As the symbolists, constructivists and surrealists of the historical avant-garde began to abandon traditional theatre spaces and embrace the more contingent locations of the theatrical ‘event’, the built environment of a performance became not only part of the event, but an event in and of itself.
Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory of ‘performative architecture’.
‘Event’ was of immense significance to modernism’s revolutionary agenda, resisting Realism and Naturalism – and, simultaneously, the monumentality of architecture itself. Event Space analyses a number of spatiotemporal models central to that revolution, both illuminating the history of avant-garde performance, and inspiring contemporary approaches to performance space.
