English 9141A

Performance and the Global City

Professor K. Solga
Fall Half Course.

What is urban performance? How do cities “stage” themselves for citizens, tourists, politicians, and others? What kinds of performances shape the “creative city”? How do human geographers, performance theorists, theatre artists and others engage with urban studies issues in order to shape the city-worlds we now increasingly inhabit?

This course will combine theoretical readings with published descriptions and videos of key urban performance events as well as site visits to performance spaces in Toronto, Detroit, and here in London as we unpack these questions and imagine what urban performance might look like in the years ahead. Thinking through relational aesthetics, parkour and civic “play”, para-theatrical events (like sporting events, political rallies, and protests), and civic festivals (Toronto’s Nuit Blanche and Luminato, Montreal’s Theatre Festival of the Americas), we’ll also consider carefully and critically the political impact of linking art and culture work to a neoliberal urban agenda.

View the course syllabus here: English 9141.