performance & community: some brief reflections
TRANSCRIPT
Performance and community
Some brief reflections
Graham Jeffery
Double-edged discourses• Community as slippery – invoked by policymakers and developers, inherently
‘defensive/exclusionary’ but also as a space of hope, solidarity and possibility?• Spectacle and performance – living in an increasingly spectacularised/mediatized
society – constant recuperation of performance and spectacle to serve powerful interests
• Foregrounds the politics of performance – in whose interest(s) are ‘community performances’ taking place?
• Arguably, all performances are community performances – values, aesthetics, representation, institutions, economics etc
• Double-edged narratives of regeneration, poverty and development: Markers of disposability/obsolescence but also sites of opportunity – for whom?
Giroux and public pedagogy
• Histories of critical public performance practice and community education
• The politics of public space – how is this secured, defended, contested?
• How places are enacted and performed – both in the everyday (see, e.g. Alan Read’s work on theatres of everyday life) and through the rituals of art-making –working in public – ‘special occasions’
• Ethics, agency, power and representation are all important – as well as the ability to translate, mediate, produce, dialogue – skills and principles together…
Principles
• Spatial agency and social agency: creative methods which build active involvement and participation
• Fran Tonkiss: ‘space at the margins, and room for manoeuvre in the cracks & geographies of urban power,…minor practices, ordinary audacities and little anti-utopias that nevertheless create material spaces of hope.... Such spaces may matter most when...prospects are most bleak’
Spaces of possibility and hope?
• Under what circumstances? • Connective approaches and the relationships
between the arts, activism and social change• Artists working in public/across sectors/between
organisations – brokering, bridge-building etc – as intermediaries/ambiguous actors/agents provocateurs
• Complex politics of funding – question of community arts relationship with the state (and private sectors) has not really been addressed since Owen Kelly (1984)
Odd Numbers – mythmaking in Milton
• Storytelling, ritual, play• A place without much visible heritage (cf.
Govan..)• High deprivation, and all the problems of power
and representation of poverty-stricken communities
• Reverse archaeologies?• Intergenerational practice• Inviting people into a participative, performed
space
http://nadfly.net/ODDNUMBERS
Future research agendas
• Connecting performance/practice perspectives with the sociologies, histories and geographies of contested spaces and places – as well as with architecture/urban design/planning
• Critical interventionist/public arts practices as a catalyst for changing perceptions, challenging power structures and revealing/uncovering identities and histories
• The value of small gestures/small projects versus the complexities of macro-social struggles – Harvey’s ‘spaces of hope’ and the ‘insurgent architect’
www.generalpraxis.org.uk
www.twitter.com/grahamjeffery
www.twitter.com/RemakingSociety