Chloe Veltman recently suggested that a show couldn't be considered site-specific unless it was created in response to a specific place. So, staging Beckett's Happy Days on a beach, Hamlet in Elsinore or Blasted in a hotel in Leeds should not be considered site-specific as they are pre-existing texts imposed on a site, albeit in most cases a very appropriate one. "Site-specific work," Veltman concludes, is by this logic "always newly devised and can never be replicated in any other venue or locale."
Unpicking the nature of the relationship between an artist, an event and a place can be infinitely useful to audiences, critics and the artists themselves. But I'm not sure about the definitiveness of Veltman's conclusion. Is it always impossible for a piece to replicate its specificity in a number of different locations? What if the show isn't reliant on the kind of concrete text that Veltman assumes? And what if the show is more an invitation than a presentation; an opportunity or a provocation for people to each create their own site-specific event? For example, a couple of years ago I created a show called Exposures that invited the audience to take photos of their city in response to a series of questions. Here, the questions could be the same every time but each set of photos would be a unique response to that city. Was that not then site-specific?
I'm always drawn back to the archaeologist Julian Thomas's beautiful description of what it means to be in a place – that it is "not simply a matter of being physically contained within a much larger entity; it is a relational involvement like being 'in business' or 'in love'". Consequently, theatre "specific" to that place needn't be designed by its material history and geography. Instead it could be specific to the people who live or work there and their relationship to that place.
With that in mind, couldn't a show be created by providing a framework or an invitation for people to animate their relationship to a site? Holly Gramazio's Trap Street is a charming collaborative psychogeography project that is presently touring the country as part of the Hide&Seek Sandpit. Based on an old mapmakers' trick, Trap Street invites its audience to add one real and one pretend feature to a bare map of the town. Over the course of a night, the map then builds into a rich tapestry of landmarks, stories, rumours, memories and outright lies. Although the provocation is the same each time, in every new place the project becomes a unique portrait of that city.
The same philosophy is also at the heart of Welsh artist Marc Rees's Adain Avion, an inspiring proposal for a mobile arts space built out of the chassis of an old DC9 aeroplane. With each stop on its journey, this temporary site will be reinvented by local people and transformed into a different space. It's an idea as thrilling and generous as it is epic and beautiful.
Both of these events rely on a courageous kind of incompleteness in their initial realisation: the artist offers something unfinished, to be completed by each group of people who encounter it. By doing so, it becomes eminently possible for a piece to be remade again and again in any number of locations, every time unique and authentically site-specific.
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