Performing spaces in Scotland: the theatre of circulating acts and localizing politics.

Abstract

In 1997 Scottish citizens voted to re-establish a Scottish Parliament after a nearly 300-year hiatus, which resulted from the 1707 Act of Union. As the new Parliament developed, so did the concept of a building-less National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) whose foundations relied on collaborations with artists and performance spaces in Scotland. As academics and journalists heralded a "Second Enlightenment," the nation attempted to capitalize on the philosophical and industrial lineages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland. In this dissertation I scrutinize the ways in which Scotland is performed: the modes of performance undertaken by individuals and institutions to construct and circulate particular framings of Scotland and Scottishness. My project situates moments of "national" performance in the early nineteenth century--namely, productions of a "National Drama," Rob Roy Macgregor, and the 1822 pageant held in Edinburgh for King George IV--beside political performances produced by "national" institutions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries--specifically, the mobile NTS and the Scottish Parliament's architectural design and Festival of Politics. Through archival and ethnographic research, I analyze the spatial materiality of these events and sites to consider how public spaces, architectures, geographies, texts, and institutional bodies complicate the exchange between mobility and rootedness in Scotland. As I map these complex performance practices, I ask: What are the frameworks in which articulations of Scotland become visible and material in these historical moments? How does a mobilization and circulation of Scottish bodies, texts and subnational imaginaries forward an agenda of an itinerant Scotland in larger political economies?