Theatre & Architecture is an interdisciplinary working group that focuses on the intersections between the two disciplines by examining the ways they inform, challenge, expand, complement or frame one another through a broader understanding of performance and space. Refining the field of interest over the years, the focus of IFTR’s Theatre & Architecture Working Group (TAWG) has expanded: from theatre architecture as a built form to recognizing and exploring both disciplines through their critical and creative overlaps. This opens the notion of Theatre towards Architecture and Space, and Architecture towards Theatre and Performance. Operating from a critical spatial platform, the group shares practical, theoretical and research-based phenomena relating to theatre and performance studies, embracing a broad spectrum of spatial theories, architecture and design practices. TAWG is composed of scholars, practitioners and industry professionals working in between and across theatre/performance and architectural/spatial design. Traversing a wide range of spatial, performing and visual arts fields, the Working Group is made up of members living and operating in all five continents.
Dimitri Szuter is a member of the TAWG.
‘Reprendre place’ is a french word game that articulates a typology of public spaceand its performative embodied process of reclaiming : an experimental project-process aimed at transforming the parking-based central squares of French villages through performative actions, installations and processes that aim to re-shape public spaces within local communities. It’s all about public celebrations, metamorphosis and subversivity! In fact, the project envision to re-claim surfaces for people instead of cars, living soils instead of concrete oceans ; to design spaces that empower people, result and engage synergistic movements for social life & natural ecosystems together. We seak to (re)ground forgotten, vulnerable or bright new rituals of everyday life and extend possibilities for the extraordinary to happen!
A pilot-process is happening in ‘place de la Libération’ in Reillanne, a small village located in south France. We already engaged the creative process with 2 residencies and a summer school of 15 days is planned for july 2025. It will bring together a group of students in architecture, landscape and dance from France & California, with the local community and our transdisciplinary cast of teachers/professionnals. The project is actually embedded into an experimental research on the heritage of Anna & Lawrence Halprin’s collaborative work and their creative use of scores in raising environmental awareness, engaging creative communites and designing performative processes for urban (re)generation. We will present the process and various scores of the project, generating a carnivalesque infrastructure for unpredicted events and creative emergencies for the collective re-design of the square.
