City Stages #1: Exploring the Intersection of Performances, Bodies and Urban Landscapes
“All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women are merely players.” (William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1599)
The sentiment conveyed by Jaques in the sixteenth-century play, as mentioned above, may sound quite dramatic. Although the world might not always seem like a stage at every moment, theatre is in fact everywhere in the city. Social interactions and artistic performances form a tapestry of theatricality within urban settings. Theatre has long been intertwined with the citizenry, manifesting in diverse forms. While traditional art performances like ballets or concerts may not always be accessible, the theatricality of our daily interactions remains omnipresent, shaping our encounters with others on a subconscious level.
According to performance theorists, performances occur in several, and sometimes overlapping situations: in everyday life, in the arts, in sports, in business, in technology, in sex (gender), in ritual and in play. This merges insights from urban studies and performance studies to establish a connection between performance and urban theories. The exploration here primarily focuses on performances unfolding in the public spaces of urban areas, seeking to establish the connection between our social and aesthetic performances and the physical settings where we present ourselves to others — a notion termed as our city stages.
The writings of ‘City Stages’ here belong to a series of reflections on leading the Master of Architecture (MArch) studio Performing Architectures at the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Northumbria University, between 2018–2022 (Fig.1).
With a cohort of MArch students, we were exploring theatrical and performative dimensions between people, time and urban spaces. These spaces, often called “small urban spaces” (Whyte, 2001), “spaces between buildings” (Gehl, 1987) or the “public realm” (Sennett, 2020), serve as the backdrop for various theories highlighting the significance of low-intensity social interactions. The emphasis is placed on the pivotal role the public spaces play within the urban environment. According to theorists like Richard Schechner and Erving Goffman, these are the settings where performances take place.
Introducing the expansive realm of performance
Performance is a term hard to pin down, and so are its subdivisions. Within the broad field of performance studies, a multitude of perspectives are represented. David Wiles notes in ‘Places of Performance’ (2003) that during the 1960s and 1970s, a stark division was upheld between theatre as an institution and other forms of theatrical expression.
However, this perspective was challenged by numerous performance theorists in the subsequent decades. Professor Mike Pearson (1950–2022) expressed in his 1998 manifesto his irritation for the conservative character of this institution: “I can no longer sit passively in the dark watching a hole in the wall, pretending that the auditorium is a neutral vessel of representation. It is a spatial machine that distances us from the spectacle and that allies subsidy, theatre orthodoxy and political conservatism.” Wiles echoes similar sentiments by suggesting that “theatre-as-institution is a concept that serves the needs of the professional theatre historian”.
In the article ‘Selective inattention’ by Richard Schechner, he takes a position in this debate by introducing the eight-shaped-diagram, dividing performance into two worlds: social drama and aesthetic drama (Fig.2). This diagram illustrates a continuous relationship between ‘theatre-as-art’ and ‘everyday theatricality’.
Aesthetic performance and bodily co-presence
German Performance theorist, Erika Fischer-Lichte gives grip regarding aesthetic performance by stating that ‘the bodily co-presence’ is a crucial condition of a performance. ‘For a performance to occur, actors and spectators must assemble to interact in a specific place and for a certain period of time’. This is also reflected in the book — A Short History of Western Performance Space, which categorises several physical locations of performance. Those places Wiles indicates are for instance “the sacred space”, “the public space” and “the processional space”.
Performance theorist Fischer-Lichte, like Wiles or Schechner, rejects theories that define performances as an object-subject relation, where the performer is the active object, and the spectator passively consumes the performance: “Instead, their bodily co-presence creates a relationship between co-subjects. Through their physical presence, perception, and response, the spectators become co-actors that generate the performance by participating in the play”. Fischer-Lichte states that her theory is derived from 1920’s writings by Max Hermann that defined performance as a game in which everyone is a player, actors and spectators alike.
The below film shows the project ‘House With Ocean View’, by Marina Abramović, which fits well as an aesthetic performance. The three units were standing five feet above the ground, with a gap of about two feet in between each room. Sparsely furnished, they contained a rudimentary wooden bed with no mattress, a chair, a table, shelves containing a different outfit for each day, a sink, a shower, a toilet, and a ticking metronome marking the passage of time. Ladders with sharpened butcher knives for rungs, upturned. All the walls were pure white and all the furnishings in warm wood, with hard edges, the plumbing in stainless steel. A white line was drawn on the floor in front of the platform, marking a limit the audience was not allowed to cross.
Through the film, we can witness how performance involves the interaction between performer and audience, represented by the performer and spectator, within a contextual backdrop — the ‘stage set’ where their physical presence unfolds: the performance space. This setting could vary from a modern stage to a public plaza.
Social performance and the theatricality of everyday life
The urban experience has often been compared to a theatrical performance. Goffman employs theatrical performance as a metaphor to explore the significance of role-playing in social interactions: A character staged in a theatre is not in some ways real (…) but the successful staging (..) involves the use of real techniques — the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations.” (Goffman, 1990) While Goffman clarifies in the conclusion that his use of theatrical terminology in the book was purely metaphorical, his theory significantly impacted performance studies by shaping definitions of performance and elucidating the nuanced interplay between performer and audience.
Social performance is intricately intertwined with urban life. Jonathan Raban, in ‘Soft City’ (1974), underscores the omnipresence of strangers in urban environments. This perpetual exposure leads to continual rapid assessments of others, intertwining their identities with our own and fostering the development of stereotypes about those we encounter. Consequently, this process amplifies one’s own persona, effectively casting them as a participant in a theatrical production: “Once we reduce people to singular synecdochal roles [stereotypes], both our lives and theirs become part of a structured drama.”
“The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.” (Jonathan Raban, Soft City, 1974)
One notable observation of theatrical behaviours among unfamiliar city dwellers, referred to as strangers by Raban, is articulated by Jane Jacobs. She portrays the daily rhythms of her Greenwich Village street in New York as akin to a ballet — an organised chaos that serves a purpose, specifically fostering social cohesion, despite the participants being strangers to one another: “This order consists entirely of movements and changes, and though it is life, not art, we may whimsically label it the urban art form, akin to dance (…) an intricate ballet where individual dancers and groups each play unique roles that miraculously complement one another, forming a coherent whole.”
Studio explorations into aesthetic and social performances
The early stages of our studio projects involved a comprehensive exploration of both aesthetic and social performances. Together with my colleague Dr. Sebastian (Seb) Messer, we initiated the project by delving into the exploration and mapping of two city gateways: Westgate Road and Shields Road, starting in 2018 (Fig.4). Our methodology involved deep mapping and the creation of spatial narratives to chart the nuances of the streets and storefronts. This process encompassed the gathering of old and current maps, drawing, writing, photography, video, and audio recordings of the streets, interviews with local residents, and the incorporation of found objects such as old photographs, census data, and architectural drawings from the local archive.
In the subsequent phase, ‘Performance with the City’, we delved into theories such as the ‘Dérive’, the ‘Space of Flows’, ‘Urban Performativity’, ‘Aesthetic Performance vs Social Performance’, the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed, the ‘Expanding Theatre’, ‘Laban Movement Analysis’ and others. We aimed to integrate the everyday life dynamics of Newcastle’s urban landscape into a performative artwork. We encouraged students to view their chosen locations as valuable resources, casting them as storytellers of these specific places. They were tasked with utilising the language of human actions to form the new narratives; using the human body as a multifaceted tool for drawing, thinking, creating, sculpting and cognition; generating notational sketches within the spatial continuum. We encouraged the students to conceptualise space as an extension of bodies, and bodies as an extension of space. Whether on a small scale, such as within a room/gallery, or on a larger scale, encompassing the entire city, they can actively shape their environment while simultaneously being shaped by it.
The above figures offer a glimpse into the ‘performative practices’ at the studio, illustrating students’ dynamic engagements with urban landscapes, and covering political, social, environmental and infrastructural concerns for their MArch thesis. The exercise challenged established knowledge paradigms and imposed belief systems, as each performance arising from this practice is unique to its site, intricately crafted, and rich in multimedia representations of the locale and its inhabitants.
The aesthetic and social performances resonate with the buildings, artefacts, flora and fauna that are within it, and the activities of everyday life. For students, it’s a chance to step into the shoes of those who dwell here, conveying their hopes, dreams, joys, and anxieties, delving into the intricate bonds between people and their environment. This process crafts poignant spatial stories for the projects, which engage with the social, economic, political and cultural essence of the city.
Read the next part: City Stages #2: Communities and Ethnoscapes on the Edge by Dr. Jiayi Jin
Acknowledgements:
I am fortunate to have worked with Dr. Sebastian (Seb) Messer and all Year 5+6 MArch students in the Performing Architectures studio (2018–2022).
Bio:
Dr. Jiayi (Jennifer) Jin is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies. Jiayi taught studio at all levels from undergraduate to post-graduate, as well as theory courses and research methods for MArch and PhD. She was the Studio Lead of a MArch Studio: Performing Architectures (2018–2022), Acting Programme Lead for Master of Architecture (2021–2022).
