Introduction: Environments and Interspaces

The research project “Performing Interspaces: Social Fluidities in Contemporary Theatre”, whose primary output is this monograph, began as an imperative to account for spaces that are awkward, evade attention, or, when they receive it, rarely do so because they produce feelings of desirability, warmth, or contentment. These spaces are sometimes fixed and others mobile, but always, in a sense, fluid: brimming with potential and emergence, also due to their temporal contingency. They are transient and correlational: formulated by and dependent upon intimate and intricate ecologies, human and non-human, that cluster together to challenge the orthodoxy of other spaces that might be dominant, and structurally sound. This is the kind of site we might describe, like the system to which it belongs and whose patterns it performs and perpetuates, as robust; inflexible. Interspaces, on the contrary, are not definite and rigid—they are tentative, exposed; and they generate this effect for their inhabitants, that may be human or non-human.