Andrew is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of East Anglia, under the supervision of Dr Rebecca Tillett. He holds a B.A. in Theatre Directing from Rose Bruford College (2001), and an M.A. in Theatre Directing from UEA (2003). An acting graduate from The Poor School (1995), he has worked as an actor in England and the USA. Since 2016, he has focused on his academic and teaching career, and before entering UEA as a research student, gained a PGCLTHE from Rose Bruford College. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

For the last fifty years, Native American dramatists have worked tirelessly to create a distinctive and far ranging body of plays, covering the full spectrum of the Native American experience – from the encroachment of settler colonialism, to the Native dispossession from ancestral lands, the social relocation through the residential school systems, and their ultimate marginalisation on reservations. However, despite so much of their history being intimately related to the land and location, few Native American theatre practitioners and producers have sought to explore the wider environment outside of traditional theatre spaces and venues for their production.

However, in recent years, theatre practitioners have begun to explore how site-specific techniques might be used to add a greater dimension to their work. One prominent exponent of this is the multi-award-winning Sicangu-Lakota playwright Larissa FastHorse, who – in collaboration with the Californian based site-specific/community theatre company Cornerstone – has worked to create unique theatre performances, resonating the experiences and wide-ranging cultural inconsistences of living in a ‘Urban Rez’ such as that found in Los Angeles.

Building on my Ph.D. research into ‘place’ and Indigenous performance, this paper examines the interrelationship between Native American theatre and the more unusual places in has begun to be performed. It considers how the contrast between performances in modern urban environments, such as those of FastHorse, work to bring out the often- confused time-scape of ancestral land and urban landscape through the juxtaposition of both theatrically modern and traditional methods of Native American performance and storytelling. Through the use of practical examples of FastHorse and Cornerstone’s work, it points the way towards the exciting potential for Indigenous theatre practitioners to create a more unique Native theatrical experience, free from the traditional spacial expectations of the predominant mainstream western theatre in the USA.