Performance and urban space: An ambivalent affair (original) (raw)
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The City as theatre: the performing space
2018
This research aims at investigating the theoretical basis, the role, and the regularities of performing arts in the urban environment. References to theatre and dance are abundant in urban studies, but they serve almost exclusively as metaphors. Investigating the specificity of performing arts will also allow clarifying the performative aspects of every artistic intervention in urban space. Indeed, from ancient rituals to contemporary street theatre, an intentional and staged action plays a central role not only in the processes of sense giving and community building, or in what is today called "placemaking," but also in the "production of space." Three main conceptual tools are identified: the rhythmanalytical method, as sketched by Lefebvre; the trialectical logic, as elaborated by the Situationist International; and the category of liminality, as defined by Turner. The second section of the work, called "Atlas," while working as a repertoire of case ...
TDR/The Drama Review, 2014
Cities are live performances. How people behave in the streets, in the parks, in the outdoor markets, in stadiums, and inside buildings gives cities their unique character, ambience, and tone. It is not only what physical spaces and structures signify about urban organization, hierarchies, and aesthetic invention but the imaginative behavior that people perform in and around those structures that is also important for understanding cities. The interdisciplinary field of performance studies can be instrumental in analyzing how cities are produced and performed precisely because the field and its methodological diversity bridges social, political, theatrical, and architectural forms of thought.
Dramatised Urbanism: Performance Cities
The contemporary genres of site-specific-theatre and immersive theatre insert the narrative in the architectural process transforming space into architectural scripts. This is not new to architecture as it has previously engaged with its syntax through the movement of Deconstructivism. Through Deconstructivism architecture engaged with its process, its language and theory and became performative. It composed spaces in order to speak. An elemental part of the architectural syntax is the wall, which bears heavy significations within the spatial composition; it acts upon the human body in enclosing it or excluding it from space, it forms the imagery of the urban space and bears textual symbols, historical notations and human traces. Architectural facades are therefore communicative surfaces of urban history. The urban space is better experienced in the practice of walking, which is a spatial activity that translates into flows (De Certeau,M: 1988). Flows are the modern condition for our globally networked society, and can be spatially represented in architectural diagrams of nodes and networks. Contrary to this, the flows of urban walkers cannot be graphically represented as such without erasing the very essence of walking as a dynamic appropriating tactic in the urban space. The performativity of the urban space is understood as the interaction of humans and the built environment within the familiar scale of everyday life. In turn, this affects the shape of the city through the longer cycle of historical time. To experience this performativity, one needs to participate in the performance of its becoming. ‘Performance Cities’ is a platform for the intersection of space, urbanism and theatre. The core activity of the practice is the creation of performances about the history of cities. These performances take the form of live-installations where the urban map is built live on stage by the participatory activity of performers and audience alike.
Introduction on a sunny September weekend, parks in downtown Toronto's Queen West and Parkdale neighbourhoods became rowdy spaces for people in their mid 20s and early 30s to play tag, capture the flag and red rover. The Time out/Game on intervention invited 'participants and viewers to celebrate the spirit of the playground in and outside the park, while challenging our notion of playful space and submission to the rules of the game' (Balzer, 2007). Curated by Toronto artists and playwrights, these games were part of a broad range of interventions in the Play/Grounds participatory performance series that were part of the Queen West Art Crawl, a neighbourhood arts festival in Toronto's downtown Queen West neighbourhood. Some other performance interventions in this series included interactive, site-specific plays in the nearby boutique hotel and Toronto artist Jon Sasaki's installation in the local Salvation Army store, where the windows were taped shut and the space was filled with black light. The space was 'black enough for bewilderment, but just enough for your eyes to adjust so you could find your crocheted toaster covers' (Operation Centaur Rodeo, 2007) and the shoppers were given individual flashlights to shop that day. Funded by the local Parkdale Liberty Economic Development Corporation (PLEDC), the Parkdale Business Improvement Areas and Artscape, a non-profit organization that promotes affordable housing for artists as well as 'culture-led regeneration … stewarding creative communities, and playing a catalytic role in the revitalization of some of Toronto's most creative communities' (Artscape, 2008), the events animated the streets and brought people together in interactive performances that revealed complex layers, histories and narratives about the two neighbourhoods.
Introduction (Musical Performance and the Changing City 2013)
When the Wall came down, the size of the city doubled overnight. There was a lot more space, and much of it was unregulated. There was a joy and excitement in the population that energized the music, and the music became so central to Berlin. It coalesced with the advent of an explicitly electronic music, a new music, a new culture of the present and future.
PERFORMANCE SPACES AND SPATIAL PERFORMATIVITY Theatre has left the building
The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance , 2023
The opening decades of this new millennium are haunted by spectacular events associated with political upheaval, conflict, contamination, climate change, pandemics and the plight of those seeking refuge from such threats. How do these extended moments in nature and civilisation impact environments housing cultural events, which, as performative spacing, are themselves events and integral drivers of experience? No longer safe nor sound, architecture’s inveterate association with continuity, coherence and autonomy has submitted to the exigencies of time, action and movement, revealing an impossible task to provide secure containment for inherently uncontainable bodies. This chapter therefore reverse-engineers the cautionary tale of The Three Little Pigs, which privileges the value of building one’s house out of stable bricks, rather than rickety sticks or even more volatile straw. It exposes significant shifts for the environment housing theatre: from enduring standalone monuments of the 19th century; to more experimental sites of the 20th century; to ephemeral and transitory locations of the early 21st century, in which a deliberate homelessness reinforces the community itself as house. Like Elvis, ‘theatre has left the building’, suggesting a death of sorts to enduring forms of theatre architecture. This makes way for more dynamic spatialities seen in seminal contemporary European venues that proffer alternatives to the persistent cookie-cutter models of proscenium stage and black box studio.
Urban space and the politics of socially engaged art
Progress in Human Geography, 2018
This paper interrogates the political potential of socially engaged art within an urban setting. Grounded in Lefebvrian and neo-Marxist critical urban theory, this political potential is examined according to three analytics that mark the definition of ‘politics’ in this context: the (re)configuration of urban space, the (re)framing of a particular sphere of experience and the (re)thinking of what is taken-for-granted. By bringing together literatures from a range of academic domains, these analytics are used to examine 1) how socially engaged art may expand our understanding of the link between the material environment and the production of urban imaginaries and meanings, and 2) how socially engaged art can open up productive ways of thinking about and engaging with urban space.