IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Locality 79
Children’s Theatre in London, looked at more than a hundred buildings
before deciding to commission a new theater on the River Thames. 14 ‘‘We
are moving back to the amphitheatre model which thrusts the stage into
the body of the audience,’’ Graham told me. ‘‘Audiences today don’t want
trickery, special effects and illusion. They want to see things as they are,
without artifice.’’ And as Peter Brook has said,
It is not a question of good building, and bad. A beautiful place may never bring
about an explosion of life, while a haphazard hall may be a tremendous meeting
place. This is the mystery of the theatre, but in the understanding of this mystery
lies the one science. It is not a matter of saying analytically, what are the requirements,
how best they could be organized—this will usually bring into existence a
tame, conventional, often cold hall. The science of theatre building must come
from studying what it is that brings about the more vivid relationships between people. 15
Many people in theater question whether new buildings are needed at all.
Big theaters, in particular, tend to sap energy out of productions and
money out of producers. Some producers have taken literally to the streets
in so-called promenade and site-specific theater. In Chaucer-like journeys,
players and audience move together around cities, through forests, up
mountains, or into resonant but abandoned spaces. In the age of the rave,
street-level events are everywhere: festivals, concerts, corporate events,
church pageants, and fashion shows vie with each other to occupy the
streets.
In Europe, where theater people are leading the way to a sane policy for
space planning, the term ‘‘territorial capital’’ is now being used to describe
the ‘‘hard’’ and ‘‘soft’’ assets of a region. Hard assets include natural beauty
and features; shopping facilities; cultural attractions; and buildings, museums,
monuments, and the like. Soft assets are all about people and culture:
skills, traditions, festivals, events and occasions, situations, settings, social
ties, civic loyalty, memories, and the capacity to facilitate learning of various
kinds. Turning the notion of territorial capital into a policy or a design
program is a challenging task. EU countries are committed formally to the
worthy ambition to enable a ‘‘European knowledge economy’’ by the year
2010. The problem is that these countries understand what the knowledge
economy means in different ways. A British company, Local Futures, is
therefore developing a regional economic model structured around human
capital as the main determinant of growth, competitiveness, and employment.
Calling this model a regional economic architecture (REA), Local