Jo Caird: Site-Specific Shows on the Fringe
Go see a show at the Fringe and there’s a fairly good chance that you’ll
find yourself in a non-traditional performance space. There are a few
proper theatres in Edinburgh, of course, where work takes place all
year round, but the vast majority of companies will be performing in
lecture theatres, Portakabins, tents, turrets, wine bars, car parks
and upturned ruminant mammals. This system has its flaws –
unconventional spaces come with challenges concerning access,
ventilation, noise and storage – but it’s all part
of the fun of the festival that theatre turns up here where you least expect it.
But
even in a context where any space that will fit performers and an
audience can become a makeshift venue, there’s still something
special about deliberately site-specific work. Having seen none of this type of show during my stint up here at the beginning of the
festival, earlier this week my schedule threw up three site-specific
performances in three days and I was struck by how affecting I found
each of these very different experiences.
First
up was The Ethometric Museum, a sound installation
performance in the cellars beneath the Hill Street Theatre,
a masonic lodge the rest of the year. Via a demonstration of the
ethometric instruments in the collection, strange machines from a mysterious and little known branch of science that emit harmonic
frequencies, sound artist Ray Lee creates a sort of electronic
symphony. It’s an almost overwhelming experience for ‘visitors’ to
the museum, one further enriched by the atmospheric
surroundings of the low-ceilinged, vaulted cellars, supposedly the
location where one of the instruments in the collection was found
during recent excavations.
The
second show on the list was The Simple
Things in Life, which takes place in a series of sheds at
the Royal Botanic Gardens. I say ‘show’, but it’s actually five
separate theatre pieces (audiences see three of the five at each of the several performances that run every day).
You wander through the lovely (but chilly) gardens visiting the
different sheds, enjoying two sets of site-specific scenario: the
gardens themselves, which form a sort of promenade prologue to the
individual pieces; and the theatrical worlds created within the sheds. The shows themselves offer a range of funny, moving and thought-provoking theatre experiences, while the rural
calm that pervades the space and the fresh air you
breathe as you walk from shed to shed are a remarkable antidote
to the urban chaos and toxic lifestyle of normal Fringe business.
The
final site-specific piece I attended was 3rd
Ring Out: The Emergency, an interactive gaming-style show
in a shipping container placed at one end of the Grassmarket. The
premise here is that the 12 audience members at each performance are
a disaster response team faced with a climate change crisis affecting
the UK in the summer of 2033. The company didn’t quite succeed in
creating enough of a sense of urgency to force the individuals in my
group to fully consider the consequences of a catastrophe of this
kind, but the claustrophobic atmosphere of the show’s setting was
certainly diverting enough to make me forget I was in a box in the middle of a
busy shopping street.
There’s
simply something extraordinary about coming out blinking into the
daylight after a site-specific show. The best work in traditional
spaces, of course, succeeds in taking its audiences to another place
but it’s rare that you’ll actually be made to forget that you’re in a
theatre all together. Site-specific work can be so powerful because it does
just that.
