Performing the City

2014 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Martin
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Urban Organization ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
The City

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.

scholarly journals Performance studies. Experiments with the Methods of Transformation of Sociocultural Landscape

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-164
Author(s):  
Nadiya Babiy
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Landscape Studies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Social ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
The City

In the article, the concept of performance is considered as a leading communicative art practice of socialization of distinct spaces of Western Ukrainian cities. Performance studies are viewed as an effective global interdisciplinary field that views performance and uses performativity as a method of studying various cultural processes and practice of setting up and collaborating of the social groups and urbanistic spaces. In this context, performance art pieces, artistic projects, political actionism and other cultural practices and experiences are presented on the examples of actionism of Western Ukraine. Method of synthesis that helped to compare and generalize scientific sources and literature is applied; as well as the systematic method for the analysis of culturological aspects of performance and sociological method, when culture is considered as a factor in the organization of public life and the formation of the intellectual landscape. The methodology of the field research gave the work practical significance, due to the use of valuable photography materials, memories of the participants of performative practices. Observing the organization of the performance allowed to examine its reflexive effect on the audience. Performance studies are an important discipline that can be useful for all groups of the socio-cultural urban landscape. Studies of performance allow us to understand distinct world cultures or to evaluate our own behavior critically. Artists frequently develop their intuitive abilities through performance, look for hidden meanings in familiar objects and actions. The practice or contemplation of the performance by the consumers of the culture of “bread and spectacles” (Latin: panem et circenses) may consist in understanding one’s own assessment of the circumstances, comparing it with the perception of others, perhaps by changing one’s position. Government institutions have the opportunity to master additional resources to gain understanding of distinct environments of the city and at the same time to acquire effective methods of personnel management.

The Fiery Pacific: Volcanic Eruptions and Settler-State Theatricality in Oceania, 1780–1900

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-392
Author(s):  
Diana Looser
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Volcanic Eruptions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Red Color ◽  
Form Part ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
The City

In the closing scene of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's melodramaLa Tête de mort; ou, Les Ruines de Pompeïa(1827), audiences at Paris's Théâtre de la Gaîté were presented with the spectacular cataclysm of an erupting Mount Vesuvius that invaded the city and engulfed the hapless characters in its fiery embrace. “The theatre,” Pixérécourt writes, “is completely inundated by this sea of bitumen and lava. A shower of blazing and transparent stones and red ash falls on all sides…. The red color with which everything is struck, the terrible noise of the volcano, the screaming, the agitation and despair of the characters … all combine to form this terrible convulsion of nature, a horrible picture, and altogether worthy of being compared to Hell.” A few years later, in 1830, Daniel Auber's grand operaLa Muette de Portici(1828), which yoked a seventeenth-century eruption of Vesuvius with a popular revolt against Spanish rule in Naples, opened at the Théâtre de Monnaie in Brussels. The Belgian spectators, inspired by the opera's revolutionary sentiments, poured out into the streets and seized their country's independence from the Dutch. These two famous examples, which form part of a long genealogy of representing volcanic eruptions through various artistic means, highlight not only the compelling, immersive spectacle of nature in extremis but also the ability of stage scenery to intervene materially in the narrative action and assimilate affective and political meanings. As these two examples also indicate, however, the body of scholarship in literary studies, art history, and theatre and performance studies that attends to the mechanical strategies and symbolic purchase of volcanic representations has tended to focus mainly on Europe; more research remains to be undertaken into how volcanic spectacles have engaged with non-European topographies and sociopolitical dynamics and how this wider view might illuminate our understanding of theatre's social roles.

The war against the homeless: Frank Jordan, broken windows, and anti-homeless politics in San Francisco

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-81
Author(s):  
Sean Parson
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Public Space ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Broken Windows ◽  
The Public ◽  
Matrix Quality ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Chapter 4 discusses Mayor Frank Jordan’s (1992–1995) revanchist Matrix Quality of Life Program, which sought to enforce a broken-windows policing system in San Francisco. The impact of the policy was felt largely by the visible homeless in downtown San Francisco, who were regularly harassed and arrested by the police and forced out of the city. Because quality-of-life policing desires to sanitize the public space of disruptive and asocial behaviour, the public meals of Food Not Bombs near City Hall resisted the city’s attempt to criminalize homelessness. This chapter argues that the city attempted to construct the homeless as anti-citizens and exclude them from the political and physical spaces of the city.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Shu-Yeng Chung ◽  
Mike Douglass
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Shared Meanings ◽  
Equal Importance ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
The City

This chapter outlines how imaginative representations of the city, told through the images they convey or evoke, form collective expressions of human agency in placemaking and the (re)shaping of urban space. Of equal importance are polemical developments that play integral roles in influencing conditions for artistic and social (re)production in Singapore. In foregrounding society-space relations and the city, we argue that physical spaces are subject to a multitude of social imaginings, which are then projected back into urban space to convey individual and shared meanings, identities and purposes. Such diverse ways of conceptualising space, which can sometimes be born out of resistance, present another mode of understanding and experiencing the lived city.

Vexing Visibilities

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-172
Author(s):  
Bretton White
Keyword(s):  
Central City ◽  
City Center ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Spaces ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Chapter 4 investigates the relationship between fear and perceptibility in the play Chamaco (2006) by Abel González Melo. Using works by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, it explores how gay and transvestite characters travel through and manipulate the central city spaces of Havana, most notably the Parque Central, transforming official, celebratory spaces of the nation into concealed meeting places that reveal the true, queer nature of the city. This chapter argues that this play is concerned with the ethereal, and that the transformative possibilities of queer sex—which in this play occur at the periphery of the city center—can encourage a multiplicity of citizenships that extend from the queer throughout the city, and not just at its edges. In Carlos Celdrán’s direction of Chamaco the physical spaces of stage and city are reconstructed by playing with what is visible to the audience and other characters via lighting. Celdrán makes previously “invisible” queer bodies visible by utilizing light as an inclusionary tactic. Further, he challenges ideas about utopia and dystopia, center and margin, hetero- and homonormative by collapsing the public and private spaces of street and home in his staging of the work.

Urban Communication

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan J. Drucker ◽  
Gary Gumpert
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Place And Space ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Urban Communication ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The City

Cities themselves function as media of communication. They are places where messages are created, carried, and exchanged by structures, infrastructures, and people. Urbanity is an age-old phenomenon undergoing radical transformation as developing means of communication redefine traditional notions of place and space. Urban communication meshes population density, technology and social interaction. Urban communication, like urban studies, is an interdisciplinary field that provides a fresh perspective from which to view the city and its transformation. The communication lens offers valuable perspectives and methodologies for the examination of urban and suburban life. It conceptualizes the city as a complex environment of interpersonal interaction, a landscape of spaces and places that shape human behavior, and an intricate technological environment. The development of urban communication research and activities is traceable from the early works a diverse group of urbanists to more current research programs conducted by communication scholars. Urban communication foregrounds communication in the study of the urban landscape. The unique patterns and needs of urban dwellers and communities are examined in an age where cities are layered with media technologies. An increasing number of technologies enable information from the digital world to be layered onto the physical world through augmented realities, thereby altering the person–environment relationship by creating spaces in which users interact with their physical surroundings through digital media. The future of cities is increasingly influenced by media technology. Cities are global, connected, inclusive, livable, green, sustainable, mega, and smart. Cities have been identified as communicative cities. There are many ways of looking at communication and cities and the history and broad parameters of the growing area of urban communication.

scholarly journals Waves of Data

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 80-83
Author(s):  
Greg Niemeyer
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
City Planning ◽  
University Of California ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
The Arts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The City ◽  
Positive Effect

With Brittney Silva’s tragic May 2014 death fresh in everyone’s memory, the city of San Leandro began collaboration efforts between them and University of California, Berkeley to do something to make the city safer for pedestrians. A course was developed at UC Berkeley called Sensing Cityscapes, offered Fall 2015, aiming to collect data about human activities too often ignored. As part of the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative, the class aimed to harness methods not just from city planning, engineering, and architecture, but from the humanistic disciplines, cognitive science, art, public health, and performance studies, bringing students together from each field. We now are bringing the installation back to the streets of San Leandro with the support of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town grant for a project called San Leandro Lights. Transferring the project from the lab back to the street, we hope that the positive effect for individuals we observed in the lab will remain, and that responsive lighting will create a dynamic culture of attention.

scholarly journals Identification of Urban Leprosy Clusters

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Antonio Armani Paschoal ◽  
Vania Del’Arco Paschoal ◽  
Susilene Maria Tonelli Nardi ◽  
Patrícia Sammarco Rosa ◽  
Manuela Gallo y Sanches Ismael ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Ecological Study ◽  
Population Based ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Time Analysis ◽  
Clinical Forms ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
The City

Overpopulation of urban areas results from constant migrations that cause disordered urban growth, constituting clusters defined as sets of people or activities concentrated in relatively small physical spaces that often involve precarious conditions.Aim. Using residential grouping, the aim was to identify possible clusters of individuals in São José do Rio Preto, Sao Paulo, Brazil, who have or have had leprosy.Methods. A population-based, descriptive, ecological study using the MapInfo and CrimeStat techniques, geoprocessing, and space-time analysis evaluated the location of 425 people treated for leprosy between 1998 and 2010. Clusters were defined as concentrations of at least 8 people with leprosy; a distance of up to 300 meters between residences was adopted. Additionally, the year of starting treatment and the clinical forms of the disease were analyzed.Results. Ninety-eight (23.1%) of 425 geocoded cases were located within one of ten clusters identified in this study, and 129 cases (30.3%) were in the region of a second-order cluster, an area considered of high risk for the disease.Conclusion. This study identified ten clusters of leprosy cases in the city and identified an area of high risk for the appearance of new cases of the disease.

Perverting Play: Theorizing a Queer Game Mechanic

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Engel
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Media History ◽  
Locative Media ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
Queer History ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
The City

This article argues the possibility of building not just a queer gaming experience but rather a queer game mechanic—that is, a game whose very structure of play can be theorized as queer. It presents the prototype game Go Queer, a locative media history app, as a theoretical experiment in what it might mean to play queer. Queer theorists and historiographers have demonstrated the intimate relation between queer subjects and the city; the game literalizes this dynamic, requiring players to travel the physical spaces of the city in the hopes that they will encounter queer history—now disappeared, redeveloped, forgotten. It proposes that a productive and underrepresented setting for queer play is the space of the city itself and that the hybrid reality of locative media provides particular affordances to enable particularly queer navigations, occupations, and constructions of queer urban space.

GONE WITH THE WIND: PHYSICAL SPACES IN THE THIRD GENERATION METROPOLIS

2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (supp02) ◽  
pp. 233-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
GUIDO MARTINOTTI
Keyword(s):  
Social Changes ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
Urban Forms ◽  
Civic Organization ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Social Orders ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
The City

This paper makes an attempt to deal with the description, and possibly the explanation, of the profound transformation of the city, and of the changes in urban experience and practices, connected with the shape of contemporary urbanization. I stress the term description, because as it occurs in all periods of fast social changes, our conceptual tools tend to become blunt before we realize that normal science keeps failing us. The city is a complex and ambiguous object, as it is constituted by two parts, or orders of facts, inextricably bound. One is visible, i.e. observable through physical wavelengths: the other is not physically visible and can be grasped only by intellectual tools. Arrangements in the second order of facts, though, are responsible for arrangements in the first one, in the sense of producing them, and these in turn affect the former ones, although in ways and in degrees that are far from being clear. In general, decoding between the two order of facts is hazardous and has not produced a set of rules widely consented upon. This is why I remain very skeptical and in some cases outright critical of models stressing continuities in the concepts of civic organization, by referring to traditional urban forms. Reminiscent of Anthony Gidden's sharp statement that the city is one of those social forms that display "a specious continuity with pre-existing social orders" (Giddens, (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press, Stanford, p. 6) I will try to etch analytical tools capable to clarify at least a few processes that are shaping civic life in contemporary metropolis.

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