Site And Audience Response Essay

A limited amount has been written on the exclusive topic of the impact of site-specific work on cultural heritage. This may due to the fact that the “immediate effect” of the show and audience reaction is difficult to record and evaluate in the “fluid” process of performance (Pearson, 2010:4; Kidd, 2011:206). However, some previous studies of the reciprocal relationship between the site and the play are applicable to this theme. Site-specific theatre allows “a rediscovery in places” since it is animated (Jakovljevic, 2005:1) and audiences “understand places through the shifting ways” they perform (Wilkie, 2012: 206). The keyword of the relationship between sites and performances is “immersion”, which indicates the “access to the inside of the

In particular, cultural heritages as architectures “frame, structure, re-orient, scale, refocus and slow down” the audiences’ experience and makes it part of their embodied sense (Pallasmaa, 2011:100). Furthermore, the differences between the chosen location of a play and the normal daily places that people live in, lead to the audience’s awareness of special time and space, and performance encourages people to “explore the specific effects of various situations and environments” (Jakovljevic, 2005: 97) with their desire for “authenticity” of the sites (Bagnall, 2003: 88). The experience of being inside of a show is an “integral element of audiences’ enjoyment”, which evokes their memories of visiting heritage sites (Kidd, 2011:217). In other words, within those storytelling spaces, the relationship between audience and the site is strengthened through the performance (Gleave, 2011:8), and the emotions that generate by responding to the surrounding or socially transmitting by others, “shape, subsequent cognitive processing and generate meanings” (McConachie, 2008: 563). These important parts of site-specific theatre experience are all generated from the performance