Nomadic Theatre: Mobilizing Theory and Practice on the European Stage by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink (review)

In Nomadic Theatre: Mobilizing Theory and Practice on the European Stage, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink presents a detailed study of a particular kind of performance that can offer a multilayered insight into current experiences of being “on the move.” The book’s premise is that mobility shapes the contemporary world in various complex ways and that performance can provide “a space for reflection and engagement” (5) with these developments, primarily through acts of deterritorializing the theatre stage. Groot Nibbelink proposes the idea of “nomadic theatre” as a compass for navigating the interplay among performer, spectator, and space in works that often take place in urban contexts; these works involve new technologies, morphing or fluid stages, or they may engage spectators in one-on-one encounters. From the outset, the author declares that her objective is not to propose nomadic theatre as a particular genre but to consider it as “an analytical concept” (3), drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of “nomadism” in her attempt to conceptualize nomadic theatre beyond existing associations with travelling theatre troupes or street theatre.

The book argues for the theatre’s potential to produce new knowledge and understanding of the ways that people live and connect to each other and to space, particularly within urban environments, by focusing on mobile performances that have been produced by northern European artists and have subsequently toured various countries. Examples include immersive, ambulatory, and participatory works by Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven, Ontroerend Goed, and Signa that are put in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “nomadology.” In her chapters, Groot Nibbelink details the ways that each performance is staged, layered, and composed, proposing broader questions around spatial dramaturgies. A recurrent motif that emerges within these works is a “feedback loop” (49), whereby the experience of the performance involves a spectator’s participation in a situation constructed by the artists as well as an observation of and reflection on that participation. For example, in her analysis of Verhoeven’s No Man’s Land (2008) in chapter two, Groot Nibbelink draws attention to how such performance installations deterritorialize fixed positions of spectator as either participant or observer, blending the two and thus reconceptualizing spectatorship – particularly in the context of postdramatic theatre – as a particular mode of “heightened attention” (41).

In the chapters that follow, the author further argues for the permeability of the borders of the theatre stage and for expanding how spectatorship as “a culturally conditioned process” is conceptualized (53). Drawing on another project by Verhoeven, Trail Tracking (2005), and works by Rimini Protokoll, Groot Nibbelink demonstrates how performers and spectators can co-construct performance and, in so doing, generate a “relational understanding of subjectivity” (113). The book stresses the significance of connection, encounter, mutuality, and exchange in these works, particularly as they emerge as inversions of the vocabularies, logics, and practices of the neoliberal, digital world.

Nomadic Theatre makes a valuable contribution to expanding definitions of dramaturgy, particularly in regard to what Groot Nibbelink defines as “procedural dramaturgy” (177), which highlights how a work’s form and structure are expressed via particular procedures that are constitutive of the neoliberal world. For instance, in the analysis of Rimini Protokoll’s mobile phone performance piece about call centre employees, Call Cutta (2005), Groot Nibbelink draws attention to how the collective questions “the socio-economic conditions of the service industry by offering a theatre service and organizing this service on precisely the same grounds” (80). Here and throughout the book, she makes a strong case for a particular methodology of thinking through practice, whereby “a theatre performance or artistic practice is not a ‘passive’ object that is subjected to analysis” but “a material manifestation of thinking” (179). To help describe these new approaches, Groot Nibbelink offers us some rich new terminology that places her discussion in productive dialogue with existing discourses in philosophy, aesthetics, and urban sociology.

Nonetheless, what is missing in...