Performing Culture

As a mode of cultural production, the performance of culture – whether high or low, formal or vernacular, material or digital – involves a series of embodied actions that unfold over time and at various scales in a range of purpose-built and adaptively reused spaces. It is by moving in different ways – physically, but also imaginatively, affectively, socially, culturally and politically – that bodies, individually and collectively, produce and perform culture and hence co-generate urban spaces. Performative actions may include instruments and props, be guided by scripts and scores, and culminate in distinct situations or events. On a spectrum from amateur to professional, performers are artists (e.g., actors, poets, musicians, dancers and Carnival krewes) who present their work publicly after it has been tested and refined through rehearsal. Performances of urban culture, then, are supported by a distributed infrastructure of rehearsal spaces (as well as performance venues, the city streets and community and cultural centres) that are accessed across cities, often in a time-limited way through short-term rentals. Where they can still afford to operate in cities, rehearsal rooms and recording studios can be rented by the hour or day to individuals and small groups. Many larger cultural institutions like universities, colleges, theatres, museums, libraries, dance studios and music halls also offer rehearsal spaces through rentals and residency programmes, but these come at a cost and must be applied and budgeted for. Those performers with long-term institutional relationships and contracts usually have access to stable and affordable rehearsal facilities, but individuals and community groups often struggle to access such spaces and are forced to be more mobile. In a panoply of small rehearsal spaces in the backrooms of bars, suburban garages, strip-mall storefronts, abandoned warehouses and even on pavements, subway platforms and apartment balconies, the uncertainties and vulnerabilities underlying creativity and cultural experimentation play out. Yet, as Bingham-Hall and Kaasa (2018: 10) specify, “[i] f performers are mobile, use infrastructures for time-limited periods, and are less tied to specific locations”, their infrastructural needs are less likely to be articulated in a unified political voice that can be amplified through media coverage, and they are less likely to be implicated in the contentious “politics of place” that contributes to neighbourhood-based gentrification.

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