City as

Performance

Imanuel Schipper
In the last five to ten years the number of performances that have taken place in urban
environments mainly in public spaces has increased dramatically. Nearly every theatre
institution has its own city project, every major city a sculpture biennale, and, of course, at
least one festival with the explicit mission to use the urban environment. Even though my subject in its broadest sense, art in urban spaces, concerns all the different kinds of arts, my focus
here istheatre and performance in urban spaces that I saw in Germany and Switzerland
between 2007 and2013.1

1. This text is based on two talks, one held at the Performance Studies international conference at Stanford
University in June 2013, and the other at the Scenography Symposium Layering Reality: The Right to Mask,
November 2013 in Prague.

18

TDR: The Drama Review 58:3 (T223) Fall 2014. 2014

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In Zrich alone over the past five years (to use the city in which I live as an example), I saw
all of the major theatre institutions (Schauspielhaus Zrich, Neumarkt Theater, Rote Fabrik,
and Gessnerallee Zrich) and the international Zrcher Theater Spektakel organizing various productions in the city. As examples of these productions I point to the stagings of eight
well-known urban places, such as hotels, train and bus stations, apartment houses, courts, factories, and others in Ciudades Paralelas (2010); walking tours by Bernhard Mikeska, including
GHOSTS: whos watching you? (2007) and Departure: Zrich HB (2013); Stefan Kaegis RemoteX
(2013); and the staging of the opera La Traviata im Hauptbahnhof (2008) by Opernhaus Zrich
in the main Zrich train station and broadcast live by the Swiss TV station Arte TV. In addition there was the huge public art project (as the organizers referred to it), Art and the City
(2012), that took place in an emerging part of Zrich West, organized by the Civil Engineering
and Waste Management Department and sponsored by huge real estate companies that are in
the process of developing this new dynamic district.2 The use of urban space is very different in
each of these productions. The staging of the opera used the train station as a backdrop and was
geared toward television viewers: The station is simultaneously an opera stage and a television
studio and must, of course, remain a station during this period. The television audience at
home is sitting in the front row, said producer Christian Eggenberger (in Berthoud 2008). The
goal of staging La Traviata in the train station was to bring opera closer to a wider TV-audience
than televised operas normally attracted. Neither the travelers nor the spectators in the train
station were overtly addressed in the production. On the contrary, the stations operation and
the passersby were not to be disturbed by the opera, according to the station manager, Willi
Bhler (Berthoud 2008). Nevertheless, the massive technical effort (15 kilometers of cables, 151
installed microphones, 16 cameras) had a significant impact on the train station for several days.
The press photographs of this staging of the opera looked less like the busy goings-on of a train
station and more like a substitute opera stage. Special blocked-off areas were used to ensure
good camera positions and to keep the scene free from the mixing of art and everyday life. The
aim was to create a stage aesthetic within the everyday life of the train station that seamlessly
served to create the reality of an opera production, which took place in a train station.
The productions of Ciudades Paralelas, curated by Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi, had a different way of dealing with urban space. This 10-day event made stops in various cities; eight semipublic places and buildings were staged in different ways by the various artists who participated.
The productions included tours, collective choreography, concerts, and performative installations. Audiences had to buy theatre tickets at the coproducing theatre in advance and were then
given the exact address of each event. The Zrich version of Ciudades Paralelas was followed by

2. These companies then had the chance to use the artworks from the event in their brochures and websites to
promote the artsy neighborhoods as investment opportunities. See www.hardturm.com/pub/aat.php and
www.utebarth.com/NOT_VITAL_Mobimo_Sponsoring_Niger.htm.

Figure 1. (facing page) The audience watching Prime Time, directed by Dominic Huber, performed in the
Ciudades Paralelas festival. July 2011, Zrich, Switzerland. (Photo by Dominic Huber)

City as Performance

Imanuel Schipper is a dramaturge and performance and theatre studies scholar at the Zrich University
of the Arts. He is a Senior Researcher in the Swiss National Science Foundations (SNSF) funded research
projects on Re/Occupation: Designing Public Spheres in Urban Space by Theatrical Interventions
and Longing for Authenticity: A Critical Analysis of the Term and the Actual Practice in the Context
of Contemporary Staging. He has worked as a dramaturge for the theatre collective Rimini Protokoll
and has developed, along with the collective, a contemporary mode of documentary theatre.
imanuel.schipper@zhdk.ch

19

an interdisciplinary research project on how the productions dealt with public space and the
public.3 Prime Time is the title of the staging of an apartment building by Dominic Huber and
it refers to the evening hours when many people typically watch television and therefore when
the best programs are broadcast. For Prime Time, the meeting place was a grocery store at the
corner of Josef Street and Otto Street in Zrich. If one was unfamiliar with the surroundings,
it was not easy to see where the performance was going to happen. Initially, there was little that
pointed to exactly where the show would take place: it looked as though the whole neighborhood was already staged somehow. Equipped with headphones for the audio installation part
of the event, the audience gathered opposite a common four-story apartment house, passively
ready to watch the play. They had to stand at a certain distance across the street in order to see
the house and the completely choreographed performance.
The outside of the apartment building was untouched. Inside the apartments, however, there
were slight changes that, along with the choice of the building itself, comprised the set and
lighting design for the piece. Huber, the director, worked with colorful theatre lights from the
inside as the audience looked at the tableau vivant from the outside. The performers were the
actual inhabitants themselves, and they did quotidian actions like standing at the window, standing on the balcony, sitting at the piano, and so on. Sometimes they were just standing at the
window and looking down at the audience on the street, thereby turning the spectators into
performers as well.
The soundtrack was a mixture of live sound transmitted from the apartments, and prerecorded and edited interviews with the residents about their lives. Each story was a single sentence that gave some hint about the person who was spotlighted by the lighting design at the
very moment the audience heard his or her statement. The personally narrated biographies
sometimes seemed like professional CVs, complete with profession, education, and even political views; other statements were strange stories revealing that the inhabitants were aware of
one another. Sometimes there was an anecdote about Zrichs past or a situation that happened
in the apartment building. Along with the recorded stories were live sounds: a girl playing the
piano, a PlayStation soccer game, kitchen noises, etc. This multi-sourced soundtrack mixed
places (inside the apartments and the locations of the interviews) and times (now and then) layering distance and proximity in the context of the present setting, that is, the stage itself: the
apartment building, the windows, and the inhabitants. Looking at the house and listening to the
fragments of narrative was like surfing through Facebook profiles or opening the small windows
of pre-Christmas Advent calendars to find a picture or candy inside.

Imanuel Schipper

As with La Traviata im Hauptbahnhof, Prime Time makes a clear and obvious separation
between the space where the performance takes place and the space from which this performance is watched. Again, special attention was paid to ensuring that everyday life was not disturbed: bicycles and cars continued to pass by on the street that separated the spectators from
the building. As an aesthetic experience, Prime Time was reminiscent of watching TV because
of its use of the film-like panoptical, voyeuristic view identified by media scholar Georg
Christoph Tholen (in Schipper and Dangel 2011). Yet the audience was not at home, sitting in
front of a screen, but rather they were standing on the street with headphones. This meant that
there was not one perfect place from which to observe (as there is with the camera filming the
TV opera), but a variety of possible sites whose vantage points could not be entirely controlled.
Unlike La Traviata im Hauptbahnhof, the urban space of Prime Time was not just used as a backdrop, but rather the specific building was used as the stage itself. As the private, albeit staged,

20

3. Re/Occupation: Designing Public Spheres in Urban Space by Theatrical Interventions was an interdisciplinary
research project under my supervision at the Zrich University of the Arts that was funded by the Swiss National
Science Foundation (SNSF). The project mainly tracked the Zrich version of Ciudades Paralelas. For more information see blog.zhdk.ch/reoccupation/.

Figure 2. In Prime Time, directed by Dominic Huber as part of the Ciudades Paralelas festival, the
audience watches the apartment building from the outside. July 2011, Zrich, Switzerland. (Photo by
Dominic Huber)
lives in the apartments were made public they were infused with the interactions of people on
the street, initiating not only a process of public-space consumption but also one of publicspace production.
The relations between public and private space and place are among the most discussed concepts in current discourses on urban life and artistic practices. Cities are in many ways the
most popular topic of our time, relevant to nearly every culture, population, gender, ethnicity,
and nearly every discipline and social group. I am very aware that the majority of the 50 percent of the worlds population who already live in cities live in situations where questions like
the ones discussed here are not their main concern. I am also aware that I will discuss situations, phenomena, and problems that occur in medium to large cities in the northwestern part
of Europe that have a comparable luxury in their ability to deal with cultural and urban problems and possibilities. Nevertheless I want to argue that Western European citizens have to
take responsibility for rethinking the culture they are constructing by living in cities. Hopefully
some of the ideas formulated in Western Europe will be useful to the rest of the world and vice
versa. Present urban and cultural policies are widely criticized for turning cities into scenes for
events, eagerly transforming sites and channels of public expression into fun promotional
spaces that represent a happily regulated vision of pleasure (see Sorkin 1992; Boyer 1993). In
this regard, a form of aesthetic power can be used as a means of controlling how we think
about cities and how we live in them by deciding what and who should be visible and what and
who should be invisible (Zukin 1995:7). This is why we have to rethink basic questions such
as: What is a city? Or better: What does a city do? How is the life between buildings created, as proposed in 1971 by Danish architect Jan Gehl ([1987] 2011)? How do we add meaning (what is relevant to our life) to the places that we build (the city)? How do we wish a city to
be? How would we dream of cities we would like to live in? How can we dare to dream of what
we reallydesire?

What Is a City?
City as Performance

A city is not merely an assortment of buildings and streets, nor is it only what city planners construct. There is something that goes beyond the built-up places and structures something
that has to do with people and life itself. How people live together, how they move, what they
do, how they do things, and how they do these things together. A city is even more than buildings and the movement and actions of its inhabitants. The city is a huge production machine;

21

cities produce knowledge and industrial goods and unique ways of organizing their inhabitants
in the form of laws, markets, and cultures. Cities produce images and stories of the realities they
engender. When we talk about the city, our city, the city that we love to visit, we are also talking
of these things.
Therefore I propose that we define the term city in terms of process rather than simply as
concrete, asphalt, and glass. The city is a coproductive process undergoing constant transformation and development. This process exists on four interwoven levels: (1) Environment
physical structures, climate, geographical site, urban morphology; (2) Urban structures laws/
policies, institutions, production of surplus; (3) Urban practices social behavior, exchanges,
interactions; (4) Representations our idea of the city, mental images, social values.
When defining the city as a process, we are talking about this complex system and the interrelations among these four levels through which urban life is expressed. In this context, urban
space is understood as the result of the dual relation between the citys social organization
(people) and its spatial organization (space). On the one hand, space influences human action
because it provides an organizational frame; on the other hand, people create or alter space to
express their own needs and desires. In 1974 the French geographer, philosopher, and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1974) founded his theory of space with the observation that spaces do not
exist per se, but rather arise as a social product, as relations between the perceptions and actions
of people and the built environment. In other words, a space (including urban space) is a coproduction of given circumstances and the experiences and actions of human beings. Secondly, as
urban space depends on people, it always has the potential to be reshaped, transformed, and
used differently.
The British human geographer David Harvey also postulates that urban space is produced
by city dwellers in his essay The Right to the City:
The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is
a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an
individual right [...] The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want
to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. (2008:23)
The urban sociologist Robert E. Park (18641944) wrote that the city is mans most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after
his hearts desire. Park emphasized that man is therefore also condemned to live in that selfcreated world and states, thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task,
in making the city man has remade himself (1967:3). In Harveys more recent book Rebel
Cities, he added the following explanation, referring to Parks much earlier proposal:
[T]he question of what kind of a city we want cannot be divorced from the question of
what kind of people we want to be, what kind of social relations we seek, what relations to
nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold. (2012:4)
In other words, if Harvey and Park are right, the existence of public space and even the very
discourse on public space have implications far beyond aesthetic concerns. This inevitably
brings us to the phrase that we all use and that is so hard to grasp the public sphere.

Imanuel Schipper

Public Sphere

22

The German term for public sphere, ffentlichkeit, in itself is a tough nut to crack. What is this
ffentlichkeit about? Are we talking about ffentlichen Raum (public space)? Or ffentlichen
(publicness)? As if this werent enough of a predicament, we face even bigger problems when
translating the term into English. Should the translation be public space, which describes a
space in a rather Euclidean way, or public (cant this also mean audience?) or publicity
(which evokes images of advertising) or public sphere? The latter seems to be the most common translation of the term coined by Jrgen Habermas in 1962, which always also implies a

Figure 3. Prime Time, directed by Dominic Huber, performed in the Ciudades Paralelas festival. July 2011,
Zrich, Switzerland. (Photo by Dominic Huber)
spatial dimension. Is the public aspect tied to space though? Does the public sphere need a public space? Inverting the argument, does this also mean that when we build public places we also
always generate a public sphere, two for one so to speak? Could it be possible to build public
places that do not generate a public sphere? Or at least not the intendedone?
What do we actually mean when we say public sphere? Which elements do we attribute to
this topos? Obviously the phrase incorporates elements both from the spatial as well as the social
sphere. The English usage of the concept of public sphere illustrates this point very well. Its
first element, public, is borrowed from the Latin publicus, which denotes something affecting the
people ( populus). When used as a noun, the term also denotes a group of people German speakers call Zuschauer (audience). However, as Nicolas Bourriaud (2002), Claire Bishop (2006), and
Jacques Rancire (2009) have argued, even the most passive audience contributes to the work
of art it is observing, simply by observing it. In this sense, something that is public affects the
people as much as it itself is affected by the people.
Inevitably, when speaking of something public, its private counterpart comes to mind.
This division dates back to the old Greek societies that kept polis (community of the citoyens)
and oikos (home community) strictly apart. Interestingly, apart from the obvious areas of personal relationships and family, oikos also included matters of health, education, work, economy,
and generally everything concerning money. Richard Sennett declared in his 1970 work The Fall
of Public Man that the individuals newly developed narcissism created tyrannies of intimacy
(1970:33740) that made a functioning public sphere impossible. As Sennett has shown, the separation of private and non-private has always had to be renegotiated.
City as Performance

In our current time, this two-way movement seems to break an invisible wall: On the one
hand, the publication of private details in social media has reached such a degree that it appears
to now be at either a climax or complete burn out. What was formerly known as the private
sphere has extended far beyond the limitations of a persons own home. The spread of mobile
devices has created the opportunity to handle the most private problems as well as business

23

dealings anytime and anywhere and this anywhere includes all of a citys public places.
On the other hand there exists a nearly worldwide complaint that public places are disappearing, meaning that the actual physical space of what could be public and is therefore not determined by neoliberal, profit-oriented dictums, gets smaller all the time. In other words: there is
a contradictory movement that describes (a) a constant loss of physical public space; and (b)an
increase of private activities in public spheres. For both moves it is obvious that the borders
between what is called private and what is called public are in constant flux.
The second term of the phrase public sphere denotes some kind of spatial configuration.
Its Greek etymology takes us back to the word sphaira (ball), which points towards the geometrical form of a sphere, a form in which any point on the surface is at the same distance to the
center as any other. The sphere as an image of the ideal democracy demands a center as well
as the possibility of an even and egalitarian distribution on a surface. There is, quite likely, no
image less suited for depicting the public sphere or publicness than a geometrical sphere, since
its exterior form will not change no matter how the individual surface points move or gather.
When we use the phrase public sphere, there is the connotation of an empty vessel that has a
certain form and a fixed volume that is, in fact, empty. The responsibility of filling this vessel
would rest on the public (the publicum). A citys responsibility, then, would be the construction
of such vessels the determination of the publics material limits, so to speak.
Somehow it seems obvious that a public sphere cannot be charted on a drawing board. It
cannot be expressed in terms of a number of square meters. To understand it, however, we can
draw on theories of the modern sociology of space. Ever since the work of situationists and theorists discussing space as a relational phenomena, such as Michel de Certeau (1980), Lefebvre
([1974] 1991), Martina Lw (2001), and Harvey (2008), we have known that space cannot and
should not be interpreted as an objective constant, but as a construct determined by social, cultural, political, and artistic influences. To rephrase: A desired public sphere is not produced by
city planners and architects alone, but by all the people using those spaces and places and the
ways in which they use them. Such a construct is not the product of a one-time effort, but has
to be created again and again; it will change and it will adapt.

Who Produces the Public Sphere?

Imanuel Schipper

This is an important, if not the most important question: How and when is public space (or better: the public sphere as defined in this article) produced? And by whom? Following the preceding arguments, we have to say that whoever is granted access to a given space (and actually uses
this access) helps determine its shape and quality. The quality of the public sphere (in this more
spatialized sense) is therefore not defined by a specific beauty of the buildings or by the furniture in those buildings. The quality of the public sphere is defined by the accessibility of that
place for different individuals and groups, for different aims and purposes, and by the simultaneous possibility of creative mis-use of that space aimed at redefining it for new purposes.

24

This is where the artistic productions in urban environments discussed at the beginning
of this essay come into play. They propose new modes of appropriation of the public sphere
through the use of performative, narrative, and other creative means. Such performances do not
simply blend in with big urban events; they do not simply help market a city; they cannot move
from festival to festival; and they may not even create an outstanding aesthetic product. They
do, however, initiate a process in which a citys inhabitants and users view familiar places from
new angles, and fill them with new stories. The production of new narratives that are added as
a kind of supplementary layer to an already existing place is the process that changes space into
place and place into space. The production of urban space is the very process that Harvey is
concerned with when he says that we are changing ourselves by changing the city. The specific
way of producing urban space that Prime Time was engaged in is one example among many of
what the arts might do for urban environments and their public spheres. The arts are not simply more and more present in cities such as Zrich; they are provocatively proposing ways of

conceptualizing and forming the public sphere. Taken together, the proposals enacted by new
urban art practices can be identified as deeply involved in producing rather than consuming
urban space.

The City as a Performance

I have argued that the city behaves as a dynamic and open-ended system: more like a performance than a static and bounded image or artifact. Hence the city can be described only inadequately by current approaches to urban analysis that focus on maps, statistics, and plans. The
complexity of cities demands an understanding of urban space as a coproduced sphere that
fosters diversity through constant processes of becoming. In this regard, we must acknowledge that urban analyses should produce an understanding of unquantifiable, so-called affective structures. This obviously leads us to performance studies. Understanding performance
studies more as a methodology than a discipline, we could say that performance studies keeps
reinventing itself as a tool for exploring bodies, identities, events, and narratives. This wideranging approach serves many research agendas and disciplines; performance studies is in fact
the lynchpin of interdisciplinarity. Both the latitude and the undogmatic methodology of performance studies points to its fundamental characteristic: Performance studies sets no limit on
what can be studied in terms of medium and culture. Nor does it limit the range of approaches
that can be taken (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett [2004] 2008:43). This view is based on Richard
Schechners broad spectrum of performance studies: Any behavior, event, action, or thing
can be studied as a performance ([2002] 2013:40). Schechner observes that performance studies aims to study the circumstances under which something is considered to be a performance.
Schechners broad spectrum includes the arts and the not-arts, Western and non-Western.
But some scholars are calling for performance studies to distance itself from primarily researching what currently defines the training and professional activities of performance workers and
artists: from Western concepts of theatre, dance, and music, from the notion of performance as
an art form.4 They take Schechners idea to the limit he himself proposed when he wrote that
performance studies should be regarded as a means of understanding historical, social, and
cultural processes (Schechner [1988] 2008:9). Since its emergence in the early 1980s, performance studies has evolved into an interdisciplinary research field strongly committed to theoretical considerations of embodiment, event, and agency in relation to live (and mediated)
performance (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett [2004] 2008:43) and to exploring ever-new expressions
of the performative. Performance studies provides tools that can be used to examine nonrepresentational structures and processes, and may thus provide us with new insights about our cities
when applied to urban analysis.

4. Scholars such as Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms, Jen Harvie, and Erika Fischer-Lichte are constantly extending the
use of the methods of performance studies into other elds of the academic world.

City as Performance

If we use performance studies methods not to study performances in the city or to study
how performances tell us something about the city, but rather how the city as such is experienced as a performance then we will gain a new kind of knowledge about the city and about
the way we live together in that city. Instead of constructing urban analysis as a closed process oriented toward providing specific results and solutions to urban problems, performance
studies can lay the foundation for open and accessible forms of analysis with a variety of perspectives, approaches, and skills suited to the complexity of the urban environment. As Dwight
Conquergood (2002) pointed out, performance studies is uniquely suited to braid together different ways of knowing by bridging the difference between thinking and doing, interpreting and
making, conceptualizing and creating. To look at the city as a performance offers the possibility of an urban analysis that, instead of merely reacting to urban phenomena and demonstrating the urban development, may help transform urban phenomena and, in the process, produce
new urban meanings and structures. The city as a public sphere formed by human agency is an

25

artwork in and of itself. Performance studies as a methodology is capable of addressing performance not merely as a tool for intervening in and reacting to fixed urban realities, but rather as
a tool for producing these realities by providing new knowledge and sensibilities. Studying the
city as a living construction brings a new level of awareness that will help us to answer the question: How do we want to live together?
References
Art and the City. 2012. www.artandthecity.ch (15 February 2014).
Berthoud, Jean-Michel. 2008. La Traviata zwischen Bahngeleisen und Pendlerstrom. swissinfo.ch. www
.swissinfo.ch/ger/archiv/La_Traviata_zwischen_Bahngeleisen_und_Pendlerstrom.html?cid=618594
(15 February 2014).
Bishop, Claire. 2006. Participation. London: Whitechapel.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon Quetigny: Les Presses du Rel.
Boyer, M. Christine. 1993. The City of Illusion: New Yorks Public Places. In The Restless Urban Landscape,
ed. Paul L. Knox, 11126. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Conquergood, Dwight. 2002. Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research. TDR 46, 2
(T174):14556.
de Certeau, Michel. 1980. LInvention du Quotidien. Vol. 1, Arts de Faire. Paris: Union Gnrale dEditions,
10/18.
Gehl, Jan. (1987) 2011. Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Habermas, Jrgen. (1962) 2008. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: Polity.
Harvey, David. 2008. The Right to the City. New Left Review 53:2340.
Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution. London: Verso.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. (2004) 2008. Performance Studies. In The Performance Studies Reader, ed.
Henry Bial, 4355. London: Routledge.
Lefebvre, Henri. (1974) 1991. The Production of Space. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Lw, Martina. 2001. Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Park, Robert E. 1967. Robert E. Park On Social Control and Collective Behavior: Selected Papers (The Heritage of
Sociology). Edited by Ralph H. Turner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rancire, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.
Schechner, Richard. (1988) 2008. Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach. In The
Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial, 79. London: Routledge.
Schechner, Richard. (2002) 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.
Schipper, Imanuel, and Johanna Dangel. 2011. Transcript of the Nightly Research Saloon, SNF-Project
Re/Occupation, Zrich, 30 June.
Sennett, Richard. 1977. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sorkin, Michael. 1992. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New
York: Noonday Press.
La Traviata im Hauptbahnhof Zrich. 2008. www.arte.tv/de/la-traviata-im-hauptbahnhof-zuerich
/2198746.html (15 February 2014).

Imanuel Schipper

Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

26

To view supplemental media related to this article, please visit

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.1162/DRAM_a_00370.