.

Site can be interpreted as a geographical location without particular personal attachment or inhabitation.

Space can refer to

• the physical dimensions and dynamics of places
• amorphous, untenanted, non-tangible areas that are generalised as ‘space’ (e.g. the space on a website; spaces of desert…)
• external, global networks that interact with place (the spaces of the internet; the spaces of global finance…)
• a descriptive term for an area of thought and action (e.g. safe spaces; creative spaces)

I describe place differently:

[P]lace is space (or site) animated through operations and actions and made personal. Place is geographically located … inhabited briefly or over a longer period, constructed through a range of operations, actions and behaviours and, through these, a psychological relationship is developed with place. This latter may not necessarily be a positive relationship although frequently place is associated with ‘attachment’...(Mackey, 2015)

There has been an increased consideration of virtual place, whether through connected global communities of interest, quasi-inhabited places through avatar manipulation or a range of GPS-located games and activities, for example. Sometimes the virtual replicates or is attached to the geophysical and ‘real’ place. Not yet a part of the arguments for ‘performing places’, no doubt it will become so.

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For further thinking about concepts of place, and related to the Half Moon project within the ‘Challenging Place’ project, see www.challengingplacehalfmoon.org

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Linked to the previous section, a further differential for me between site and place is in their performance. Site-based performance (e.g. site-specific work) is often undertaken by performers (professional, students, ‘outsiders’…) working on and with a site. Performing place, I would argue, is a ‘performance’ by participants who live in that area and who are not necessarily performers (see the Oldham project on this website). If place is somewhere with which one has a personal relationship, and where one dwells – albeit possibly temporarily – then it follows that a performance of place is primarily with participants. It is a participatory practice in the applied field.

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For a detailed ‘hypothesis’ on performing place that happened at a site called Caer Llan see: Performing Place 1.pdf and Performing Place 2.pdf

The ‘Challenging Place’ projects tried out ideas first identified at Caer Llan. For additional ‘findings’ from the Half Moon project (as well as those presented on this website), see: www.challengingplacehalfmoon.org/inconclusions

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