Loitering / Busking Bodies / Subversive Singing: Why Street-Theatre is Essential to Our Cities (original) (raw)

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 ...

The Streets Belong to the People: Scenes and Heterotopias in the City (Street theatre)

Gramma 22:2, σσ. 179-187, 2014

The street releases an aura of hospitality unmatched by the great halls and the formal venues. This is so because the street belongs to the people—it is of itself the stage of hospitality. By “hospitable,” here, I mean, on the one hand, a site open and accessible to all, and even to roaming artists, and on the other, I mean something that befriends the strange, the unfamiliar, the unexpected; what you meet suddenly on the curve of a pedestrian walkway or at the edge of a square and at once you are distracted from daily existential cares and daily routines. While people were gathering without any clear objectives, besides demonstrating against the austerity measures of the economic crisis, the International Street Theatre Festival (Istfest) of Athens organized at that time, came to provide them with a significant “role”: their participation in a multi-faceted theatrical celebration, with strong political connotations. In more ways than one, the street, (in the broader sense of the public domain, of the open, collectively shared urban and planned city space, returned through the Festival to the people, the original owners, in the particular form of theatre: disguise, artistic expression, dramatic narration and performance.

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.

Street and Spatial Stories: Performing the Transgressive Step

Proceedings of TTT2016, 2016

The current paper explores the transgressive aspects of walking as an aesthetic practice through selected walking-oriented artworks, actions and performances within the urban context of the late 20th and early 21st century globalized city. Initiating from the aesthetic and methodological concepts of flaneur and psychogeography which have been reverberating throughout 20th century, this paper considers the transgressive element being approached not only as a radical action but also as a series of sophisticated site-specific performances including author’s one (i.e. Francis Alÿs, Susan Stockwell, Regina Galindo, Dominique Baron, Tim Knowles, Bill Psarras) which bring together senses, poetry, repetition, objects, places, technologies into a “performative constellation” with poetic and political implications. The paper touches on emerging methodological issues of what it means to walk with objects/technologies/people and into places (Lee & Ingold, 2006), trying to find emerging commonalities while discussing the transgressive of such spatial actions within the multimedia urban landscape.

The Streets Belong to the People: Scenes and Heterotopias in the City

2018

The street releases an aura of hospitality unmatched by the great halls and the formal venues. This is so because the street belongs to the people—it is of itself the stage of hospitality. By "hospitable," here, I mean, on the one hand, a site open and accessible to all, and even to roaming artists, and on the other, I mean something that befriends the strange, the unfamiliar, the unexpected; what you meet suddenly on the curve of a pedestrian walkway or at the edge of a square and at once you are distracted from dailyexistential cares and daily routines. While people were gathering without any clear objectives, besides demonstrating against the austerity measures of the economic crisis, the International Street Theatre Festival (Istfest) of Athens organized at that time, came to provide them with a significant "role": their participation in a multi-faceted theatrical celebration, with strong political connotations. In more ways than one, the street, (in the broa...

Walking in the city as (model for) “dissensus”

2015

This paper explores the variegated spatial meanings of “the city” by way of Michel de Certeau’s reflections on “walking in the city” as part of “the practice of everyday life”, which he conceives of as allowing people multiple ways of escaping the straitjacket of the “disciplinary society”. The latter conception, deriving from Foucault’s investigation of disciplinary practices, ostensibly leaves one scant opportunity to escape from the clutches of disciplinary mechanisms such as hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and the examination, which appear to find their counterpart in the apparently carceral spatial design of the city. In contrast to the belief, that one has become inescapably enmeshed in panoptical practices, which tend to reduce humans to “docile bodies”, however, De Certeau traces the multiple tactics employed by pedestrians to subvert their assimilation into the pre-planned geometries of city design. He also alludes to Freud’s claims about repetition of spati...