According to Peter Brook's famous dictum, it requires more than just an empty space , an actor and someone watching to constitute an 'act of theatre' (The Empty Space). The actor must also walk across the space. Setting aside the questions of why she is walking or where ( the narrative factor), it is motion in theate practice that remains the connecting spark. And that for site-specific theatre especially, it is mobility - either of audience, performers, or stage - that 'ignites' into being the dramatic space in which events may occur. De Certeau also finds that space is 'composed of intersections of mobile elements' and is 'in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements within it'. Space is 'like a word when it is spoken' (Everyday Life). Lebrve, taking his cue from the astrophysics of Fred Hoyle, similarly argues that space may be created 'by the energy deployed within it' (Production of Space).
This article examines two recent productions in real places where performance space is created and maintained by the movement of actors and / or audience through it. I argue that both Guerrilla Street Theatre's Sir Don V The Rat Pack (November 2009), enacted outside BHP Billiton's Annual General Meeting, and Northern Rivers Performing Arts' Railway Wonderland (November 2014), sited on the platform of Lismore's now disused railway station, institute different practices of mobility which not only facilitate the intrusion of space, but also enhance audience's complicity in the occupation that invariably follows - both vital to the site- specific agenda.
As With riding a bicycle, balance becomes feasible through forward movement. Opposites are reconciled, suspension of disbelief (place and space) suspended, arrest avoided (mostly), progression of story achieved. Through the strategies, and by these means, the practice of sire-specific performance continues to thrive outside dedicated theatre buildings and does so in ways that move the art of the 'theatre' (Appia) into literally new territory. Richard Sera' assertion that 'to move the work is to destroy the work' may well app;y to sire specific sculpture (one need only look at the peripatetic travails of Ron Robertson-Swann's (in)famous Vault aka The Yellow Peril). However, drawing on my study of TheatreWorks plays in trams, boats and houses (2013). I would argue that quite the reverse applies to site-specific performance - where not to move the work is to risk potential failure.
