Explores the cultural, social, and poltical aspects of theatrical architecture, from the threatres of ancient Greece of the present.

Written by both practitioners and scholars, this significant and timely collection explores the sites of contemporary performance, and the notion of place. The volume examines how we experience performance's varied sites as part of the fabric of the art work itself, whether they are institutional or transient, real or online.

Places for Happiness explores two of the most important performance-based activities in the Philippines: the processions and Passion Plays associated with Easter and the mass-dance phenomenon known as “street dancing.” The scale of these handcrafted performances in terms of duration, time commitment, and productive labor marks the Philippines as one of the world’s most significant and undervalued performance-centered cultures. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, William Peterson examines how people come together in the streets or on temporary stages, celebrating a shared sense of community and creating places for happiness. The first half of the book focuses on localized and often highly idiosyncratic versions of the Passion of Christ. Peterson considers not only what people do in these events, but what it feels like to participate. The book’s second half provides a window into the many expressions of “street dancing.” Street dancing is inflected by localized indigenous and folk dance traditions that are reinforced at school and practiced in conjunction with religious civic festivals. Peterson identifies key frames that shape and contain the individual in the Philippines, while tracking how the local expands its expressive home by engaging in a dialogue with regional, national, and diasporic Filipino imaginaries. Ultimately Places for Happiness explores how community-based performance responds to and fulfills basic human needs. Many Filipinos rely on family members and immediate neighbors for support and sustenance, and community-based performance assumes a unique and leading role in defining, reinforcing, and celebrating shared belief systems. By bringing forth the internal, phenomenological, and embodied aspects of a range of community-based practices contributing to human happiness, the book offers a cultural framework that interweaves the individual experience with that of the collective, plotting out what resides inside the body through the coordinates of culture.

This book investigates the expanding parameters for site-specific performance to account for the form's increasing popularity in the twenty-first century. Leading practitioners and theorists interrogate issues of performance and site to broaden our understanding of the role that place plays in performance and the ways that performance influences it

Over the period 1999-2005, choreographer and dancer Tess de Quincey and a team of international artists conducted a series of art-laboratories and performances in and around the Central Desert town of Alice Springs. These art-labs culminated in the 2005 performance of Dictionary of Atmospheres, staged during the Alice Desert Festival. Drawing upon practice-based research conducted while interning with de Quincey during the development and staging of Dictionary of Atmospheres, Anderson contemplates the way in which moments from the production illustrate the artist’s approach to and articulation of place. Meeting Places offers meditation on the nature of experience as it manifests in serial site-specific art encounters in desert locations. Mary Elizabeth Anderson is an assistant professor in the Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre & Dance at Wayne State University. Her research explores dimensions of popular participation in performance, with particular focus on placemaking, teaching artistry and reflective practice.

Fresh from her critically acclaimed international tour, America's premier preformance artist has re-created her startling new work in a lavishly illustrated book. Empty Places includes the complete text of that performance, as well as all the songs on her tie-in album Strange Angels, comedic monologues and 200 dazzling photographs.