Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography and critical analysis of a practice as research project that I conducted in the Fall of 2017 to investigate three interstitial sites nested around the Concordia University campus in downtown Montreal. I began with the premise that the body, sensitive and responsive to a site, could engage with it through movement and in so doing, render important aspects of the site palpable. I asked: if the body is available to being moved by the site’s affect, what may be understood about the site through that engagement? In order to explore this notion, I conducted a series of experiments which facilitated participants’ site-responsive movements, as generated through exercises drawn from theatre acting training and from a class in somatic approaches to movement.

This interdisciplinary research is grounded in my theatre practice and informed by theory based in the empirical study of performance methods. By applying the training methods towards engagement with the site, I extended them towards a framing as spatial practices, thus creating a platform for critiquing the site. Through this study, I seek to illuminate connections between the site’s social, historical, and economic contexts, its materiality, and the affects that thread into the participants’ experiences. I aim to underline the importance of affect in interstitial spaces, to demonstrate the potential of embodied performance practices to engage with that affect, and to contribute a methodology for generating and analysing qualitative, embodied, site-responsive data.