Raindogs: performing the city

Abstract

This article describes a multi-site, mediated performance entitled Raindogs achieved in Cardiff in 2002, and discusses the ways in which the presence and coexistence of such transient, aesthetic practices might reveal and pull into momentary focus aspects of the city’s fabric, its manifold temporalities and the diverse activities of its populace. Inter-textual in form and interdisciplinary in ambition, the article combines passages of creative writing with more sustained critical reflection that draws upon architectural planning, contemporary archaeology, forensics and performance analysis; it proposes performance as both a potential mode of enquiry and of interpretive exposition in enhancing public understanding of contemporary urban experiences. It suggests that the script of performance can itself contain moments of disciplinary perception – from local history, cultural geography; and that new forms of dramaturgy might both utilise and disclose the nature of pervasive phenomena of the city, such as surveillance – through the analogous use of media, refiguring the theatre auditorium as an oligopticon, a place from which only part of the city is seen, but seen well and site-specific performance as place-making as much as site-occupying.