Site-specific, site-sympathetic or site-responsive? There's a bewildering number of terms used to try and tease out the various relationships that theatre-makers are forging with alternative spaces. It's nice to see artists debating the right words to explain their work; for one, it demonstrates that they are really thinking about what they are doing and how they are doing it.
Discussing whether a piece of work is site-sympathetic or site-responsive hopefully means you are really considering how you are responding to that site. It's prompting questions about how much you are taking from it and how much you are bringing to it. And hopefully all of this will mean a more considered, meaningful and engaged show. Which is surely a good thing, regardless of how irritating it might be to hear people splitting hairs over the correct terminology.
There is, however, in this delicate delineation still an elephant in the room. For while people toil earnestly over whether work is site-specific or site-responsive, they seem to take the "site" bit for granted. For me, too much of the discussion seems to be about how you're going to engage with a site and not enough about what it is you actually mean by the term in the first place.
What is a site? It could mean an area in structural terms, like a building site; the walls and angles and shapes of a space. It could be about that site's generic purpose – a library or a bank or an "industrial site". It could refer to the full history of a place – all the stories and people and meanings that make any given area of land a place or a home. To make a work "site-responsive" obviously means massively different things depending on which, if any, of these descriptions is how you understand the word.
A perfect example of this is the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust's calls for applications for their 2010 award, announced recently. They ask for ideas for a "site-responsive" piece for "a town square, a shopping centre, a busy street". What they want is a piece of theatre responding imaginatively to a generic architectural space, one that might be reproduced in a similar space in any number of towns or cities. Contrast this with the brilliant Finnish ANTI festival, which in 2007 invited artists to create new "site-specific" pieces by giving them not only the features of the space but its stories and its histories.
Clearly, artists are being asked to engage with two very different kinds of site. Neither way of thinking is necessarily "correct" but undoubtedly, both require very different ways of working and thinking about space. And hopefully an acknowledgement of that difference might mean that both artists and audiences can get a better grip on any show living beyond the auditorium's doors.
