What's Safe

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.

2016

Moving Publics develops a set of strategies for analyzing how professional sitebased dances refunction and reframe the public spaces in which they are set. Using a site-specific methodology, I focus on five case studies in Vancouver (Canada) to advance a theory about the reciprocal relationship between ground and movement-a notion of "choreographic topographies" that is sensitive to the socially and politically inscribed grooves that constitute a given dance's local emplacement. I examine an archival dance, an "urban proscenium" dance, a vertical dance, a danced walking tour, and a tactile dance to analyze how different forms of site-based dance hail audiences in their bids for curbside attention. These performances, I argue, contain important information about the relationship between a temporary public and the address (in the dual sense of salutation and location) around which that public coheres. I contend that choreographic explorations of public places bring us together to move, or in stillness to watch, in ways that challenge our atomized movement through city spaces. In doing so, these dance-based practices pose questions of aesthetics, use, access, exclusion, density, and mobility in resolutely physical terms. Framed by kinaesthetic concepts (arriving, gathering, following, turning, lifting, passing, and adjusting), Moving Publics proposes a model of choreographic thinking that takes movement as a critical lens as well as an object of study. Extending outward from my study of the choreographic object, I bring a movement interpreter's attention to the physical arrangements of audiencing bodies in and around the dances I study. I analyze the consequences of coding as theatrical both the publics and the public spaces in which these dances are set, and I examine what dance-a form that regularly relies on directed, delegated, and aesthetic labour in the context of collaborative co-presencecan expose about how we move in and through our cities, with and past one another. The dances I study foreground how the city (a built, legislated, lived, and perpetually unsettled structure) orchestrates a set of quiet choreographies of the everyday even as they reimagine a "relational kinaesthetics" at the threshold of vicariousness.

Recently a multitude of artists' endeavours to creatively engage with the public space have become more aligned with the temporal than the spatial. This shift away from traditional notions of public space has allowed for an increasingly elusive, radically dispersed number of events and intervals to occur. Projects incorporating sitespecificity have also shown a greater preoccupation with so-called non-spaces and non-sites. Many such artworks can be characterized by their movement from the grandiose to the more intimate in scale. Practices rooted in institutional critique now foreground playfulness rather than pontificate, although nonetheless maintaining a concertedly premeditated approach incorporating multiple angles, vantage points, and media. Much recent art has been involved with a choreographic turn as artists stage, configure, and orchestrate their creative actions. This article discusses a variety of these projects including artworks by Mark Boulos, Harrell Fletcher, Sharon Hayes, Toby Huddlestone, Tino Sehgal, Jane Tsong, and The Yes Men.

2018

By Alexandra Halligey This thesis proposes theatre and performance as tools for understanding the relational emergence of city spaces. It responds to two related urban studies calls. The first is for fine-grained ethnographies of the everyday to learn what city spaces might be becoming in order to strategise how to support these becomings. The second falls under the 'cultural turn' in urban thinking: what artistic projects might offer an everyday urbanism. Through an everyday urban lens, the work asserts the performativity of daily actions in constructing space, but also the affectual qualities that daily city life produces. These affectually charged, spatial constructions through the interrelation of daily activity are what make spaces become places, places that are temporary and always evolving. This thesis draws a link between everyday placemaking practices and the artistic practice of playmaking to propose theatre and performance as a way of learning about city spaces, actively engaging with this knowledge and broadcasting it. It argues that theatre and performance staged in the sites it seeks to know and in concert with city dwellers has the capacity to facilitate an embodied, but reflective experience of what it is to be continually implicated as a city dweller in spatial-and therefore place-construction through daily actions. The work takes as its primary focus a year-long participatory theatre and performance project run in the Johannesburg inner city suburbs of Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith's Paarl, resulting in a 'site-specific' play performed in the streets of the area. The practical component to the study is contextualized within the broader landscape of Johannesburg public art interventions over the last 15 years and specifically in relation to two other Johannesburg-based participatory public art projects: Terry Kurgan's Hotel Yeoville and a series of public art commissions managed by The Trinity Session. The research uses Tim Ingold's notion of corresponding with materiality in order to know as a methodology in service of understanding cities through their relational construction. This phronetic approach-knowing through doing-is applied to interpreting Kurgan's and The Trinity Session's work and to both the making of the theatre project in Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith's Paarl and the writing of this thesis. The study takes place at the intersection between urban studies, theatre and performance studies and public art. It draws together the socially-engaged concerns and considerations of all three fields to propose theatre and performance as a public art form offering a mode of productive, robust engagement with the contemporary urban moment. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, this project is indebted to Sara Matchett for casting me in Breathing spaces in 2005 and to Nicholas Dallas for describing and then lending me The practice of everyday life in 2009. The two happenings combined into my conceiving the project and they have informed my research process throughout. Breathing spaces was Sara's final Master's piece and a Mothertongue production-a cross-community professional theatre project created with ten women from Darling for the Voorkamer Fees and performed site-specifically in three of the women's homes. Nicholas's introduction to The practice of everyday life gave me the language to articulate what excited me about Sara's process and how I wanted to work in a similar way in a densely-urban context. I owe many more thanks besides: Further to the Mothertongue Project for the inspiration that my continued relationship with the theatre company provides and to Sara for all our conversations since 2005, both creative and academic. Mark Fleishman and Jennie Reznek for the two years of teaching and facilitating at Magnet Theatre-like the Mothertongue Project, so inspiring as to how and why to keep making and experimenting with socially-engaged theatre and performance. My Masters colleagues and dear friends, Ariel Hall and Veronika Boekelman, for their encouragement and for sustaining our conversations across the seas and continents. Clara Vaughan, for being my steadfast study partner, full of clarity and insights and patient listening to all my manic gabbling about the latest research revelation. Tizzle Leyland, without whose support, reading and deep interest, the first half of this PhD would have been a far harder path and not nearly as fun. For her constant witnessing of the journey from start to finish: Hanneke Mackie. Linda Hathorn and Penny Morrel for beds in Cape Town and so much more besides. Lucia Walker and Sharyn West for a retreat cottage and retreat dinners. Rike Sitas for literature at the beginning and Kim Gurney for a very helpful conversation midway. For early experiments, The Braamfontein Saturday Project group, especially Jenni-Lee

By critically analysing recent explorations into walking the city as a creative and politicised practice, this paper illustrates how mobile devices can be used as tools for radical play and to encourage subversive use of public spaces. Building on Henri Lefebrve's Writings on Cities (1993) and The Urban Revolution, (2003) this paper will offer new types of technologised mapping as a politicised performative practice that enacts participants 'right to the city'. Australian performance group pvi collective's recent piece Deviator,(2012) sited in Glasgow and other international cities, demands a subversive re-coding of the city via a technological derive, live performance and play. By positioning audiences as interventionists on the streets and encouraging a deviation from the norm the social codes of the city are reimagined and participant-spectators encounter potentially transformative interactions with public spaces.

Dance Articulated, 2021

Stemming from one creative experience that emerged in London during the lockdown period of early 2020, called the "Emergency Festival", this article is a result of observations based on practice, centred around the festival that a group of multicultural, interdisciplinary movement-based researchers and dancers created, curated, and participated in. It explores the possibility of making a radical alterity out of a hitherto previously established ideas of territory, time, and community, using performative writing as practice-based analysis scheme. Employing the concept of "communitas" by Victor Turner (1969) to approach the phenomenon of dance through distance, the article examines the importance of the emergence of collaboration as a way forward, epistemologically looking at dance as a method of creating and sustaining communities that are longing for a sense of home in times of change. The writing is divided into three parts, focussing on the aspects of space, time, and community, all the while embedded in the nature of movement and its effect on the practitioners, and onlookers, concluding with contemplation on the place of dance in varied mediums and the way forward to study it in a period of global disruption.

This paper presents the actions in the Project Breeze: sensitive territories, contributing for the discussion about democracy and social actions in the public sphere. BREEZE is a research project and artistic creation inserted in the fields of art, politics, science and nature. Methodologically founded on the Performance practice as research, we propose that political, poetical, aesthetical and cognitive issues may emerge from immersive experiences as a field of creative possibilities and of construction of critical thinking, contributing to the methodologies of research in Arts and to new mechanisms and creation devices. By proposing itself in this research field, BREEZE aims to dialogue with the Arts issues in the Anthropocene area, investigating new methodologies and practices about the relations of art with and for the nature and discuss social actions in the public sphere. As Chantal Mouffe (2007) says, the “public space” is not a place of consensus, but rather a battle camp where different hegemonic projects confront each other (…); the public spaces are always plural. We can also say they are complex territories, as proposed by Richard Sennett. Rather, sensitive territories permeated by subjectivities and sensorialities. Composed of a transdisciplinary research network which involves artists from different areas such as audiovisual, body arts, art and technology, visual arts and music, technologists, geographers, urbanists and residents of the studied regions, the project proposes a collaborative practice of investigations and creation.

Wired Aerial's As the World Tipped (2011) is heralded as a work of outdoor art that effects a literal shifting of the ground upon which the climate change debate rests, though it also participates in exposing the transience of the urban environment. The horizontality of the built stage is overlooked by an imposing mobile crane that rises into the night, a familiar, skeletal form that stalks cities across the globe as they transpose aspiration and renewal into architectural certainty. The choreography of such materialisations is writ large in Motionhouse's Traction (2011) in which dancers and construction vehicles meet in prehensile pirouettes that speak to the accommodations between man and machine. Yet, beyond the similarities in gesture, there is the foregrounding of the organic and inorganic alike as agents of labour in service of urban construction. In turn, one recalls the task-led The Bastille Dances (1989) of Station House Opera in which the performers broke down and reassembled 8000 breeze blocks in what they termed “grand scale sculptural theatre”. These dances play not on but with the fabric of the city, exposing the literal foundations of the urban alongside its reliance on cheap, itinerant, dispensable labour, cocooned in carapaces of protective outerwear, apart and invisible to the citizens, inured to the lure of hi-vis clothing. This paper considers the aforementioned works alongside others in advancing a belief that the making and remaking of the city can be made visible through performance. Just as architect Richard Rogers’ exoskeletal Lloyds Building and Pompidou Centre exposed the workings of the building so too does the making visible of the choreographic impulse of construction reveal the possibilities of understanding, engaging with and contesting the assumptions upon which it rests.

Dance Research Aotearoa, 2016

Creative practices emerge in relationship with ecologies, spaces and sites, where culture meets geography, where the terrain of the city meets the behaviours of its streets. This article translates the way one dancer has made her home in dance. It is structured around a series of narratives and employs practices of experimental writing in an attempt to capture affective moments. The paradigms that interconnect and inform this writing include practice-led research, contemporary dance, inter-disciplinary studio practices, somatic methodology and dance in tertiary education. Relationships between practices of dancing and writing are at the heart of this paper, which explores how affective spaces created by processes and ecologies of dance might be translated to the page. These auto-ethnographic narratives do not claim to speak for any communities of practice or to map relationships between cities and dancers. Instead, they concentrate on a few specific moments out of many, in the hope that these moments may illuminate a sense of how ecologies of dance, place and community interweave, creating all manner of different kinds of dance-homes, bringing sensoriums of proprioception, touch, connection and listening to the worlds of our cities.

Creative placemaking is no longer a friendly foil in the soft power arsenal of private property developers. It has been successfully institutionalised at every possible level from national governments to NGOs. Loosely threaded utopian hopes of democratic community building have been quickly woven into pretty bunting for insidious gentrification; winners’ pennants for the agents of systemic social cleansing. Some artists working in the field of social practice – once as instinctually opposed to free market economics and state instrumentalism – swallowed meagre scraps as bait for complete annexation to neoliberal agendas. Social practice has, in some cases, become ‘regeneration’s muse’ or at Balfron Tower, London, recruited artists as ‘foot soldiers’ whose arrival signals impending regeneration-by-social-cleansing. Even ‘poster boy for socially engaged art’ Theaster Gates concedes that gentrification is the inevitable (and profitable) end game for social practice as creative placemaking. But some (perhaps many) socially engaged artists do not wish to engage in creative placemaking’s global dystopian ‘dreamscapes’ nor in falsely democratic community ‘re-imaginings’ where state/developer always get their way. Artists in the US, UK and other countries are beginning to question why should ‘we’ want to ‘make’ a place for ‘them’. Don’t places already exist; already have communities? Who are ‘we’ to become embroiled in the sinister depths of urban planning, some artists wonder. Increasingly, socially engaged artists are, true to their roots, standing in support of those threatened with rehousing - against vested interests; taking direct action with people against place-makers; guarding complex community cultures and their existing ways of living.