Performing the City

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.

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 ...

Geography Compass, 2018

Artistic performance is increasingly seen as a crucial creative means of empowerment in the midst of urban transformation. However, the varied abilities of performance to challenge, or not, existing power structures are often lost in analyses that either celebrate the utopian potential of performance for challenging hegemonic oppression, or critique performance for being inevitably complicit with hegemonic sociopolitical ideologies due to its material conditions. By introducing a neo‐Marxist critical framework that focuses on the interplay between socio‐material conditions and performance, this paper promotes a nuanced analytic strategy for examining the relation between performance and urban space.

PAJ, 2015

Performance and the city Gülgün Kayim in conversation with Bertie Ferdman A n award-winning interdisciplinary theatre artist, Gülgün Kayim is co-founder of the acclaimed, Minneapolis-based site-specific performance collective Skewed Visions, as well as a teacher, curator, and arts administrator. She is also Director of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy for the City of Minneapolis. Kayim has always been fascinated by urban spaces and the memories they occupy. As such, she has made urban site-specific practices the hallmark of her career. Originally from Cyprus, Kayim and her Turkish family fled when she was only five, amid the violent conflict and subsequent civil war that erupted between the Greek majority and Turkish minority population. She was raised in London, where she received her degree in theatre and film from the University of Middlesex, and then came to the United States to continue her studies at the

Theatre Survey, 2014

Performance and the Global City, 2013

Performance Interventions is a series of monographs and essay collections on theatre, performance, and visual culture that share an underlying commitment to the radical and political potential of the arts in our contemporary moment, or give consideration to performance and to visual culture from the past deemed crucial to a social and political present. Performance Interventions moves transversally across artistic and ideological boundaries to publish work that promotes dialogue between practitioners and academics, and interactions between performance communities, educational institutions, and academic disciplines.

The Cambridge World History, 2015

The rapid development of early cities at different dates in many regions of the world affected their hinterlands profoundly, The cities became ceremonial and economic centers, appropriating functions that had previously been scattered, as well as serving as a stage for activities of new f)4)es, both in administration and, at least as importantly, in perfiormances. In the late fourth millennium nce, Uruk in southem Mesopotamia grew to cover more than zoo hectares, of which around nine were devoted to the Eanna precinct, a vast open area of uncertain but clearly ceremonial use. The construction of the ciry and of the sacred precinct, which required unprecedented amounts of labor, were themselves events and performances, creating arenas for repeated use in future perfiormances. These nerü¡ spaces were closely tied into the centers of population, unlike some great monuments of comparably early date, such as the third millennium megalithic circle of Stonehenge in southern England, which were constructed by dispersed Neolithic societies. The urban centers also drew population from hinterlands, which became "rurahzed," depending on cities for most things apart from agricultural subsistence. In all of this elites played the primary role, while performances enhanced social solidaricy and mitigated the societies' deep divisions in power and wealth. Performers could be seen as existentially distinct from non-performers, or even superior to them, but necessary to the collective existence.

2016

Cities are a focal point in our narratives about history. [… W]e look at cities to see where history is taking us. [… I]t seems that the future of mankind is somehow connected to cities.« These three sentences, taken, in condensed form, from Miguel Sicart's essay »Play and the City« in this special issue of Navigationen, capture the significance and urgency of our heightened interest in the development of cities. Indeed, studies of the history, current state, and potential futures of cities abound (and have done so for decades), occupying the center of some disciplines, such as urban studies, 1 and constituting subfields of other disciplines, such as literary and cultural studies, 2 media studies, 3 and history. 4 What distinguishes the essays and discussions assembled in this issue from the majority of research on the city, however, is a shared focus on play as a crucial urban element. As Sicart points out in his essay, »playful engagement with urban environments has been a constant mode of resistance and appropriation of cities for their citizens,« and it seems to us that this engagement deserves much deeper and broader analysis than it has been afforded to date. Thus, this special issue draws attention to the city as a playground: as a space that enables, and perhaps inherently calls for, playful and often creative encounters among inhabitants, visitors, and the urban environment itself. As Bruce McComiskey and Cynthia Ryan note about the urban theories advanced by Henri Lefevbre and Michel de Certeau,

Professor Donald Mitchell, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, USA