Performance and the City: Constructing Urban Identities in Contemporary London

Laura Di Michele

doi:10.14198/raei.2013.26.12

Abstract

The relationship between spectators, performers and spaces is investigated in a critical perspective which aims at further developing the concept of the city as a performance place where precarious urban identities are dynamically and temporarily shaped and reshaped. Even if this essay takes into due account the seminal studies of Barthes (1971), H. Lefebvre (1974), and urban theorists such as Reyner Banham and Kevin Lynch who conceived of the city as a ‘legible’ text, at the same time it argues that textuality and performativity must be perceived as intertwined cultural practices that work together to shape the body of phenomenal, intellectual, psychic, and social encounters that frame a subject’s experience of the city. London 2012 Olympic Games, and in particular the stunning Opening Ceremony directed by Danny Boyle, for which visitors and overseas spectators were invited to transform themselves into a global theatrical audience, can be used as a privileged viewpoint from which to analyse the different ways of perceiving, but also being looked at and performing oneself, in and through spaces which tend at modifying, or at interrogating or destabilizing one’s traditional identity.

Highlights

Because London is one of the most seductive to-day global cities together with New York City, Tokyo, Berlin, Toronto and others; because it is a multicultural metropolis
The invitation asks the visitors to transform themselves into a theatrical audience, ready to take part in the greatest spectacle ever staged on the wide London scaffold extending from the West of Hyde Park to the East of Victoria Park
The impression is that the Lord Mayor of London is astutely attempting to cancel or at least blur the social, economic and cultural distance between those two different and divided London areas which may not be known to foreign visitors or recognized as such by the British people; we must remember that Victoria Park is located in the East End and was “commissioned by Queen Victoria for the working class of the East End” (Dyckoff and Barrett, 2012: 127)

Summary

Introduction

Because London is one of the most seductive to-day global cities together with New York City, Tokyo, Berlin, Toronto and others; because it is a multicultural metropolis.

Results

Conclusion