Performing Cities

Nicolas Whybrow (ed)
Hardback 250 pages (2014)
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137032522

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, Sydney, LA, Cape Town, Toronto, Paris, Palermo, Cardiff, Chicago and Bogotá, while writers number Sue-Ellen Case, Gay McAuley, David Williams, Mike Pearson, Matthew Goulish and Freddie Rokem. 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.

List of contributors: David Williams, Sue-Ellen Case, Carl Lavery, Matthew Goulish, Mark Fleishman, Jay Pather, Mike Pearson, Heike Roms, Gay McAuley, Laura Levin, Paul Rae, Silvija Jestrović, Freddie Rokem and María Estrada-Fuentes