Site-specific theater in Ireland is a relatively new phenomenon that challenges the very concept of what is generally held to be drama, crossing as it does the boundaries of installation art, dance, and theater. In Ireland site-specific theater emerged at a time when the trend of building-based theater was in the production of monodramas that reduced theater to physical stasis. Those monodramas, by writers such as Mark O’Rowe (Crestfall, Howie the Rookie, Terminus), Eugene O’Brien (Eden) and Conor McPherson (Rum and Vodka, The Good Thief, This Lime Tree Bower, Port Authority), featured often abject characters on the margins of society, connected barely at all with nation and living outside of the mythical “Celtic Tiger” economic boom of 1997-2007. Most of those monodramas were softly political; instead of placing characters within sharply defined socio-political contexts, they focused on the politics of the personal often obliquely, in a world of no ambition, alcoholism, and self-abjection. First productions of those plays provided only abstract settings rather than specific places for the action, foregrounding their dislocation from the social and their emplacement entirely within the performative. And as the monodramas advocated primarily the theatricality of the narrative as opposed to the theatricality of space, Irish theater was embedded in theatrical contexts, dramaturgical forms, and theater buildings.

Moving theater out of buildings—and thus from their marginal socio-cultural arena of impact—and into the streets, is a hugely political act. It is no wonder that street theater became the favored form of left-leaning political theaters of the USA in the 1960s and beyond. Companies such as The Living Theatre and Bread and Puppet Theater in the USA and Welfare State in the UK found new communities of spectators beyond the theater and thereby contested social spaces as political. While often in medieval times perambulatory street theater was a means to imbue illiterate spectators with the moral teachings of Christianity in clearly defined imagery of heaven and hell, the divine and the devil, the transgressive power of theater since the Restoration and the shift to urban centers of power in Europe encapsulated, controlled, and licensed performance in buildings.[1] Modernist European theater from the end of the twentieth century onwards perhaps became the highpoint of control of audiences and their response, in that new technologies of lighting helped render audiences passive in the dark, despite the often subversive material of, say, surrealist theater that challenged notions of bourgeois art.[2] While challenging artistic and cultural values politically, theater artists, and particularly directors, were subjecting audiences to singular visions and authorial control. Site-specific theater challenged authorial control and enabled spectators to experience a much looser dramaturgical structure, and to have a greater sense of their own agency in terms of what they wanted to watch. In the early years of companies in continental Europe such as Dogtroep in the Netherlands (1975-2008) and the Théâtre du Soleil in France (1964-present), theater and visual artists invested in non-theater spaces and created visual spectacles using popular forms of entertainment reaching out to new audiences for whom art and performance otherwise might have been inaccessible.

In the UK, there has been a resurgence of site-specific theater since the 1990s, some of it emerging from the Theater and Performance departments of universities more heavily invested in Performance than Theater Studies, and also by live artists from the arts schools. One of the most celebrated of the UK companies is Punchdrunk who perform in non-theater buildings often with the raw material of epic stories and plays but told in nonlinear ways and in performances closely resembling art-installation environments. They describe their work as “immersive,” in which the audience is surrounded by the performance and often the audience has free rein to journey through the space. Another company, You Me Bum Bum Train, has produced regularly since 2004 and in various locations their eponymous performances in which individual audience members encounter staged scenes with an army of volunteer performers who challenge the individual spectator by immersing her or him in environments in which she or he is invited and expected to conduct an orchestra, deliver a lecture on contemporary art in a gallery, prepare vegetables in a restaurant, and commentate a snooker match. Both companies seek not only to challenge audiences but also to empower them, and therein reside their politics.

To what tradition then does Irish site-specific theater belong? First of all, it is important to determine and locate the various types of site-specific theater that have abounded, largely from festival contexts. Since 1994 Cork-based Corcadorca have led the way in what they term “off-site” performances, the first location being Cork City Gaol. Relocating theater outside theater buildings, like many of their European predecessors, has provided the company with greater possibilities for audience outreach, impact, and access. From their celebrated outdoor version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as part of Cork City of Culture in 2005 to their indoor (in an apartment) portrayal of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s one-woman show Request Programme in 2011, the company’s work has pushed theater and audiences out of their comfort zones and into intimate contact with each other. That type of site-specific work also includes more recent productions such as WillFredd’s Farm (2012), a production that relocated various farm environments in a disused urban warehouse in inner-city Dublin. Such metonymic substitution of one environment for another has been format of the acclaimed Berlin Love Tour by Lynda Radley (2010, performed by Playgroup) who have reconfigured Irish cities as the divided city of Berlin, and Siamsa Tíre’s What the Folk (2011), which invited audiences to tea and a conversation in the bedrooms of the play’s performers to reveal their own innermost secrets, fears, loves, and losses in intimate encounters growing up in the world of traditional Irish dance. What characterizes all of these productions is their empathetic off-site locations, for the performances that have been created in rehearsal rooms, but crucially not in theaters.

ANU Productions’ work, and in the first three parts of the celebrated and award-winning Monto Cycle (2010-12), however, is distinct from the context of Irish site-specific theater in general. First, their work does not relocate to sites but responds to the sites in the first instance—that is, the stories, images, reenactments, and journeys of characters and spectators alike all emanate from the sites, from their macro- but largely micro-histories, and from the very materiality of the sites themselves.[3] Nick Kaye’s definition of the site-specific is a useful starting point for the examination of ANU Productions’ relationships with spaces: “a site-specific work may define itself through properties, qualities or meanings produced in specific relationships between an ‘object’ or ‘event’ and a position it occupies.”[4]

The three performances that (so far) make up the Monto cycle were situated in and featured as both subject and backdrop to the north inner-city Dublin district colloquially known as the Monto. The name “Monto,” refers to the formerly named Montgomery Street (now Foley Street) made famous in a song by The Dubliners. The Monto is a less than one square-mile area from which artistic director Louise Lowe originates (as well as other members of the company who have close connections to the area). During colonial times it was an area notorious for prostitution, being close to a British army garrison, and the docklands. No sooner had the British left after the War of Independence (1919-1922) and the subsequent Civil War (1922-23) than Catholic Evangelicals in the form of the Legion of Mary, led by Frank Duff, swiftly waged their own war on the Monto, closing down brothels and moving the prostitutes on. Some of the prostitutes who worked the area were moved to the Magdalene Laundries, one of which was nearby at the northern edge of the area in Seán McDermott Street (formerly Gloucester Street). The twentieth century thereafter was not kind to the area and it never shook off its former image of poverty and criminality. In the late 1970s and 1980s, with the arrival of heroin in the country, the residents of the Monto suffered more than most with a generation of young people being wiped out by overdoses, AIDS-related illnesses or contaminated drugs. All of this social history perpetuated the negative image of the area but became source material for ANU Productions’ work.

The first production in the cycle was presented as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2010, was nominated for an Irish Times Irish Theatre award for Best Production, and won the Best Off-Site Production Award of the Fringe Festival that year. It was a performance that focused on the area’s colonial reputation of being Ireland’s—and possibly the Empire’s—most notorious red-light district. The performance began and ended in The LAB, Dublin City Council’s ultra-modern arts space where much contemporary theater is made in its rehearsal rooms. The LAB stands at the West End of Foley Street and on the site of one of the most celebrated brothels of all. Spectators arrived in groups of three and the performance began in the lobby area with two men in contemporary clothing aggressively separating the spectators into what would become individual and intimate encounters with the history of the area. Time was collapsed: the past for spectators was very much an acute present in which they were moved along either aggressively or seductively from one troubling image after another. Installation-like scenes included one inside a constructed brothel in The LAB’s foyer in which the spectator sat opposite a prostitute in a bedroom while her pimp’s eyes peered in through peepholes. At one moment a man entered the room engaged in a sexualized movement sequence with the prostitute. The spectator clearly was being marked as voyeur and the salaciousness of the voyeur was a very troubling reality in the contemporary performance moment. Another scene featured a prostitute in contemporary clothing in the street who lured spectators out of The LAB building and around a corner, with a reality that was deeply troubling; was she real and, if so, what really was around the corner? And the final scene involved the individual spectator being put to work filling plastic bottles of the Virgin Mary, not with holy water but with methylated spirit under the ever increasingly watchful eye of an actor playing one of the area’s most notorious madams, May Oblong. Spectators left the performance with the smell of meth on their hands, a reminder of the drug’s prevalence in the area at the time. Throughout the performance, spectators moved back and forth through time, twice wearing headsets to listen to the history of the area. While the recording temporally distanced the past, it also spatialized the spectator between an intimate retreat into the past, privately listening to a recording through headphones, and the very public space of a performance. This collapsing of the private and public spaces, as well as the collapsing of time to create a “theatrical haunting,”[5] was a dialectic that engaged spectators in a political sense, disallowing a retreat into the solely private that can so often happen in building-based theater, and pulling the past into a very present public sphere.

For most of the second part of the trilogy, Laundry (2011), spectators experienced performed encounters with the memories of one of the existing Magdalene Laundries on the northern edge of the area. Since its closure in 1996, the building colloquially known as the Gloucester Street Laundry (now in Seán McDermott Street) has remained idle and unoccupied. Owned by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity that had run it as a “refuge” for women and operated its laundry as a business with state contracts, the building since closure was gifted to Dublin City Council. For the first hour, as spectators entered the building in groups of three, installation-like scenes were performed to spectators as individuals. There was no other spectator as co-referent and thus individuals were thrust into performative encounters with a performed past in real sites of memory. This layering of performed memories on top of the materiality of the site itself, obviously layered with real memories, called into question the ethics of the encounter of paying spectators to an aesthetic event in a site of performances of an imagined “real.” It was also a site of the hurt, loss, shame, and endurance of the women who had been incarcerated there with the complicity of the state, the church, and sometimes their own families. How would the spectators’ memories of the performance in the laundry relate to the real memories of those whose lives became the starting point as subjects of representation?

Laundry presented an ethical challenge not only because it represented a painful past of women while survivors and their relatives were, and still are, alive but also because it called into question the use of a building that for all intents and purposes is a memorial both to a less than salubrious past of church and state, as well as to the sacrifice of the women who were incarcerated within. Cliff McLucas’s notion of site-specific performance as being a “ghost” within a “host” architecture takes on greater agency in this performance,[6] a reflection of Michel de Certeau’s notion of spatial practices within a constructed order.[7] As Mike Pearson points out, McLucas’s theory came about while he was working as designer for Welsh site-specific company Brith Gof, and his host/ghost alliance was conceived primarily as two sets of coexisting architectures. For Pearson, though, the host/ghost alliance can be read beyond the scenography: “a drama with a ghost is spectrally present; it is not ‘of’ the place but finds temporal affordances there.”[8] As spectators were led through the disused laundry they were encountering both use and disuse at the same time. Much of the original interior remains intact, certainly of the spaces used in performances. In the vestibules near the front door, little other than the performers were added to the space. The same was true of the splendid chapel that remained intact. But there were more obvious scenographic additions, such as a “bridge of human hair” between spaces and guardian to the entrance of the chapel. The bridge relocated a “non-place”—to redirect Marc Augé’s term from its supermodernity roots[9]—to the position of a place proper, while prior to that, a false wall in a hallway had been created in order to specifically conjure up the ghosts of the past. One space was located through a two-way mirror in which a ghost-image of a woman came in and out of vision, while directly opposite, a wall with peepholes all but kept hidden dozens of abandoned high-chairs for babies. But these were marked off by walls and thus marked off in memory as spectators did not encounter them in real terms, only as apparitions suggesting both a ghosting and what Alison Landsberg would term, a “prosthetic memory,”[10] a memory that attaches itself to a spectator that has been prompted by a cultural experience.

Further, theater lighting in a bathroom scene provided a necessary aesthetic context and distancing device. In one encounter there was a representation of one of the incarcerated women taking off her clothes and bathing in disinfectant, while she was reaching out to each individual spectator for assistance in getting in and out of the bath. While the context was real, the ethical challenge to an individual spectator in helping a naked, young woman out of a bath was tempered by the suggestion that the encounter was a performance. While previous encounters with the performers were direct and challenging, this performed ritual behavior of cleansing, and the ethical challenges it throws up in a live performance for an individual spectator, was marked specifically as performative by means of a clear use of theatrical lighting within the real setting. The colored lighting in this scene was most notable for it not being natural light (as was the case in most of the other scenes) helping to orient this scene with its troubling ethical encounter more clearly within the world of performance. Some spectators, like myself, took the performer’s hand, helped her out of the bath, and when prompted helped her wrap herself in a bandage. For others, the intimacy of the encounter was too much and some did not help out or intervene. Sitting in the room watching the scene, too, was a performer-guard, who was there primarily for the performer’s safety—if a spectator wished to intervene too much—but also to mark the unreality of the scene as performative.

The guard, however, was played by another incarcerated woman. None of the Sisters who had run the institution were present in any sense, performative or otherwise; and all of the performers were operating within the aesthetic sphere. But there was a clear sense of a hierarchy of performers as insiders and outsiders the further spectators were led into the building and were embedded more deeply in the performance structure. The first two encounters with performers were in tiny vestibules and came swiftly after the grill in the imposing front door was slid open and a woman’s voice rang out accusingly to the spectator in the street. In one vestibule, a male and female performer, presumably father and daughter, performed a choreographed ritual of suspicion, eyes darting between them and the spectator, before the woman attempted to escape, only to be restrained by the man. The big question for the spectator was whether to intervene. In the other vestibule, a young man asked direct questions to the spectator about the length of time that had passed, before the male performer lost patience with time and very aggressively began banging on the door. These two early scenes were marked by the contemporary clothing of the performers and the degree of violence that they performed. Nevertheless, as spectators progressed through the building and through ritual encounters with performed representations of the women who had been incarcerated there, these two scenes stood as violent contemporary guardians to the performed past. Freed from the confinement and the violence of those two small rooms, spectators encountered the women in their drab uniforms and wellington boots as a relief. The first of the women petitioned spectators to remember the names of three of the women who had been resident there. Another woman held hands with spectators in the chapel and told a story of her own confinement and of her inability to cope with the harsh reality of the outside world, while a third, in a confessional, invited spectators to dance, and help her recover a memory of a time before the laundry. And finally a woman, again in a vestibule at the back of the chapel, in a non-place rendered place through a pile of dirty sheets, invited spectators to help her escape.

The final moments of encounter with the laundry were conducted like a film in reverse. As spectators hurriedly followed the escapee, fleeting images of subsequent spectators encountering the same rituals as had just been performed flashed past in quick succession until the final moment when spectators were encouraged to lie to enable the woman to escape the building. The rushed flashback was a high-speed reminder of the need to help the woman escape so that, when it came to the final hurdle of the doorkeeper, spectators were caught in an adrenalin rush of being complicit with the lie. But the thrill of the escape was tempered by the momentary challenge to and contestation of an authority that spectators recognized from other media reporting of the laundries in the social and political spheres. In the performative spheres, our political agency, though real and potent, was transient; spectators were bundled into the back of a taxi and as it sped off they looked round to see the escaped woman voluntarily returning to the laundry, while the taxi driver told of the woman escaping and returning from the laundry every day. Our political agency as spectators came to naught; the institutionalization of that particular woman who desired escape was such that she was unable to cope in the outside world. The escape was a desire that could not be matched by any reality.

In the taxi, spectators were given a social history of the Monto from the perspective of the driver himself, which included both some personal memories and, prompted by an encounter with the world of World’s End Lane that ran in tandem to Laundry, some knowledge of prostitution and social deprivation of the area that also prefigured the content of the subsequent performance in the cycle. The driver deposited spectators one by one in a real launderette in which the three spectators who had started the performance together but who had never seen each other since were put to work, taking clothes out of the industrial dryers, ironing and folding them as well. And as the spectators worked, they listened to talk radio host Marian Finucane on the history of the Laundries. All the while, people came and went, some depositing clothes, some just in for a chat, and it was impossible to distinguish who was real in this social environment and who was performing.

Outside the laundry, the boundaries between the real and the performed worlds collapsed and permitted the framing of what had been experienced in the convent building of the laundry in the first half of the performance to shift outside of an aesthetic context. Consequently, spectators were invited to rethink the content of the performance in more socio-political terms as they were literally working in a real environment with people who had a direct connection with the laundry and were affected by it in many ways, from a simple memory of delivering to and collecting laundry from it, to meeting a young man who had been born within the laundry’s walls. Moving out of the laundry and away from the aestheticized ghosts emanating from the materiality of the site of the performance, spectators were challenged to relocate and rearticulate the aesthetic performance as a socio-political reality, through “bearing witness and emotional exchange.”[11] As spectators left the performance, the taxi driver gave them bars of strong-smelling carbolic soap with their names written on them as an olfactory reminder of the impossibility of escaping the memory of our performative encounter with the past. And while the women who survived the Laundries had not yet received any form of redress, and whose memories had not then entered public discourse, the spectators’ soap was not so much a reminder of an aesthetic performance as it was a memento that served as a call to remember the women and the social injustice inflicted upon them.

The third part of the Monto Cycle, The Boys of Foley Street, focused on the blight of heroin in the area that began in the 1970s—the community response to which came in the form of Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD), a vigilante group with unofficial connections to the IRA—and on the 1975 car bombings of Dublin by the Ulster Volunteer Force, one of which occurred a very short distance from Foley Street. Local historian Terry Fagan provided much of the historical background, the events and social changes that occurred in the intervening period, and facilitated ANU’s performance project’s assimilation by the community. The initial starting point was also the 1975 documentary by talk radio host Pat Kenny for the national broadcaster, RTÉ. Kenny parked his car in Foley Street and recorded interviews with four teenage boys of the area who talked of their lives that already involved petty crime. Kenny returned in 1988 to remake the documentary, only to discover the same boys had all been to prison. In 2008 the project was revisited by Ciarán Cassidy who interviewed the same men, now middle-aged, while interspersing his own interviews with those of Kenny’s more than thirty years earlier. Cassidy’s documentary bore none of the class divisions so prevalent in the original interview by Kenny, whose middle-class south Dublin accent stood as a moral and vocal register by which to measure the voices and the anti-social behavior of the inner-city boys. Listening to the documentary became the starting point for spectators, and helped frame an encounter with Foley Street, calling into question the spectators as mediators of a social history that was not theirs. 

In The Boys of Foley Street, spectators were taken on journeys, both on foot, and in a high-speed car chase through the area, encountering both fictional characters as well as the everyday social activity of the area. One of the routes was led by a man on a crutch (who had the appearance of a drug user) carrying a plastic bottle of cider and a sleeping bag and pointing out not only where he was born but also the spot where Kenny had parked his car to make the documentary that spectators had just listened to on headphones. As spectators journeyed down the street, they were caught up in a drug-dealing scenario as a pusher, Git, was on the run from his dealer. He was cornered down an alley as spectators were cajoled into complicity with the beating up of the pusher, holding the dealer’s jacket and the kilo of heroin contained within it, and filming the violence on the dealer’s smartphone. This was the first of several moral dilemmas encountered by spectators: should they intervene in the violence, or at least refuse to film it? While this violence was clearly part of the performative world, spectators who opted to film it would later realize that moments earlier they had themselves been recorded receiving instructions on filming and thus were directly implicated in an act of violence in the criminal world.

On another route, in another performance, spectators encountered Git’s mother, who wanted to know who had informed on her son to the Concerned Parents Against Drugs. Spectators who had innocently given up his name were now faced with the consequences of their action; would Git’s mother take her revenge on them for leading Git to, at worst, his death or, at best, a kneecapping? Here spectators directly experienced the everyday dilemma facing local people, a dilemma that polarized a community caught between the drug barons and the IRA. That polarization involved many of the same characters all within a whirlwind of violence in which ordinary people were forced to make frightful moral decisions about protecting their children from drugs or from death at the hand of the vigilantes.

Despite the numerous routes through the street and the area in the performance, all spectators experienced life in a real-life tenement flat whose interior had been redesigned to that of the 1970s and in order to reflect the life of a real-life drug baron. The source of inspiration was the notorious Tony Felloni, who had been responsible for the rape and enslavement of women in his drugs and prostitution ring in north Dublin and who unwittingly had supplied heroin that had been contaminated by rat poison and led to numerous deaths of users. In the flat, spectators first were confronted with a young woman recovering from being raped in a toilet, and experienced the animal-like nuclear family of the dealer, whose violence and apparent incest provided an unsafe background for spectators who were offered tea and whatever food was appropriate to the time of performance. And just when the violence might spill over, spectators were ordered out of the flat only to be photographed by the member of the CPAD who rescued them from the complex in his car.

At the end of the performance, in the meeting room of the vigilante group, photos of spectators who had left the flat before them were posted on the back wall and it was clear that their own photos would appear there soon. They were captured leaving a known drug-dealer’s flat and therefore were implicated in anti-social activity. This was yet another way of immersing spectators in the performative world and at the same time enabling them to viscerally experience the dilemmas facing the community in which families were torn apart. Caomhan Keane points to this effect in his review: “By making us bear witness and, in certain cases, making us an accomplice to the crimes, [Louise Lowe] rings home how complicit we are to the gangland problems still raging around the city, whilst also showing us that many of these people didn’t choose a path of crime. They choose one of survival.”[12] And spectators, as mostly middle-class theatergoers in a festival context—and unlike Pat Kenny with his microphone—moved into the Monto temporarily to experience a performance that blurred the boundaries between aesthetics and reality, destabilizing notions of spectators as passive voyeurs, and implicating them in the social conditions of an area of the city that society would prefer to ignore. More disturbing and affecting were the traces they had left behind and were now in the archive of a performance of a very troubling social history of inner-city Dublin.

What all three performances in the Monto cycle achieved was the questioning through performance of the representation of space and how politicized space is in an urban environment. Henri Lefebvre’s triadic notion of space as spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space, is useful in understanding how ANU Productions articulate a performative engagement with the Monto.[13] The spatial practice of the area currently revolves around the remnant buildings of social destruction, as successive communities were moved out of the area and buildings razed to the ground. In their place stand modern apartment complexes, arts spaces, some flat complexes of social housing still survive. And at the north end lies the Gloucester Street Laundry, intact, unopened, unused. These buildings are the current representations of space in pockets and on the fringes of the area where new social power lies at the gateway to the vacant lots and surviving tenements within. But it is in ANU Productions’ performances that we see Lefebvre’s notions of representational space really at play, as the company overlay “physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.”[14]

The result is a spatialization of otherness in a society where a particular community, such as that of The Monto, had been wiped out of social consciousness given its history of prostitution (in its brothels), its industrial incarceration of the challenges to a virile brand of morality (in its laundry), and its playground for drug barons (its streets and flats). Each performance collapsed time to the point where the past was clearly in the performative present, and pointed to how successive policies of regeneration and renewal actively accelerated the descent into further destruction for the community. But spectators walked away from the community, and from the performers who come from the area or have links to it; walking away signified a spatializing of The Monto as contributing to further political neglect. But through ANU’s performances, spectators might walk away also stirred to remember, and to reflect on their engagement, both moral and physical, with the subjects of representation. The spectators’ contribution, through immersion, to the creation of representational space in the three performances contested, like graffiti on a monument, the spatializing of a past as other, not then, not us.