Fiona Wilkie (University of Surrey, Roehampton)

On Saturday morning, December 8, 2001, I sit in my living room and watch the video documentation of Blast Theory's Desert Rain. Included here are interviews with the six Gulf War participants ­ a television journalist, soldier, peace worker, actor, tourist, viewer ­ who become the "targets"of this performance installation for six players. In the same room, on the same day I watch the BBC news, which reports on the current state of the conflict in Afghanistan's desert spaces. The emphasis now is on the hunt rather than the attack: the hunt, that is, for Osama bin Laden's hiding place in the mountainous regions south of Jalalabad. Back to the video of Desert Rain. Rewind. Play. "You have 20 minutes in which to find your targets and then work together as a group to find the exit and leave the 'world'".

There are problems, of course, with responding to any kind of live performance when seen only on video, and in the case of Desert Rain the problems might be said to be compounded. I cannot claim to have had the kind of immersive physical experience that lead Lyn Gardner, performance critic for The Guardian, to write: "I cannot meet the gaze of my team-mates. I feel as if I really have left someone to die in the desert" (The Guardian, 18 May 2000). And yet,in a work that seeks to comment on the mediatisation of war in the late twentieth century, there is a certain appropriateness to this everyday space of reception via the medium of the television set. Echoes of other narratives received in this manner merge to shape my experience of Desert Rain. I begin to think of my living room as a performance site.

Rachel Clarke hints at the importance of site in Blast Theory's work when she develops a mapping of Desert Rain's complex visual, physical and virtual spaces(Clarke 2001). Here, my particular located experience of the work prompts me to consider the multiple ways in which Desert Rain constructs its performance site. This is not to argue that Desert Rain is a site-specific performance, but rather that a framework of site-specificity enables us to think about the event through a discourse of spatial engagement. In what ways might the debates arising from site-specific practice and scholarship be useful in articulating the effects of Desert Rain?

I want to point briefly to three concepts emerging from the academic discourses surrounding site-specific performance that have a resonance here: the mobilisation of site (Kwon), the creation of and engagement with a performance environment (Schechner), and the documentation of sited performance (Kaye). Together, these three concepts begin to suggest a means by which we might build a layered notion of the multiple spaces within and between which Desert Rain operates.

One of the problems inherent in any attempt to pin down the term "site-specific" is that its meanings change as the practices defined by it shift and evolve. Miwon Kwon has argued for the increasing mobilisation of site-specific art since its minimalist beginnings in the 1960s, suggesting that,whereas the "site" of art contexts was once a discrete and bordered place, it is now more likely to be an "itinerary"than a "map", "a fragmentary sequence of events and actions through spaces, that is, a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by the passage of the artist" (2000:46). While Nick Kaye contends that this shift has an earlier basis in practices occurring alongside 1960s minimalism, he too believes in the "transitive definition of site" (2000:183). This transition might occur in a variety of ways ­ it might be invited of the spectator, acted out during a single performance, or created cumulatively over a long performance run ­ and the spaces it traverses might be figured literally or metaphorically. At the beginning of the twenty-first century,site-specific performance has at its disposal a discourse that allows for plurality, multiplicity and heterotopia.

All of this means that the site of performance has the capacity to operate between places. For the purposes of teasing out some of the implications of Blast Theory's Desert Rain, it is important that these places might be both real and virtual, the performance site being constructed in the meeting of these spatial modes. There are other spatial modes at play here, too. The virtual presence of the spaces of the Gulf within the work has been much commented upon in reviews and academic analysis. The processes of touring and the dissemination of the video document, too, have meant that the site of Desert Rain exists between the places of different cultural contexts. As noted above, these contexts include the intimacy of private living space and can carry echoes of other places (for example, Afghanistan). And, in her wide-ranging history of performance art, RoseLee Goldberg situates the work of Blast Theory between two further (metaphorical) spaces: those of performance art and theatre (2001:221). The process of contextualisation is also one of locating,and Goldberg therefore locates Blast Theory alongside the performative spaces emerging out of the work of other companies: Station House Opera, Forced Entertainment, Desperate Optimists and Reckless Sleepers.

To these spaces we might add the physical space created by Blast Theory and understood here in Richard Schechner's terms as a theatrical environment. In a document first written in 1967 ("Six Axioms for Environmental Theatre", reproduced in Schechner 1994), Schechner posits two different notions of space in environmental theatre, both of which he sets up in opposition to that which he terms "orthodox theatre": "in the first case one creates an environment by transforming a space; in the second case, one negotiates with an environment,engaging in a scenic dialogue with a space" (1994: xxx). The second of these examples is what is now more usually termed"site-specific theatre"; the first is more suggestive of the performative installation and is the category into which I would place Desert Rain. Blast Theory creates an environment that contains clues for its negotiation by the participant. Instructions for movement around the environment are issued not only verbally but also through the space itself, which guides both explicitly (for instance, with "way out" signs) and implicitly (through lights, constructed corridors and other elements of spatial layout). The physical environment itself suggests a questioning of the boundaries between spatial categories: projected onto a tangible screen of falling water, the virtual image is permeable and is corporeally traversed during the event.

Desert Rain, then, engages with the concept of site on a number of levels, and asks its spectator-participants to find new ways of engaging with the network of spaces they encounter.

Finally, Nick Kaye's discussion of documentation takes us back to the anecdote with which I began. For Kaye, "site-specificity arises precisely in uncertainties over the borders and limits of work and site" and documentations of such work, through their very limitations with regard to the "original","act out some of the complexities of the relationship between work and site" (2000: 215-6). In this manner, the video documentation of Desert Rain foregrounds the complex layering of space and site constructed through the live event and, in Nick Kaye's terms, "speculates toward the performance of its places" (220). The spatial implications of the live event are complicated when I sit in my living room and watch its images alongside new images of a war in 2001. The space created by the video document invites a set of future contexts within which new performance sites for Desert Rain might be constructed. Pause. Fast-forward.

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