Unruly Sites, Bewildering Buildings, Angry Cities

A Wayward Walk

Abstract

This issue’s title, [“Cross Sections and Core Samples: CTR at 50”] with its geological encouragements, seems to speak directly to a consideration of space and site through a specific history, and to brilliantly lock time and space together in perfect revelatory images. Kendra Fanconi says in Canadian Theatre Review (CTR) 145 that in “a natural site, the memory is geographic. It remembers the beginning, when the Earth folded rock and the sea drowned valleys” (97). Such is the way of the earth but perhaps not the way of fields of theatre and performance studies. As I prepared this article, my core samples resisted verticality and sometimes did not remember the beginning. My cross-sections were often anomalies. Strata moved; crust became core; layers became soup. I abandoned collecting samples and instead engaged the most cited thinker in writing about space and site in the fifty-year span of CTR: Michel de Certeau. In CTR 170, Heather Davis-Fisch, glossing Certeau, observes that “spaces” are locations where human practice inscribes and activates stable “places” (89). Andy Houston in CTR 121 finds Certeau’s favoured human practice of walking “akin to the act of enunciating one’s relationship to surroundings, to place” (“Deep-Mapping” 33), and Alana Gerecke and Laura Levin in CTR 176 assert that this critical perambulatory practice “allows new physical and spatial possibilities to emerge” (6). Space and site came alive for me in CTR as a walk without a definite route, with significant detours, adjusting, reversing, sometimes looping back on itself, and occasionally sprinting toward an unknown goal. Along the path, a complex spatial narrative emerges, and many new subfields are born. Walk this way.