Site-specific theatre: The documentary space of the performance

Abstract

The article analyzes two site-specifc documentary performances: Radio Taganka at the Taganka Theatre, directed by Semen Alexandrovsky (2014), and Go, Moskvich!, directed by Georgy and Valeriia Surkov at the employees' club of the former factory “Moskvich” (2015). Go, Moskvitch! presents an ambivalent portrait of Soviet car factory workers through the museifcation of their habits, objects and words that remain the same through the years in a small local museum-club as if the epoch hadn't come to an end. Radio Taganka is a promenade across the inner spaces of the legendary theatre with a radio play written on the basis of Yuri Lyubimov's fght against censorship during Soviet times. The functioning of the space during a site-specifc performance is explained through the concepts of Charles Peirce's and Rosalind Krauss's indexicality and Foucault's heterotopia. A site-specifc performance turns out to be a place of interpenetration of various behavioral, temporal and spatial norms, which allows it to engage cultural memory and to belong not only to the realm of fction, but also to that of real social interaction.