In “Enactments of Power,” N’gugi Wa Thiong’o writes: “The state has its arenas of performance; so has the artist. While the state performs power, the power of the artist is solely in performance. Both the state and the artist may have a may have a different conception of time, place, content, goals, either of their own performance or of the other but they have the audience as their common target. Again the struggle may take the form of the state’s intervention in the artist’s work — what goes by the name of censorship –but the main area of struggle is the performance space: its definition, delimitation and regulation.”

What does Wa Thiong’o mean by this?  And can you identify a performance/piece of theater/dance that became more powerful, more gripping, more vital (what Peter Brook might think of as “immediate”) due to its relationship to the site in which it was performed?  Why?