Marking Time: Performance, Archaeology and the City
English
By (author): Prof. Mike Pearson
Marking Time: Performance, archaeology and the city charts a genealogy of alternative practices of theatre-making since the 1960s in one particular city Cardiff. In a series of five itineraries, it visits fifty sites where significant events occurred, setting performances within local topographical and social contexts, and in relation to a specific architecture and polity. These sites from disused factories to scenes of crime, from auditoria to film sets it regards as landmarks in the conception of a history of performance.
Marking Time uses performance and places as a means to reflect on the character of the city itself its history, its fabric and make-up, its cultural ecology and its changing nature. Weaving together personal recollections, dramatic scripts, archival records and documentary photographs, it suggests a new model for studying and for making performancefor other artistic practicesfor other cities.
Marking Time is an urban companion to the rural themes and fieldwork approaches considered in In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape (University of Exeter Press, 2006).