Questioning the persistent urban paradigm of theatre: Epidauros, Cartoucherie, Boulbon, Hardelot
Andrew Todd
Burgundy, 2023
Developed from a paper given to the Theatre and the City Conference at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in June 2022
There is a longstanding assumption in western discourse that the theatre is essentially an urban art, concerned with societal forces anchored in a concentrated built environment, grounded in urban institutions with a local populace as audience, reflecting back -intimately- on the polis through the themes and subjects presented. The Palais Royal in Paris is perhaps one of the most highly distilled examples of this, where theatre and government ministries are in the same historic building complex, their extraordinary gardens acting as a common stage for mirrored endeavours.
Paradigms such as the theatrum mundi have shaped this idea, treating the theatre as a kind of simulacrum and distillation of the city; urban codes of dress, movement, lighting, sound and urban scenography are susceptible to direct influence by the theatre arts and sub-disciplines. I was an early -and enthusiastic- protagonist of Richard Sennett’s movement bearing this same name, inviting choreographers, composers, fashion designers, lighting artists and sociologists to bond the two entities and enliven the urban scene through the filter of theatricality.
Current trends in theatre are, however, re-orienting otherwise. A combination of pandemic and climate crisis has led many leading theatre directors to question their heretofore frictionless city-hopping, trading their products on a global arts market which has outposts in the metropoles of Shanghai, Berlin, Buenos Aires, New York, London and Paris. Leading creators Jérome Bel and Katie Mitchell have actually stopped moving between cities, and have stopped touring their work in a conventional way: nowadays, they seed projects, reproduce them differently and from a distance in the soil of various city-places. Bel is also interested in the outdoors, performing in forests.

Certain institutions are also questioning their relation to their urban situation. The Vidy-Lausanne theatre is the leading contemporary theatre of its home city and -more broadly- a crucial fulcrum between the French and German-speaking worlds. Located in a splendid lakeside site surrounded by greenery (but nonetheless firmly within Lausanne), its attitude to its hinterland changed radically during a coincident rebuild and COVID-related shutdown. Director of programming Caroline Barneaud enlisted artists such as Laetitia Dosch to reflect -through a series of radio plays- on the shutdown-provoked loneliness of the theatre’s surrounding trees facing the absence of their habitual human companions. Barneaud and director Stefan Kaegi are also working on a multi-year project extracting audiences from cities -including big urban festivals like Avignon- and transplanting them into sites where the primary actants are vegetation, fauna, and large terrestrial systems like rivers and woodland.
Dosch and director-scenographer Philippe Quesne (working together and individually) are also unleashing non-human forces inside the theatre, performing with horses, putting make-pretend swamps, snowfields, clouds and scraggy forests on stage. In another register, performative pioneers such as Roger des Prés are provocatively confronting urbanity (such as the arid context of la Défense) with flocks of farm animals, mixing underground raves in repurposed industrial spaces with agricultural praxis, grazing sheep on the rump, marginal verdure of hostile business districts, and creating impromptu parades and joyous encounters with residents and office workers as they pass.


Awareness of these examples, as well as a COVID- motivated retreat to rural life in Burgundy, have led me to question the original paradigm of theatre-city interdependence. Reconsidered, two obvious ‘urban’ models -the ancient Greek and the Elizabethan- are in fact binocular, their feet in the city (often at the edge), their attention facing outwards or over-the-top (in the case of almost all Greek theatres). The landscape forming the backdrop to the Epidauros skene was not undifferentiated, decorative greenery, but an environment richly inhabited and animated by the gods whose doings were manifested on the stage. Dionysus, the Athenian festival resident deity, had a particular role to play in this, bringing the fruits of the vine to bear on the human temperament, leading it towards ecstasy.


Almost all of the London theatres of Shakespeare’s time were in liminal conditions, the most famous being south of the river, outside of the city proper, but deeply engaged in its life. Wenceslaus Hollar’s detailed 1647 engraving of the view from Southwark Cathedral shows these buildings to be urban exceptions, round forms which face outwards into the country, animating edge conditions. This elastic character allowed Shakespeare to dispense with any physical scenery, invoking in his audience’s mind both city streets near and far (Venice, Rome, London, Verona) and the sylvan settings in As You Like It, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and so on. Standing in the Globe yard, one must have been able to catch a whiff of the city sewers and the surrounding stands of trees; one was both here and there.
Some urban-anchored modern exemplars can also be seen -when considered from this angle- to be stepping out into wilder and greener worlds. Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil is umbilically attached to Paris by the end of line 1 of the metro system (reached by a further journey in a shuttle bus, or by scuttling through the forest on foot, avoiding the assignations of prostitutes in the woods). The former armaments factory which it occupies with four other theatres is distinctly urban in layout, but its sheer scale inside allows rather particular imaginative journeys. The vast halls of the Soleil can breathe with the historical depth of Japan, India, Tibet and -indeed- Shakespeare’s London, and can be the setting for the rolling landscape of l’Age d’Or (made from the soil excavated from the Pompidou Centre’s future basement). It is worth noting that Mnouchkine’s predilection for the theatres of Asia relates us -through Noh and Kathakali, for starters- to performance traditions which are located outdoors and predicated (in the case of Noh) on the animism of the forest surrounding the theatres. It is not declared anywhere on site, but it is perhaps extraordinarily important, that the Cartoucherie acts as a bulwark to a large forest biotope situated behind the complex. Defended by theatres, a human-free nature can be observed through a tiny door at the back of a stage which might itself evoke Scotland, Pondichery, Pnom Pen or Athens.


The Hellerau Festspielhaus -a notable precedent for Mnouchkine’s stage world, especially as it was used by Adolphe Appia- is also a kind of valve between Urbis and Ruris, facing the town, backed-up against agricultural and forested land. Dependent economically on the Werkstätten-fueled garden city in which it sits at the edge of Dresden, Hellerau’s qualities as a vast, abstract place of ritual, movement and immersive, environmental lighting which could be used to reproduce the unfolding of dawn or twilight, are certainly reinforced by -if not rather predicated on- this outwards-facing situation. Sitting in this vessel, facing out towards the hinterland, one senses a wider world of cosmic light, mood and weather pressing against and through its walls. The choreographic work of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze also resonates with its contemporary innovations such as those of Monte Verità, which celebrated the unadorned human body in the landscape.
Peter Brook -who died in July 2022- famously left the comfort and prosperity of city theatres in the late 1960s for a period of errance through African deserts and villages, suburban shopping malls in America and the remote archaeological sites of Persepolis. The experiments he undertook in these varied ex-urban contexts taught him the value of rescinding total control of the stage, making it into a place of negotiation between audience, actors and environment. He proposed a measured release of the wild energies usually kept fully in check by elevated stages, hygienic building conditions and dulling comfort. When -in 1974- he made his triumphant return to the city, establishing his base in the decrepit Bouffes du Nord theatre, he invoked some of these exterior, environmental forces within city limits. The Bouffes was subject to the agency of fire, water and the microbial life of decay, peeling away the ‘cultured’ skin of a late 19th-century music hall to a fabric which is mysteriously intemporal and alive, palpably in-process. This collaboration of external environmental and other non-human actants with an historical architectural carcass has contrived a space which remains remarkably elastic and chameleon, able to take on the allure of a forest, a palace, a garden or a nineteenth century house. Leaving this place to tour the work fermented there, Brook also seeded spaces around the world of a similar openness, and also of great variety, whether they are another abandoned theatre in Brooklyn, various industrial buildings, and the vast environments of the Boulbon, Hudman, Petroupolis and Taillades quarries. Brook and I documented these explorations in our 2003 book collaboration The Open Circle (also coauthored with Jean-Guy Lecat).


I would like to conclude on a personal note, feeling keenly the importance of Brook’s passing and the extraordinary legacy he leaves as a creator of fertile spaces facing from the city to our broadest, and most contested context as part of the natural world. Equally inspired by Bruno Latour -who also died in 2022- I have come to see my role as a theatre architect as that of allowing to exist (or of composing, assembling, conducting) a temporal and biological openness similar to that of Brook’s spaces. Latour -also a theatre-maker, intensely probing the ecological crisis with stage effects and emotions, with director Frédérique Aït-Touati- emphasised the need to be aware of one’s circumstances, to be in tune, in touch with fellow humans as much as non-humans. Indirectly echoing him, Brook said that it was inimical to good theatre to attempt to separate the human from their ground and background, railing against insensitive architects who failed to allow the slight disorderliness which underpins research, experiment and creation. Making a brand-new building is therefore somewhat challenging in this respect, its habitual freshness and cleanliness implying neutrality, narrow temporality and overpowering artifice. One answer I have found in my own work lies in the presentation of the character and presence of biomaterials, allowing them to exist as protagonists, co-presences with the stage world. In the Hardelot Elizabethan theatre in northern France, trees surround the building -in a vast and beautiful natural park- and also constitute its flesh and bones, its skin, structure, sonic response, smell and atmosphere. It is my hope that it will serve as an open theatre of closely defined space, allowing the audience to see through its substance to the wider world from which we emerge.
And -lastly- it should be emphasised that the examples presented here all exhibit a great frugality of energy and resource. Connectivity, awareness, coexistence can actually be reinforced by using only the most essential means, and by opening towards the whole world, rather than the part we have made in our own image.


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