Abstract

Performance and Place edited by Leslie Hill and Helen Paris
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 296 pp. (paperback)
Edited by artists Hill and Paris, with insightful contributions from placers and makers Performance and Place is a timely, and at times, poetic engagement with an elusive sense of place. Operating between opposite poles of “place” and “placelessness”, writers hop from personal recollection to academic rhetoric. Lois Keidan reminisces about Forced Entertainment’s ‘sublimely bleak’ early work for audiences ‘who grew up with the television always on’ (12) before describing a ‘place for audiences to contemplate their own relationship with “the Other”’ (14). Perhaps Emily Puthoff’s television is always on, her claim that the notion of ‘place’ has become ‘so multi-faceted it shimmers’ (76) credits a hair commercial bracketed by live coverage of the Indonesian tsunami. The unfolding debate is controlled by a creative but restless editorial remote control. It can be difficult to locate the “place” inhabited by writing on “place”. The words, like the notion, shimmer.