My understanding of Site Specific Performance is that it is any kind of performance which can only be performed in a specific site. If you were to take it out of the context of it’s site, the performance would not make sense. This pushes audiences and performers alike to question what exactly a site can be.

“Not only does the use of non-theatre venues contribute to ‘an enquiry into what theatre is and might be’, it also incorporates ‘a set of productive spatial metaphors, whereby practitioners use their focus on geographical space to explore a range of theatrical, conceptual, political and virtual spaces. Thus the potentially restrictive specificity of the work is expanded to allow for ambiguity and multiplicity’.” (Pearson, 2010,9)

“There is no place of origin: a place owes its character not only to the experiences it affords as sights, sounds, etc. but also to what is done there as looking, listening, moving. Both ‘being’ and environment are mutually emergent, continuously brought into existence together.” (Pearson, 2010, 16)

Pearson, M. (2010) Site Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.