ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Welsh theatre company Brith Gof created a number of site-specific performances in disused, often semi–derelict, industrial buildings and large public spaces: car factory, ice rink, railway terminus, iron foundry and empty swimming pool (see Pearson 2010: 68–72). Designer Cliff McLucas supposed that the particular properties of such sites – their extent and height, ground-plan, layout of integral features and distribution of vernacular details – might offer unique opportunities for scenic design: to create installations at the scale of the building itself, employing materials unusual in the auditorium but commonplace at such locations, and to construct another architecture within the existing architecture (see Pearson 2010: 112–15). In Gododdin (1988) (see Pearson and Shanks 2001: 102–8), McLucas employed hundreds of tons of sand and dozens of trees and wrecked cars in a formal setting of circles, avenues and cones, that was gradually flooded with thousands of liters of water during the performance; in PAX (1990) (see Pearson 2010: 68–70), he built a section of a Gothic cathedral from metal scaffolding. This overlay and interpenetration of the found (the site) and the fabricated (the production) he eventually characterized as the co-existence of host (the extant building with its fixtures, fittings, ambiance; that which pre–exists the work; all that is at site) and the ghost (that which is temporarily brought to and emplaced at site; that which remains spectral, transparent). Significantly, host and ghost may have quite different origins or natures. Their relationship may be frictional or anachronistic – in Gododdin a sixth-century battle elegy was staged in a twentieth-century car factory – and they might effectively ignore each other’s presence. They are not necessarily congruent – they need not inevitably fit easily together as complementary functions of a particular narrative theme – though both are always apparent and cognitively active for an audience: ancient military defeat and contemporary industrial decline resonate against one another. Site itself becomes an agency of performative meaning, rather than simply acting as a convenient, neutral space for spectacular exposition. It is not converted into a thermostatically controlled auditorium, and the prevailing environmental conditions of host and those manufactured within ghost impact upon performers and audience alike.
