Beth Weinstein
Beth Weinstein’s practice and research move between the architectural and the performative, and across scales from drawing to performance-installations to urban interventions, investigating spatial manifestations and invisibilities of political, environmental, and labor issues. Her practice-based doctoral research explored how performances of spatial labor, employing architecture’s instruments (text, drawings and models), can render ‘sensible’ (in)visibilities around architectures of internment. She continues to ask what forms of architecture, and associated invisibilities, are produced through executive order and under states of exception.
Beth has extensively published on performativity in and of public space, theater architecture, and scenography. She serves on the advisory editorial board of the Routledge Journal of Theater + Performance Design, and previously served on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education. Building upon her research that resulted in the Collaborative Legacy of Merce Cunningham exhibition (2011-14), she is currently writing a book titled Architecture + Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge 2022). Through critical texts, photos and original drawings, Architecture + Choreography examines the artifacts and performance events that emerged through fifty collaborations, unpacking the methodologies, concepts, and approaches that pushed the boundaries of participants’ practices.
Beth is a registered architect and has taught undergraduate and graduate design studios; history, theory and techniques of representation; building technologies; and workshop-seminars exploring performance, politics and public space. Recent pedagogical projects explored how urban spaces invisible-ize, how states of exception curtail rights of assembly, and to critically question architecture through the lens of the anthropocene. She has lectured internationally, taught at ENSA Paris-Malaquais, the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA), Confluence Institute and Columbia University in Paris, as well as Columbia’s GSAPP, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pratt Institute, and Parsons/The New School for Design.
Beth has extensively published on performativity in and of public space, theater architecture, and scenography. She serves on the advisory editorial board of the Routledge Journal of Theater + Performance Design, and previously served on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education. Building upon her research that resulted in the Collaborative Legacy of Merce Cunningham exhibition (2011-14), she is currently writing a book titled Architecture + Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge 2022). Through critical texts, photos and original drawings, Architecture + Choreography examines the artifacts and performance events that emerged through fifty collaborations, unpacking the methodologies, concepts, and approaches that pushed the boundaries of participants’ practices.
Beth is a registered architect and has taught undergraduate and graduate design studios; history, theory and techniques of representation; building technologies; and workshop-seminars exploring performance, politics and public space. Recent pedagogical projects explored how urban spaces invisible-ize, how states of exception curtail rights of assembly, and to critically question architecture through the lens of the anthropocene. She has lectured internationally, taught at ENSA Paris-Malaquais, the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA), Confluence Institute and Columbia University in Paris, as well as Columbia’s GSAPP, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pratt Institute, and Parsons/The New School for Design.
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Papers by Beth Weinstein
Bearing in mind that developments in architecture, scenography and theatre/performance - and in the attendant professional practices of these disciplines - are significantly conditioned by the ways in which they are taught, these 4 workshops ask:
How are architecture, performance, dramaturgy and scenography being taught now? And, how might we teach them in future?
The discipline of architecture is already recognising the value of performance in the education of architects, enabling students to test and develop concepts and designs through prototyping and embodied inhabitation and to form more nuanced understandings of architecture/user relationships. Performance as pedagogical method helps break down architecture’s presumed autonomy, and critiques its dominant working methods. We aim to take these explorations further still.
We also aim to discover how architecture theory, tools and techniques might offer critical constructional tools for performance pedagogy and for training in theatre design. How might an awareness of architectonics (including, for example, studio exercises in form-making or a renewed stress on materials and textures) enrich theatre and performance pedagogy, generating new insights into play structure, choreographic and scenographic practices, devising processes or site-specificity – and what might be gained by working in this way?
Over thirty participants—political scientists, historians, archeologists and scholars across humanities and social sciences; artists, architects, art and architectural historians, writers and photographers—presented scholarly and creative research as well community engagement work.
Presenters included Aurélie Audéval, Nicolas Fischer, Beth Weinstein, Alex Braithwaite, Rachel Van Nostrand, Terrence G. Peterson, Henrique Trindade, Alexandra Natoli, Rowena Ward, Mary M. Farrell, Sonia C. Gomez, Jennifer L. Jenkins, David Taylor, Susan Briante, Francisco Cantú, Anita Huizar-Hernández, Greer Millard, Dora Rodriguez, Taylor K Miller, Ben Lepley, Alba Fernandez Keys, Miriam Davidson, Todd Caissie, Ori Tsameret, Laurence Prempain, Lynne Horiuchi, Anoma Pieris, Jeff Burton, Koji Lau-Ozawa, Lucile Chaput, Adèle Sutre, Nancy Ukai, John-Michael H. Warner, Kaitlin Findlay, Laura Madokoro, Rebecca Glasberg.
McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or else : from discipline to performance. London; New York: Routledge.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The politics of aesthetics : the distribution of the sensible. London: Continuum.
Rendell, Jane. 2007. "Introduction. Critical architecture: between Criticism and Design." In Critical architecture, edited by Jane Rendell. London; New York: Routledge.
Rendell, Jane. 2011. "Critical Spatial Practices: Setting out a Feminist Approach to some Modes of what Matters." In Feminist practices interdisciplinary approaches to women in architecture, edited by Lori A. Brown. Farnham, Surrey, UK, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Current political discourse that excludes certain populations through the textual architectures of executive orders and threatens physical confinement and exclusion though the building of a border walls hauntingly resonates with the “grave injustice” of the internment of Japanese Americans as mandated by FDR’s 1942 Executive Order 9066. Furthermore, while unseen as a result of their displacement to “Relocation Centers” in isolated desert and swamp landscapes, and their enclosure behind barbed wire, interned Japanese Americans also engaged in invisible architectural labors of architectures of invisibility. They constructed the now-demolished barracks and schools that were once the environment that hid them from sight for years and they engaged in contract work for the Army to produce architectural devices of obfuscation—camouflage. My current work on a performative installation, titled Intern(ed), researches erased architectures of internment and the invisible labors that occurred there.
As an architect and performance-maker I choreograph the labor of making and unmaking ephemeral spaces; explore materials that contribute to fleetingness and disappearance; and shift the focus from the design of enduring objects to processes of space coming into being (and becoming un-done). My research investigates choreographies of labor—of erasure, in erased sites and in plain sight—with the intention of re-thinking labors of spatial construction and de-construction as performance, neither as spectacle nor as Taylorized movements and optimized material flows, but as a critical spatial practice acknowledging and honoring the often-invisible and contained labor and laborers who shapes our environs. Using performance and installation as medium, I seek to draw into tension past and present, remote and near, labors and spaces of containment and erasure.
During the PSi Performance & Design working group panel, an abundant gathering of research/project manifestos and manifestations will be shared by artists, architects, designers, theorists and performers, forming the basis of a dialogue regarding the future of design practices in performance.
How to re-think labors of spatial construction and de-construction through the lens of performance, neither as spectacle nor as Taylorized movements and material flows, but as practices acknowledging and honoring the often invisible and contained populations and their labor? My practice-based research moves between architectural and choreographic modalities; it is informed by task-oriented choreographies of the Judson Church Group as well as emergent, contingent, relational choreographies of William Forsythe, Richard Siegal and others; by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s idea of thinking-in-movement and its architectural reciprocal—Space-in-the-Making (Frances Bronet). I also draw from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s politics of speak nearby and inappropriate/d others. I will share work in progress—choreographies of labor—a working through the politics and practices of redacting and camouflaging—in relation to spaces that contain and disappear others and the construction-related labor of interned populations.
towards ecological and political issues related to place. Through a current collaborative project—with working title intern(ed)—I am researching erased architectures of internment and the forced labor that occurred there involved in fabricating spatial devices that render invisible—camouflage. Contemporary anxieties prompted by executive orders or threats to other, contain, excluded or eradicate certain humans, to define as “alien” as well as “non-alien” enemies, hauntingly recall the events that occurred seventy-five years ago that lead to the construction of these now erased spaces of internment. Using performance and installation as medium, our intention is to draw into tension past and present, remote and near, labors and spaces of containment and erasure. For the Between Spaces Symposium I would like to present aspects of this work in progress.
How does theatre architecture construct relations through the siting of the audience in space in relation to action and to other audience members? How does this theatre architecture, and its construction of relations, condition the seeing and sensing of the performed event? How do the designed spatial relations of the theatre prescribe, suggest, or perhaps inadvertently offer alternative staging opportunities and, through that, contribute to the experience of the event?
The chapter includes several original illustrations including El Lissitzky's set for the Meyerhold Theatre, the Spiral Theatre, Teatro Oficina, and alternative stagings within Barcelona's Liceu and in the Paris Odeon.
Two performance buildings by Ateliers Jean Nouvel—the Opera de Lyon (1993) and the Danish Radio Concert Hall, in Copenhagen (2009)—will be unpacked to reveal how the design of their pre-performance spaces heighten the theater-goer’s experience, visually, viscerally and haptically, to turn the tables, casting theater-goers as performers, empowering them to create their own heightened theatrical experience independent of the planned event and its space.