The Ambit of Performativity

The Ambit of Performativity is a broad contextualization of The Weyburn Project, an interdisciplinary, community-based performance, produced in an abandoned mental asylum in the Canadian Prairies. Written from a scenographic perspective, its fundamental concern is spatiality and the generative nature of "found" space. The book provides an overview of gestural and site-specific practices in the visual and performing arts and traces the drift from the indiscriminate space of galleries and theaters to specific, generative sites absolutely integral to the work itself. The theoretical framework considers how meaning is disseminated and received in found space circumstances and how this process is mediated through scenography. The discourse is situated within an aesthetic that adheres to the terms and conditions of postmodernism and a world characterized by contingency and chance. In the face of overwhelming universalization, site-specific performance is a strategy for artists, from a range of disciplines, to act locally and connect globally through work that is integrated with a discrete site and its adjacent community.