Geographies of the Performing Arts: Landscapes, Places and Cities

Abstract

The performing arts of dance, theatre, music and live art have become established means through which cultural geographers can examine how people experience and make sense of their everyday worlds. Simultaneously, performance theorists and practitioners increasingly seek geographical tools that help elucidate the broader processes or politics that underpin artistic genres of performance. This review article works at this interdisciplinary nexus, exploring the diverse areas of engagement between geography and the performing arts. It provides an overview of three spatialities around which interdisciplinary exchanges take place, and where there are interesting synergies in the conceptual approach to studying geographies of performance, namely: landscapes, places and cities. In so doing, the article outlines some avenues where geography and performance studies academics might further their mutual interests, and argues that geography is central to the constitution, meaning and form that performance works take.

Performance and urban space: An ambivalent affair

“…For geographers, the potential of performance to reflect on contestations around, for example, place and identity is nothing new (see,e.g., Johnston & Pratt, ; Longhurst, ; Nash 2000). As Rogers (, p. 60) points out, theories and practices from the performing arts offer geography means through which to “reveal the experiential qualities of space and place” and “provide a way to think about their power‐laden politics.” Accordingly, geographers have long applied performance as a useful lens to better understand how different spatialities are lived, experienced, and constituted (see,e.g., Thrift, , ; Thrift & Dewsbury, ). Performance here constitutes a methodological lens that enables us to analyze urban space as performance.…”

“…The aim here is to use the cases simply as illustrative examples, rather than providing thorough empirical case studies. Furthermore, this paper does not provide an exhaustive mapping out of geographies of performance in relation to cities (for an excellent overview in this regard, see Rogers, , in this journal). Rather, the paper provides tools for developing a critical framework that thinks carefully about the politics of performance in relation to the production of urban space.…”

The enchanted path: magic and modernism in psychogeographical walking

“…A recent collection of artists from the Walking Artists Network (Qualmann and Hind ) not only shows the variety of the scene, but its insurgent playfulness, with many of the pieces offered as a disorientating game played in the landscape (see also Butler ; Ingold and Vergunst ). As this implies, the aura of yearning and the uncanny that Pinder () and Gallagher () locate in specific artist audio‐walks is less typical of recent artists’ psychogeography than the kind of ludic and political works Pinder depicts elsewhere as the ‘arts of urban exploration’ (2005b; see also Middleton ; Rogers ; Smith ) . However, Pinder has also warned against reducing art walking to a set of political interventions, arguing for recognition of the artists’ poetic and open intent (in his study of Francis Alÿs, he notes how ‘he summons shadows and spirits’; 2011, 684).…”

Intergenerational Community-Based Research and Creative Practice: Promoting Environmental Sustainability in Jinja, Uganda

“…Narrative storytelling-in this context in the form of a poem-can be an affective and embodied practice creating transgressive possibilities through performance (Rogers, 2012). Here an elected member among the younger participants would speak the words of multiple elders from their community, voicing their environmental knowledges and reflections.…”