Performing Cities

Performing Cities is an edited volume of contributions by a range of internationally renowned academics and performance makers from across the globe, each one covering a particular city and examining it from the dynamic perspectives of performances occurring in cities and the city itself as performance. Performing Cities is an edited volume of contributions by a range of internationally renowned academics and performance makers from across the globe, each one covering a particular city and examining it from the dynamic points of view of performances occurring in cities and the city itself as performance. Cities covered are Jerusalem, Singapore, Belgrade, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Toronto, Paris, Bogota, Cardiff, Chicago, Sydney and Palermo. Above all the book explores the possibilities of writing itself as a spatial practice that does justice to the city as a place of multiple movements. Where urban writing has for so long been dominated by textual readings of the city - as seen in the hackneyed trope of the 'city as text' - the case is made here for a move towards a form of situational, relational and performative writing that is premised on the multifarious inflections of bodies and actions in space Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Writing Performing Cities: An Introduction....Pages 1-18 Front Matter....Pages 19-19 Performing Palermo: Protests Against Forgetting....Pages 21-38 Sprawled, Distracted, and Trembling: Performing LA....Pages 39-55 Performing Paris: An Ecography of Meridians and Atmospheres....Pages 56-79 Performing Chicago: Seven Demolitions....Pages 80-98 Performing Cape Town: An Epidemiological Study in Three Acts....Pages 99-119 Performing Cardiff: Six Approaches to a City and Its Performance Pasts....Pages 120-138 Front Matter....Pages 139-139 Performing Sydney: Inhabiting the Edge....Pages 141-158 Performing Toronto: Enacting Creative Labour in the Neoliberal City....Pages 159-178 Performing Singapore: City/State....Pages 179-198 Performing Belgrade: Itineraries of Belonging....Pages 199-217 Performing Jerusalem: Religious, Historical, Ideological and Political Scenarios — and Some Personal Ones....Pages 218-232 Performing Bogotá: Memories of an Urban Bombing....Pages 233-244 Back Matter....Pages 245-254