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

Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink argues in her brilliant book Nomadic Theatre: Mobilizing Theory and Practice on the European Stage not only that the spectator becomes mobile, but that the theatre space itself is set in motion by nomadism. Conceptually, the book adapts Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of nomadology, the point of which is not rootless rambling but rather a specific attitude to place that destabilizes the fixity and normativity of space as territory, into its own original proposition: nomadic theatre. As Nibbelink understands it, the key attribute of nomadology is neither movement nor mobility, but the way it puts into relation space, place, mobility, and identity, thereby shifting the politics of perception.

Nibbelink makes clear from the start that nomadic theatre is neither a genre nor a descriptor for various kinds of traveling performances, but rather a concept that is useful “for thinking through practice and for mobilizing theory” (15). Nomadic theatre is concerned with territories and modes of displacement; it explores new experiences of spectating attuned to different affective and sensorial registers; at its heart is experiment and play. The author calls her concept of nomadic theatre a “toolbox” (ibid.) with which to explore the production of space through performance (both its poetics and its politics), the process of spectating, and the interconnectedness of places, objects, ideas, and identities. Hence, as with Deleuzian nomadology, while motions and movements are often deployed in the formation of the theatrical spaces and events the book considers, the nomadic is found in the attitude to place, in the mode in which the web of intersections has been weaved, and in the way the spectator becomes situated within it. Nomadic theatre is therefore both a way of thinking through creative practice and an analytical tool to understand patterns of de- and reterritorializing in and through performance.

These patterns of de- and re-territorialization in staging movement and mobility are examined through the following thematics, with a chapter devoted to each: “Encounter,” “Displacement,” “Cartographies,” “Diagrams,” and “Architectures.” Each adds a new aspect to the formulation of nomadic theatre and its kaleidoscopic dramaturgies. Chapter 2, “Encounter,” uses Dries Verhoeven’s solo performance walk No Man’s Land (2008–14) to explore the question of mobility. Nibbelink argues that the performance confronts the audience with migrant and refugee experience of place, being, and belonging. In chapter 3, “Displacement,” Nibbelink turns to Lefebvre to analyze Rimini Protokoll’s Call Cutta (2005) and its sequel Call Cutta in a Box (2006–12) as specific dramaturgies of the “production of space” through performance, whereby the action is directed remotely yet performed/embodied locally. In other words, the “production of space” is shaped simultaneously from afar and in situ. Set side by side, these chapters complement one another through their approach to performances of mobility on the part of actors and audiences, revealing how nomadic theatre emerges through the intersections of local encounters and remote operations.

Turning to another Verhoeven production—Trail Tracking (2005), an imaginary journey at the site of an abandoned railway station—in chapter 4, “Cartographies,” Nibbelink builds further on the exploration of the politics of location with a feminist twist. The chapter analyzes Trail Tracking’s spatial dramaturgy of connectedness as a way of understanding spectatorship not only as an embodied but also an embedded practice. Nomadic theatre is described here as a situated practice, wherein nomadism is a kind of site-specific and even, one might add, site-sensitive practice, in the sense of performance and its spectatorship being attuned to the particularities of place. Therefore the relationships to and within the site, what Nibbelink calls the “spaces of proximity” (115), become key to understanding how nomadic theatre constructs, or rather opens, the reception process further. This is also the main consideration of the fifth chapter, “Diagrams.” Here, the author deploys the Deleuzian concept of diagram, which invites the spectator into an open process, while also setting the terms of...