Performing the City: Space, Movement, and Memory in O Ben’Groes at Droed Amser

Abstract In considering some of the aspects that are brought to the site-specific process, this article explores how theatre renegotiates patterns of intraurban movement, enacting complex approaches to space and memory. The focus is on O Ben’Groes at Droed Amser, a Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru and National Theatre Wales production, created in collaboration with BBC Cymru Wales and BBC Arts in 2020 as part of Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru’s new programme in response to the COVID-19 emergency and the challenge of creating original dramatic work during lockdown. By allowing virtual audiences to join author and poet Karen Owen on a bus journey from her home and the street where she grew up to Bangor city centre, the production articulated the experience of the city in terms of individual and collective memory, bringing together issues of performance, representation, history, and heritage to reveal alternative layers to the reality of the urban landscape. Memory, I argue, emerged from this production as a performative construct open to renegotiation through a range of present relationships to landscape. In addition to this, the production also offered an alternative to the privileged figure of the walker, performing a subversion of codified patterns of movement.