Moving Together in an Era of Assembly

Abstract

Editors Alana Gerecke and Laura Levin frame the central concerns and interventions of the issue. They insist that in this historical moment of Women’s Marches, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and the Idle No More ‘round dance revolution,’ of flash mobs and pop-up culture, of relational art and postdramatic performance practices, we must think seriously about what is at stake in gathering and moving together in public spaces. Increasingly mainstream and increasingly evident, these collective reimaginings of quotidian practices, cultural consumption, and political resistance challenge the atomized ways we normally move through cities. In doing so, they pose questions of aesthetics, use, access, exclusion, density, and mobility “in resolutely physical terms” (Gerecke 42). What does it mean to show up and, more specifically, move together in these collective arrangements? How do different choreographic arrangements of public assembly shape and re-shape the social, the aesthetic, and the political?