Creative Practice by Dorita Hannah
Mediterranean Spacing: Performing Space Workshop, 2024
Performance is action-in-space and site is space-in-action – together they cohere as SPACING. How... more Performance is action-in-space and site is space-in-action – together they cohere as SPACING. However, our globalised worldview still tends to regard time and space as separable and absolute, generally oblivious to spatial dynamics in daily environments. In Event-Space, I maintain that, as a performative entity, “space precedes action—as action”. This requires a relational understanding of place that recognises the fluctuating relationships between objects, people and environments they inhabit. However, none of these are passive entities. They are charged with meaning within the cultural territory of site, which is specific to the sociocultural, political, historical and mythical understandings of place, requiring spatial sensitivity and site-specificity. This 3-day collaborative workshop therefore investigates the relationship between performance and site through embodied exploration. Recognising location as an event in itself – resonating with environmental performativity at macro and micro scales, interdisciplinary groups will explore the coastal environs of Nafplion to consider whether there is such a thing as “Mediterranean Spacing”. This leads to a series of site-responsive actions, ending with a shared meal in the landscape.
HĀ: A Responsive Threshold for Place & Public, 2024
One of Three Finalists in the Collin Post 4 Plinths Competition run by the Wellington Sculpture T... more One of Three Finalists in the Collin Post 4 Plinths Competition run by the Wellington Sculpture Trust. It was submitted under the rubric of SOCIAL ROOM with Janae Van Panahon, Shan Yu and Stuart Foster.
As a performing urban object full of life and energy, HĀ responds to the fierce breath of Pōneke and its harbour Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Instead of placing static objects atop the plinths, we enlist them to ground a dynamic threshold between city and sea. This responsive canopy, comprised of dynamic layers of responsive mesh, spans over and between the plinths, establishing a gateway and event-space to be activated by tangata (people) and hau (wind).
Selection of Creative Projects
Outline of Theatre Architecture & Performance Design Consultancy with Selected Projects.
Sea-Change: Performing a Fluid Continent: Program/Abstracts, 2015
As the Oceanic region’s contribution to PSi’s Fluid States, OPB 2015 linked into FLUID STATES, a ... more As the Oceanic region’s contribution to PSi’s Fluid States, OPB 2015 linked into FLUID STATES, a year-long globally dispersed festival of events in 2015 convened by Performance Studies international (PSi). Sea-Change: Performing a Fluid Continent asked how Pacific-oriented practices can disturb, provoke and extend thought and action in relation to the seascape and its attendant social and biotic communities. Over three days, Rarotonga (the island and community) hosts a series of public events, in which performance acts as a lens through which to ‘see change’ via a public presencing in which the ocean is explored as origin, immersive medium, life-support system and mirror.
Sites & Situations, 2019
Site-Specific Installation on Lapland’s Kemijoki River (Rovaniemi, Finland) in Sites & Situations... more Site-Specific Installation on Lapland’s Kemijoki River (Rovaniemi, Finland) in Sites & Situations exhibition for Floating Peripheries Symposium. Three garlanded inner tubes are situated in relation to each other and due North to presence the Pacific Islands of Kiritimati, Manus and Nauru, which serve as detention centres set up by the Australian Government to incarcerate refugees attempting to reach its shores by boat.
Chile Architecture & Urbanism Biennial, 2017
PhoneHome was developed for Chile's Architecture & Urbanism Biennial on ‘Unpostponable Dialogues’... more PhoneHome was developed for Chile's Architecture & Urbanism Biennial on ‘Unpostponable Dialogues’, which invited architects, artists and activists to reflect on critical contemporary issues about the built environment. It engages architecture’s role in housing those without home and homeland. The intermedial installation critiqued architecture’s complicity in detaining ‘alien’ bodies while recognising the smartphone’s role in resisting such detention. Miniature refugee cabins house phones playing videos by artists and correspondents from Iran, Kurdistan, Russia, Greece, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, which are apprehended through mediating elements of the models’ barred windows and headphones.
Remanence Exhibition: Ten Days on the Island Festival (Hobart, Australia), 2017
Dedicated to Iraqi asylum seeker Omid Masoumali, who self-immolated while in detention on Nauru I... more Dedicated to Iraqi asylum seeker Omid Masoumali, who self-immolated while in detention on Nauru Island (April 2016), this installation detains visitors's bodies at the threshold while withholding their view of a fiery figure wrapped in an emergency blanket who stands on the fossil cliffs on Maria Island looking into the rising sun.
'Island Icarus' was created for the Remanence exhibition, which examined how fire shapes the Tasmanian landscape and impacts on the psyche of people whose homelands are affected by its ravages.
Books by Dorita Hannah
Performance Design, 2008
This book gathers together a group of international artists, architects, scenographers, performer... more This book gathers together a group of international artists, architects, scenographers, performers, and theorists to establish Performance Design as a fluid and emerging field, which explores the speculative and projective acts of designing performance and performing design.
Event-Space: Theatre Architecture & the Historical Avant-Garde
Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant-garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, d... more Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant-garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory of ‘performative architecture.’ ‘Event’ was of immense significance to theatre’s revolutionary agenda, resisting realism, naturalism and, simultaneously, the monumentality of architecture itself. This book analyzes a number of spatiotemporal models central to that revolution, in order to both illuminate the history of avant-garde performance and inspire contemporary approaches to performance space.
Papers by Dorita Hannah
The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance , 2023
The opening decades of this new millennium are haunted by spectacular events associated with poli... more The opening decades of this new millennium are haunted by spectacular events associated with political upheaval, conflict, contamination, climate change, pandemics and the plight of those seeking refuge from such threats. How do these extended moments in nature and civilisation impact environments housing cultural events, which, as performative spacing, are themselves events and integral drivers of experience? No longer safe nor sound, architecture’s inveterate association with continuity, coherence and autonomy has submitted to the exigencies of time, action and movement, revealing an impossible task to provide secure containment for inherently uncontainable bodies. This chapter therefore reverse-engineers the cautionary tale of The Three Little Pigs, which privileges the value of building one’s house out of stable bricks, rather than rickety sticks or even more volatile straw. It exposes significant shifts for the environment housing theatre: from enduring standalone monuments of the 19th century; to more experimental sites of the 20th century; to ephemeral and transitory locations of the early 21st century, in which a deliberate homelessness reinforces the community itself as house. Like Elvis, ‘theatre has left the building’, suggesting a death of sorts to enduring forms of theatre architecture. This makes way for more dynamic spatialities seen in seminal contemporary European venues that proffer alternatives to the persistent cookie-cutter models of proscenium stage and black box studio.
Critical Stages/Scenes Critiques: The IATC journal/Revue de l'AICT – December/Décembre 2023: Issue No 28, 2023
As a spatiotemporal method for understanding and shaping performance, dramaturgy could be conside... more As a spatiotemporal method for understanding and shaping performance, dramaturgy could be considered a form of evental spacing, recognising that performance environments themselves are resonant with environmental performativity. However, our globalised worldview still tends to regard time and space as separable and absolute, generally oblivious to spatial dynamics in daily environments, including the theatre itself. Considering Polynesia's navigational approach to the Pacific Ocean as a "liquid continent," this article proffers Moana Nui spacing as an emerging dramaturgical methodology-spatiotemporally focussed, ecologically calibrated and specifically oceanic-applied to the conception and realisation of Performance Studies international's Fluid States project in 2015.
Global Performance Studies, 2017
Fluid States Pasifika addresses the role played in PSi’s 2015 Fluid States project by the Pacific... more Fluid States Pasifika addresses the role played in PSi’s 2015 Fluid States project by the Pacific region: a vast and generally disregarded oceanic territory that has radically transformed over the last 250 years through colonial encounter, settler culture, militarization, migrations, global capitalism, and climate change. "As a liquid continent, the region tends to image itself through the ocean, te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa : a connective space of currents, vortices, drifts, suspensions, sediments, tides, foams, and flows that resists fixity; performing in-flux" (Hannah et al. 90). Representing a fluid, enmeshed, and immersive dramaturgical condition, its Moana /Ocean culture complicates the recent emphasis on a performative interweave with that of fluctuating entanglement just above and below an unpredictable atomized surface.
Theatre & Performance Design, 2015
This article articulates how an expanded conception of scenography is capable of critiquing our b... more This article articulates how an expanded conception of scenography is capable of critiquing our built environments in order to disclose architecture's role in reinforcing power structures, socially sanctioned behaviours and geopolitical cartographies. As an interdisciplinary practice, travelling between discursive fields, performance design casts a performance studies lens on scenography, thereby broadening its scope and capability of confronting and reimagining our lived reality, especially within a globalized condition of proliferating borders that reduce, control and deny mobility for bodies and information. By adopting a 'broad spectrum approach' we are able to recognize that those constructing our worldthe architects, planners, engineers, builders, technicians, manufacturers, suppliers and politicianstend to be complicit in spatially suppressing our motility, flexibility and expressivity. Through such spatial performativity, the built environment reinforces a contemporary barricade mentality, curtailing our freedom of movement and expression in the very name of 'freedom'. And yet the borderlinemore than a simple dividing line between us/here and them/therethickens into a complex geographical and metaphysical terrain that inhabits us just as we inhabit it. Scrutinizing our contemporary borderline condition, alongside constructed and deconstructed barricades created by artists, designers and architects, unearths a critique of how our public performances are limited and controlled. Positing the barricade as an architectural and social formation allows us to consider its shifting political implications seen in public artworks that are aligned with Rubió Ignaci Solà-Morales' concept of 'weak architecture' as a productively scenographic approach to spatial analysis and its mediation. Every performance enacts a theory, and every theory performs in the public square. (Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire) On the borderline The journey of my article commences and concludes with the West Bank Wall, an object both mobile and immovable, which represents what Mike Davis calls 'the interlocking system of fortification, surveillance, armed patrol and incarceration' that 'girds half the earth' (Davis 2005, 88). Such border control has become an essential characteristic of neoliberal global capitalism, paradoxically claiming radical mobility through the collapse of cultural, monetary and geographical boundaries, yet producing an age of barriers, barricades and borderlines, from the visceral to the
Designers' Shakespeare, 2016
This chapter, acknowledging the stage as a liminal space existing both before, through and beyond... more This chapter, acknowledging the stage as a liminal space existing both before, through and beyond language, proffers it as a site for designing inter-textual, intercultural and interdisciplinary Shakespearean utterances liberated from the burden of an ‘original’ language. Interlaced with statements contributed by scenographers in Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Holland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore and Venezuela, the text explores how the spatio-visual dramaturgy of scenography contributes its own language as performative (active and abstract) rather than connotative (descriptive and mimetic) utterances. This furthers J.L. Austin’s argument in How to Do Things With Words, where ‘speech acts’ expand beyond language into action itself – saying can be enacting rather than describing. If within the illocutionary act of speaking something is being done, which constitutes action itself, then within the illocutionary act of designing something is being done through constructing and crafting thought. Just as statements can be active rather than descriptive, the material, gestural and spatial elements that accompany them also contain a performative force, suggesting How To Say Things Without Words, or in the case of this chapter, How Scenography Does (With and Without Words).
Dramatic Architectures: Theatre and Performing Arts in Montion
HOLD: Pop-Up Event-Space and Containerization in the Time of Contagion
The 2010s saw a prolif... more HOLD: Pop-Up Event-Space and Containerization in the Time of Contagion
The 2010s saw a proliferation of pop-up venues for performance, especially through the utilization of shipping containers. Born out of economic necessity, such flexible, fast and low-cost solutions repurposed vacant sites to temporarily accommodate nomadic theatres, restaurants, bars, clubs and shops: leading to innovative ways of gathering and participating in public space through anti-commercial urban regeneration. However, as a revitalizing phenomenon, the pop-up was quickly coopted by commerce to normalize insecure conditions, while operating as short-term gentrifying agents that glorify precarity for longer-term capitalist ends. This was most prevalent in shipping container architecture; constructed out of endlessly reproducible, aesthetically impoverished and globally ubiquitous elements designed for the efficient trafficking of commodities, including human beings. By the end of the 21st century’s second decade, the covid-19 pandemic both revealed and radically destabilized globalization, with the restless movement of goods and humans across borders indefinitely curtailed. What does this mean for spaces of (and as) events? Covid-19 has shown us that contaminants can be neither controlled nor easily contained: that they evade borders, invade bodies and propagate silently, quickly and without prejudice. What therefore pops-up in relation to dramatic architecture in-motion? Inquiring into the challenges and promises of such mobility, this paper critically presents and discusses the problematics of container architecture.
Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation, 2022
“If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying wit... more “If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames.” (Antonin Artaud: Theatre & its Double)
These words of urgency from Antonin Artaud’s treatise on a Theatre of Cruelty (1938) conjure an affecting image indelibly linked to the silent film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), where he plays a young monk who, in the final smoke-filled scene, compassionately raises a crucifix towards Joan of Arc as her body begins to burn on the pyre. Embracing the cruel and tragic as a means of affirming life, Artaud’s theoretical and theatrical practice was in line with Renato Poggioli’s reference to the avant-garde adopting the role of tragic victim-hero; immolating themselves to an art of the future. Drawing on Artaud’s call for artists and audiences to vividly communicate and experience the intensity of events, this chapter refers to Island Icarus (2016-7): an iterative and collaborative art project provoked by a more recent image of immolation; that of Omid Masoumali, a 23-year old Iranian refugee who set himself on fire in April 2016 on the Pacific island of Nauru. As a protest against detention by the Australian government, Masoumali’s fatal act was recorded on mobile phones by fellow detainees and posted on social media. How do we deal with such confronting images, which are streamed 24/7 on our screens? How can we, as artists in a highly mediated world, speak out against the inhumanity of incarcerating those in exile who seek refuge from the war, persecution and famine of their homelands? In its three iterations – as landscape event, site-specific installation and intermedial exhibit – Island Icarus utilised bodies, video and the screen itself to enact a visceral engagement between image, space and action through what Artaud calls “an inspired shudder,” the reverberations of which outlive both political and aesthetic event.
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Creative Practice by Dorita Hannah
As a performing urban object full of life and energy, HĀ responds to the fierce breath of Pōneke and its harbour Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Instead of placing static objects atop the plinths, we enlist them to ground a dynamic threshold between city and sea. This responsive canopy, comprised of dynamic layers of responsive mesh, spans over and between the plinths, establishing a gateway and event-space to be activated by tangata (people) and hau (wind).
'Island Icarus' was created for the Remanence exhibition, which examined how fire shapes the Tasmanian landscape and impacts on the psyche of people whose homelands are affected by its ravages.
Books by Dorita Hannah
Papers by Dorita Hannah
The 2010s saw a proliferation of pop-up venues for performance, especially through the utilization of shipping containers. Born out of economic necessity, such flexible, fast and low-cost solutions repurposed vacant sites to temporarily accommodate nomadic theatres, restaurants, bars, clubs and shops: leading to innovative ways of gathering and participating in public space through anti-commercial urban regeneration. However, as a revitalizing phenomenon, the pop-up was quickly coopted by commerce to normalize insecure conditions, while operating as short-term gentrifying agents that glorify precarity for longer-term capitalist ends. This was most prevalent in shipping container architecture; constructed out of endlessly reproducible, aesthetically impoverished and globally ubiquitous elements designed for the efficient trafficking of commodities, including human beings. By the end of the 21st century’s second decade, the covid-19 pandemic both revealed and radically destabilized globalization, with the restless movement of goods and humans across borders indefinitely curtailed. What does this mean for spaces of (and as) events? Covid-19 has shown us that contaminants can be neither controlled nor easily contained: that they evade borders, invade bodies and propagate silently, quickly and without prejudice. What therefore pops-up in relation to dramatic architecture in-motion? Inquiring into the challenges and promises of such mobility, this paper critically presents and discusses the problematics of container architecture.
These words of urgency from Antonin Artaud’s treatise on a Theatre of Cruelty (1938) conjure an affecting image indelibly linked to the silent film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), where he plays a young monk who, in the final smoke-filled scene, compassionately raises a crucifix towards Joan of Arc as her body begins to burn on the pyre. Embracing the cruel and tragic as a means of affirming life, Artaud’s theoretical and theatrical practice was in line with Renato Poggioli’s reference to the avant-garde adopting the role of tragic victim-hero; immolating themselves to an art of the future. Drawing on Artaud’s call for artists and audiences to vividly communicate and experience the intensity of events, this chapter refers to Island Icarus (2016-7): an iterative and collaborative art project provoked by a more recent image of immolation; that of Omid Masoumali, a 23-year old Iranian refugee who set himself on fire in April 2016 on the Pacific island of Nauru. As a protest against detention by the Australian government, Masoumali’s fatal act was recorded on mobile phones by fellow detainees and posted on social media. How do we deal with such confronting images, which are streamed 24/7 on our screens? How can we, as artists in a highly mediated world, speak out against the inhumanity of incarcerating those in exile who seek refuge from the war, persecution and famine of their homelands? In its three iterations – as landscape event, site-specific installation and intermedial exhibit – Island Icarus utilised bodies, video and the screen itself to enact a visceral engagement between image, space and action through what Artaud calls “an inspired shudder,” the reverberations of which outlive both political and aesthetic event.
As a performing urban object full of life and energy, HĀ responds to the fierce breath of Pōneke and its harbour Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Instead of placing static objects atop the plinths, we enlist them to ground a dynamic threshold between city and sea. This responsive canopy, comprised of dynamic layers of responsive mesh, spans over and between the plinths, establishing a gateway and event-space to be activated by tangata (people) and hau (wind).
'Island Icarus' was created for the Remanence exhibition, which examined how fire shapes the Tasmanian landscape and impacts on the psyche of people whose homelands are affected by its ravages.
The 2010s saw a proliferation of pop-up venues for performance, especially through the utilization of shipping containers. Born out of economic necessity, such flexible, fast and low-cost solutions repurposed vacant sites to temporarily accommodate nomadic theatres, restaurants, bars, clubs and shops: leading to innovative ways of gathering and participating in public space through anti-commercial urban regeneration. However, as a revitalizing phenomenon, the pop-up was quickly coopted by commerce to normalize insecure conditions, while operating as short-term gentrifying agents that glorify precarity for longer-term capitalist ends. This was most prevalent in shipping container architecture; constructed out of endlessly reproducible, aesthetically impoverished and globally ubiquitous elements designed for the efficient trafficking of commodities, including human beings. By the end of the 21st century’s second decade, the covid-19 pandemic both revealed and radically destabilized globalization, with the restless movement of goods and humans across borders indefinitely curtailed. What does this mean for spaces of (and as) events? Covid-19 has shown us that contaminants can be neither controlled nor easily contained: that they evade borders, invade bodies and propagate silently, quickly and without prejudice. What therefore pops-up in relation to dramatic architecture in-motion? Inquiring into the challenges and promises of such mobility, this paper critically presents and discusses the problematics of container architecture.
These words of urgency from Antonin Artaud’s treatise on a Theatre of Cruelty (1938) conjure an affecting image indelibly linked to the silent film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), where he plays a young monk who, in the final smoke-filled scene, compassionately raises a crucifix towards Joan of Arc as her body begins to burn on the pyre. Embracing the cruel and tragic as a means of affirming life, Artaud’s theoretical and theatrical practice was in line with Renato Poggioli’s reference to the avant-garde adopting the role of tragic victim-hero; immolating themselves to an art of the future. Drawing on Artaud’s call for artists and audiences to vividly communicate and experience the intensity of events, this chapter refers to Island Icarus (2016-7): an iterative and collaborative art project provoked by a more recent image of immolation; that of Omid Masoumali, a 23-year old Iranian refugee who set himself on fire in April 2016 on the Pacific island of Nauru. As a protest against detention by the Australian government, Masoumali’s fatal act was recorded on mobile phones by fellow detainees and posted on social media. How do we deal with such confronting images, which are streamed 24/7 on our screens? How can we, as artists in a highly mediated world, speak out against the inhumanity of incarcerating those in exile who seek refuge from the war, persecution and famine of their homelands? In its three iterations – as landscape event, site-specific installation and intermedial exhibit – Island Icarus utilised bodies, video and the screen itself to enact a visceral engagement between image, space and action through what Artaud calls “an inspired shudder,” the reverberations of which outlive both political and aesthetic event.