Performance And The City

Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award 2016 Urban studies has long understood the city as a 'text'. What would it mean now to use performance to rethink that metaphor? Performance and the City queries the role theatre and performance play in urban policy, architecture, and civic history, while also exploring their important place in the memories created in the wake of urban trauma.

Cities, with their rising populations and complex configurations, have become key symbols of a fast-changing modernity. This timely collection gathers together various urban writings from a range of relevant disciplines, including architecture, geography, sociology, visual art, ethnography and psychoanalysis. Its focus, however, is performance. Underscoring the importance of the field, it shows how performance functions as a dynamic, interdisciplinary mechanism which is central not only to understanding the multiplicity of urban living but also to the way the identities of cities are shaped. Gathering together key writings on the city and performance by authors ranging from Walter Benjamin to Tim Etchells to Carl Lavery, the reader can be navigated in any number of ways. Supported by extensive introductory material, it will be essential and evocative reading for anyone interested in making connections between performance and urban life.

How can an understanding of theatre in the city help us make sense of urban social experience? Theatre& the City explores how relationships between theatre, performance and the city affect social power dynamics, ideologies and people's sense of identity. The book evaluates both material conditions (such as architecture) and performative practices (such as urban activism) to argue that both these categories contribute to the complex economies and ecologies of theatre and performance in an increasingly urbanised world. Foreword by Tim Etchells.

A contribution to the field of urban music studies, this book presents new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of music in urban social life. It takes musical performance as its key focus, exploring how and why different kinds of performance are evolving in contemporary cities in the interaction among social groups, commercial entrepreneurs, and institutions. From conventional concerts in rock clubs to new genres such as the flash mob, the forms and meanings of musical performance are deeply affected by urban social change and at the same time respond to the changing conditions. Music has taken on complex roles in the post-industrial city where culture and cultural consumption have an unprecedented power in defining publics, policies, and marketing strategies. Further, changes in real estate markets and the penetration of new media have challenged even fairly modern music cultures. At the same time, new music cultures have emerged, and music has become a driver for cultural events and festivals, channeling the dynamics of a society characterized by the social change, media intensity, and the neoliberal forces of post-industrial urban contexts. The volume brings together scholars from a broad range of disciplines to build a shared understanding of post-industrial contexts in Europe and the United States. Most directly grounded in contemporary developments in music studies and urban studies, its broad interdisciplinary range serves to strengthen the relevance of urban music studies to fields such as anthropology, sociology, urban geography, and beyond. Offering in-depth studies of changing music culture in concert venues, cultural events, and neighborhoods, contributors visit diverse locations such as Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York, and Austin.

For three school years, from 2007 to 2010, about 200 high-needs New York City public schools participated in the Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program, whose broad objective was to improve student performance through school-based financial incentives. An independent analysis of test scores, surveys, and interviews found that the program did not improve student achievement, perhaps because it did not motivate change in educator behavior.

Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award 2016 Following the ground-breaking Performance and the City, this new volume explores what it means to create and experience urban performance – as both an aesthetic and a political practice – in the burgeoning world where cities are built by globalization and neoliberal capital.

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.