Theatre doors are no longer sealed nowadays and performance often ventures outside. It embraces walking as a “theatrical scenario” and goes in quest of new, mobile, non-material or outdoor spatialities to replace or amplify the conventional stage. Site-specific and site-generic theatre events, walking performances, audio-guided drama, mobile theatre(s) and performance interventions, all flesh a theatre beyond theatres, walking away from the black box and into new stages. A recent example comes from the German theatre collective Rimini Protokoll and their latest work, The Walks, which is described by the group as follows:

“The Walks grasps walking as a theatrical scenario – an audio-guided walk in parks, a staged walk in supermarkets or timed interactions on waters. In every city, voices, sounds, and music turn familiar places into sites and landscapes into stages, step by step through storytelling, dialogical situations, choreographed discoveries, or musical and rhythmic variations on walking”

As theatre walks on and away to create new stages, it also re-imagines spectatorship, access, audience community and participation. The roles meddle and traditional stage dichotomies dissolve. Such experimentation with spatial dynamics in performance is not, however, only an aesthetic choice, but more a political gesture of (re)action and socio-cultural intervention. Theatre extends and re-creates the walls of the auditorium to intervene in and re-articulate the space of the polis to which it belongs. In walking, it (re)claims urban space, problematizes lived space, contests received spatial boundaries and identities, and engages with ideas of new citizenship through the new spectatorship forms that it activates. Above all, it invites its audiences to engage with their surrounding environment, thus extending its lens to the non- or the more-than- human and the narratives it has to share.

Our workshop will explore such walking theatre events: we will watch, discuss and think through specific cases of walking performance (with examples mainly from the Anglophone world) and we’ll also design and experience our own theatre event on-the-go. What happens when the city turns into a stage? How is the familiar re-written and re-claimed when theatre transformation takes the lead?

Participants nr.: max, 25

Duration: max 4 hours

Meeting point: Art gallery Garagem Avenida

Meeting time: 2pm