Street Performance Research Articles

Integrating Streetscape Images, Machine Learning, and Space Syntax to Enhance Walkability: A Case Study of Seongbuk District, Seoul

As urbanization rapidly progresses, streets have transitioned from mere transportation corridors to crucial spaces for daily life and social interaction. While past research has examined the impact of physical street characteristics on walkability, there is still a lack of large-scale quantitative assessments. This study systematically evaluates street walkability in Seongbuk District, Seoul, through the integration of streetscape images, machine learning, and space syntax. The physical characteristics of streets were extracted and analyzed in conjunction with space syntax to assess street accessibility, leading to a combined analysis of walkability and accessibility. The results reveal that the central and western regions of Seongbuk District outperform the eastern regions in overall street performance. Additionally, the study identifies four distinct street types based on their spatial distribution: high accessibility–high overall score, high accessibility–low overall score, low accessibility–high overall score, and low accessibility–low overall score. The findings not only provide a scientific basis for street development in Seongbuk District but also offer valuable insights for assessing and enhancing walkability in cities globally.

Brigade d’Intervention Théâtrale-Haïti: Staging Counterpublics in Neoliberal Haiti

This article discusses street theater actions by Brigade d’Intervention Théâtrale-Haïti (BITH), a Haitian performance collective whose work staged in 2018—preceding and in alignment with mass mobilizations that swept the nation that year—registered and interrogated the deep impacts on lived experience wrought by a process of intensified neoliberalization in post-2010 Haiti. BITH’s street performances (and subsequent online circulation) made visible and palpable certain Haitian people’s complicity in manifold inequities under such conditions as they also sparked emergent counterpublics through dialogue, affect, and popular aesthetics. Through what we term “creative interference,” BITH’s artivism catalyzed alternatives to civil society from the interstices of available modalities and infrastructures.

Field experiment on the effect of musical street performance/busking on public space perception as mediated by street audience experience

Street performance or busking is common in public spaces. The literature highlights two psychological issues: the effect of street performance on public space perception and the complexity of the appreciation of street performance, regarded as street audience experience (SAE). The present study aims at verifying the effect of street performance on public space perception, while examining SAE as a mediator of this effect. We conducted a between-subjects field experiment (a quasi-experiment; N = 292) in Hong Kong. Participants assessed a public space without (control) or with (experimental) musical busking on essentialism, anti-essentialism, sonic restorativeness, and overall liking. In the experimental condition, unengaged passersby and engaged audience further evaluated SAE factors of emotion, intellect, novelty, place, interaction, and technique, and outcomes of overall satisfaction and donation worth. The public space with busking was perceived as significantly more sonically restorative. Engaged audience perceived the space as significantly more essentialist, anti-essentialist, sonically restorative, and likeable. Engaged audience also experienced more positive SAE and outcome variables. SAE fully mediated the effects of street performance on public space perception and outcome variables, respectively. These findings support the positive impact of street performance, which may enhance city inhabitants’ well-being.

Exploring the impact of street play as a powerful pedagogical tool in public health programs

This case study reports on the production, performance and evaluation of a public health street play by MSc Public Health students at York St John University (London Campus) in the United Kingdom. The street play was performed on World AIDS Day 2023. This paper focuses on the dynamic and interactive nature of street play as a pedagogical technique that aligns with constructivist principles, fostering meaningful learning experiences. Increased confidence, engagement and programme commitment were observed in students both in in-person and online sessions following the street play. While recognising these strengths, we discuss the need to address challenges, foster collaborations and implement continuous improvement strategies to make street play even more effective as a teaching method in the public health discipline.

“Arrest the dance!”: rethinking Tejumola Olaniyan’s “postcolonial antinomy” and the politics of art activism

Drawing on fieldwork on the emerging radical street performance culture in Nigeria, I reflect on the implications of Tejumola Olaniyan’s approach to popular culture and political activism, with a particular focus on his profound and provocative analysis of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s Afrobeat. In Arrest the Music!, Olaniyan adopts a cultural-materialist approach to locate Fela’s Afrobeat in the postcolonial conditions that generated its aesthetics and politics. Rather than concentrating exclusively on the oppositional messages in Fela’s lyrics, Olaniyan excavates the “antinomies” structuring Fela’s music practices and reads these antinomies as embodiments of an oppressive yet “enchanting” postcolonial modernity. In the context of Olaniyan’s readings, I interpret the production of a radical street performance culture in Lagos in relation to the extensive processes of neoliberal restructuring taking place in urban Nigeria, and I examine in which ways postcolonial antinomies continue to structure contemporary artistic practices. This paper calls for a more nuanced reading of the politics of activist art in contemporary Africa, and especially the agonistic entanglements of local artistic activism and the neoliberal agendas forced upon it.

Theories, concepts and classifications of African costumes, dress culture, make-up and body designs in the 21st century

Scholarly interrogations of African dress culture and body designs have mostly engaged non-African experiences and theories in interrogating indigenous practices. This has placed a limitation on cultural expressions of identity and inadvertently exposed the need to frame discourses around traditional African design engagements and indigenous conceptual models. The study employs the analytical, descriptive and interpretative approach of the qualitative research methodology to conceptualise, classify and describe the indigenous and contemporary practice of dressing, costuming and make-up and body designs in Africa. The emphasis is on attires/dresses/clothing, body designs, costumes and make-up practices utilised in everyday life; on special occasions; on stage; in films; carnivals; street performances and traditional communal performances. In this study, the researcher deconstructs the term ‘costume’ as currently used in describing African dressing. It attempts an understanding and classification of costumes from three levels of artistic and historical distinctions which are; indigenous traditional designs (indigenous trad.); modern traditional designs (modern trad.); and contemporary traditional designs (contemporary trad.). Given the identified gaps in existing scholarly presentations on traditional dress culture and body adornment, it maintains that African scholars should be encouraged to expand the scope of discourse through further constructions of identity for indigenous cultural products.

Reclaiming Public Spaces in Post-pandemic India (Kolkata): Activist Theatre, Gender and a Resurgence of the Marginal

The politics of our post-Covid times are expressed through various registers. In Kolkata, one especially powerful artistic medium for such expressions was the revival of street theatre as young and senior theatre practitioners plunged into exploring critical issues that have been all-pervasive since the beginning of the pandemic. As people finally started to venture out, content to be amidst human congregations, street plays, being located in open-air spaces, proved both economical and safe. The issues these street performances highlighted and their modes of presentations could be described as what Tony Fisher calls ‘activist theatre’ – which mobilizes the people by interpellating its audience around a specific grievance or issue that possesses an emotional appeal.1 These performances are a form of artistic activism, or ‘artivism’ as termed by Chantal Mouffe: the use of aesthetic means for political activism, ‘as a counter-hegemonic move against the capitalist appropriation of aesthetics’.2

Manusia Silver dan Seni Jalanan: Manifestasi Ruang Kebebasan Bagi Masyarakat di Perkotaan

Abstract The complexity of life and problems in urban areas have given birth to many phenomena of urban society, including the presence of silver men. However, as economic conditions deteriorate, especially due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many people have the initiative to adopt the “silver man style” as an opportunity to earn their personal money. Therefore, this research aims to examine how silver people express art as a form of their freedom space living in urban society. This research is a descriptive qualitative research method. The subjects of this research are silver men who are present in the area Dr.Mansur Street, Medan City. Primary data sources in this study were generated through observations and interviews with silver men. Meanwhile, secondary data was generated by digging up information about silver men in Medan City through book documentation, journals, and internet websites. The technique of data analysis is by conducting an interactive model of data analysis form Miles & Huberman. The results of this study show that urban public space is a place of freedom for silver men in Medan City to show their existence of expression of freedom to the general public. Forms of expression and existence of silver humas in Medan City include silver humans, very free to perform pantonymous forms of attraction and style like robots. Then, silver mens can easily collect money from the results of their labour by performing silver men attractions withput any social structure or environment that suppresses them to express and show their existence in the space of freedom or urban public space. Keyword: Silver men, Urban, Public space, Freedom of space, Street performance

Breakdance from Street Performance to Olympic and Art Stage

Breakdance from Street Performance to Olympic and Art Stage

The Profiles and Artistic Experiences of Street Musicians in the Urban Spaces of Montpellier, Sète, and Paris

Abstract The figure of the street musician has long attracted much attention among scholars working in various academic disciplines. This paper attempts to answer the question of who the street musician / artist actually is. While on a scholarship to Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University in 2013, I conducted a number of surveys and experiments in order better to understand what situations present-day musicians face while playing in the streets and how their social status is changing. Interviews with street performers and their audiences prove to be a valuable source of information. The paper presents the results of my own field research conducted both among street musicians and their audiences, as well as my own personal experience of performing music in public urban spaces in Montpellier, Sète, and Paris

"Before it is too late": Life, death, street performance and homelessness in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article examines the creation of ‘Before It Is Too Late’, a collaborative performance project created with the Peeps- short for Peoples- living on the streets of Aotearoa, New Zealand, who identify as Māori (Indigenous New Zealanders). The Peeps face profound, persistent, unjust inequalities, inequitable mortality rates, and devaluation of their lives by the wider community. The performance project is centred on the Peeps’ perspectives and is informed by whanonga pono (Māori values) and tikanga (customs), the principles of community-based research, relational ethics, and critical performance ethnography. The project aims to initiate a conversation with health professionals to improve the quality of care provided and to ensure greater respect and dignity in relation to the death of Māori homeless people. We present the drama Before It Is Too Late that has resulted from this collaboration with the Peeps to open a transformative space for their voices, experiences, priorities, and rights to be heard and acknowledged.

Giovanni Pontano hears the street soundscape of Naples

AbstractGiovanni Pontano’s dialogue Antonius can be read almost as a thick description of the soundscape of a Neapolitan street in the mid‐ to late‐15th century, complete with public announcements, street performers, domestic arguments, workers’ banter, charms and spells, processions, errand boys, bells, clocks, cockerels, and much more. Antonius was first printed in 1491, and then in a 1501 Opera edition alongside another dialogue, Charon, Pontano’s treatises De fortitudine, De principe and De obedientia, and his treatises on the “social virtues,” De liberalitate, De benificentia, De magnificentia, De splendore, and De conviventia. Using the street soundscape of Antonius as a framework, this essay interleaves both sonic reportage and reflections on the ethics and purpose of sound drawn from the other works included in the 1501 edition, to construct a rich and surprisingly detailed impression of the urban soundscape as it struck Pontano, or at least as he represented it in a literary context.

Passing the Torch: Exploring how Tradition and Innovation Influence Coopetition among Street Performers

AbstractUnderstanding how and why firms concurrently compete and cooperate with each other represents an important and growing area of study. This research centres on how firms engage in coopetition. However, this does not account for how much of the modern world works – independently. Through an inductive field study of 80 New Orleans street performers, we explore how and why independent creative workers engage in competition and/or cooperation. In so doing, we advance theory on coopetition by extending its explanations to the individual level. We theorize the well‐established nature of creative industries encourages the belief in the need for deviating from the status quo by engaging in creativity and innovation, which we refer to as a trailblazing mindset. At the same time, we find that the accumulation of a long history of creative practices also fosters traditions. We theorize that tradition encourages the belief in the need to act as vested actors, or custodians, by passing work traditions from one generation to the next to allow the tradition to endure, which we refer to as the torchbearing mindset. Thus, torchbearing fosters cooperation while trailblazing fosters competition.

13 ways of looking at lockdown

The extremities of a state of pandemic lockdown intensify, through physical and emotional constraints, an aesthetic of perceptual experience involving the senses, or sense perception. Part of this pandemic perception requires living “with uncertainty, […] which involves living with the [cognitive] dissonance” (Aronson & Tavris, 2020). So many artists found sensuous aesthetics to live with these dissonances (Sarasso et al., 2021), such as street performances while emptying the bins, or orchestra members performing via Zoom (managing transition delays to suggest harmonies across isolations). Wallace Stevens enlarges an aesthetic of the sensuous through a non-mimetic form of practice, what he terms “the phenomena of perception”. The phenomena which illustrate the pressures of imagination and reality infuse Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the model and catalyst for this poetic suite on lockdown. This suite is rhizomatic, exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “rhizome [which] has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo”(27). The intention is to map a mass of roots, avoiding a structural tree system (beginning, middle and end) which suggests binaries or dualities. This rhizomatic presentation of extreme moments of “being between” presents an array of mappings or tracings, “migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions” (Berry & Siegal, n.d.).

‘If you play some good music, people immediately understand it’: Audience response to busking

Busking is part of the daily urban life of citizens worldwide. Every street music performance can affect buskers or passers-by in different ways because the people, the conditions, the terms and the reasons for music-making is unique every single time. This article aims to deliver social insights from the Greek busking community of Thessaloniki. Specifically, we examine the relationship between street musicians and their audience, according to their attitudes and practices during a street performance. For this study, a mix-methods approach was followed where quantitative and qualitative data was collected from 146 participants (82 were members of the audience and 64 were buskers). Our methodology relied on semi-structured interviews to collect buskers’ and audiences’ views on their experiences, as well as field notes and observation to document their relationship and reactions first-hand. The main findings indicate that buskers and audiences sustain a healthy relationship between them while buskers are thankful for the audience’s reaction to their performance and tend to make a series of performative choices, according to audience preferences. Furthermore, all audience members actively approve of the existence of street music and show their appreciation of being part of this community, by donating money and participating through various ways (singing, dancing, taking photos).

En voldtægtsmand på din vej

This article studies how the Chilean street performance Un violador en tu camino reorganized what Jacques Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible and simultaneously facilitated the emergence of new collective subjects. Theoretically anchored in Ann Rigney’s memory-activism nexus, it explores the performance’s role as part of an inherited Chilean protest repertoire, while arguing that the performance’s redistribution of the sensible and inherent collectivization of experiences did not only affect contemporary conditions, but also the remembrance of the past. The article demonstrates that Un violador en tu camino is an integrated part of a decades-long tradition of performative activist interventions in the public space in Chile and therefore serves as an example of how activists learn from earlier social movements and repurpose their practices in new contexts of contention. Furthermore, through the analysis of the performance’s lyrics, choreography, visual expression, and placement in the public space, the article concludes that the performance made visible the continuity of state perpetrated sexual violence in Chile: from the military dictatorship to the estallido social protest wave in 2019-2020 that together with the coherent emergence of new collective subjects, united activists from different generations in a multitemporal denouncement of the patriarchy’s abuse.

Andantes con Cervantes

Andantes con Cervantes

South Africa’s National Arts Festival (review)

Reviewed by: South Africa’s National Arts Festival Bryan W. Schmidt SOUTH AFRICA’S NATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL. Various venues, Makhanda, South Africa. June 23–July 3, 2022. South Africa’s National Arts Festival (NAF) built its reputation on being a platform for vital social critique, a major draw for the Eastern Cape economy, and also a kuierfees—a social festival with an immersive, artsy atmosphere. After being forced to move online for two straight years, the 2022 live festival was held in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) to rousing critical accolade—but with markedly lower attendance than pre-COVID times. Art of all disciplines was still on offer in the many venues scattered around Rhodes University, the 1820 Settlers National Monument, and the central business district, but there was a palpable decline in the bustling street life that animated years past. High Street and Church Square usually brim with pop-up marketplaces, buskers, street musicians, parades, and local children performing as mimes. This year, the few street performers present seemed confined to the NAF’s curated marketplace, the Village Green, and most of the informal vendors who make a living by following the crowds left town after just a few days. The successful pivot to digital over the last two years has given the NAF nimbleness to cope with changing times (and some virtual programming remained available in 2022), but rebuilding the live event’s vibe remains a considerable challenge. Continued caution around COVID was partially to blame for the turnout, but other factors like rapid inflation, gas price hikes, nationwide power outages, and competition from other regional arts festivals likely discouraged many from investing in the trip to Makhanda. But the NAF’s curated program still featured top-caliber work with stellar production values, and the fringe maintained a particularly robust showing from student groups and emerging professionals in the Eastern Cape, the Free State, and KwaZulu-Natal. For a festival that has made significant efforts in recent years to shed its image as an event held for a wealthy artistic establishment that skews disproportionally white, it was encouraging to see that enthusiasm for performing on a national stage continued to have a pull for Black African artists, especially those from rural areas. Click for larger view View full resolution Andrew Buckland, Tshiamo Moretlwe, Siyamthanda Sinani, Mongi Mtombeni, Roshina Ratnam, Beviol Swartz (l-r) in Hamlet. Photo: Alan Eason. Thando Doni, this year’s winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama, made the bold choice to stage his sponsored production Ngqawuse (The Death of a Nation) almost entirely in isiXhosa. Although this is the dominant language in Makhanda (and many fringe shows were also staged in artists’ vernaculars), the little English provided was somewhat uncommon for a featured work in the curated program. The language choice made a powerful claim within the space of Rhodes University, reinforcing the play’s pointed investigation of knowledge and epistemology as durable vectors of British domination. In recalling one of the Eastern Cape’s most tragic encounters with colonial power, Ngqawuse contended that contemporary social struggles in South Africa must be located within its history. It discusses events from 1856–1857, when Xhosa communities responded desperately to British violence by slaughtering their own cattle in fulfillment of a [End Page 81] millenarian prophecy, leading to mass starvation, and hastening their subjugation. Over 150 years later, Doni showed how the psychic wounds stemming from these events continue to haunt contemporary social life. Like in Zakes Mda’s novel The Heart of Redness, which also examined the cattle killings, Doni created a porous relationship between the past and present. He juxtaposed to the 19th century history of the prophet-ess Ngqawuse (Chuma Sopotela) a contemporary love story between a young man and woman that unfolded from youthful exuberance to tragic ruin. The minimal set featured a dusty, leaf-strewn floor evocative of the Eastern Cape landscape, where both stories could unfold simultaneously through crafty visual composition. Crucially, Doni’s staging self-consciously avoided leading the audience to place blame on Ngqawuse for the slaughter she urged, nor on Xhosa people still grappling with psychic trauma and generational destitution stemming thereof. Doni rendered both...

The Criminal Governance of Tourism: Extortion and Intimacy in Medellín

AbstractThis article provides a picture of the political economy of tourism and violence in Medellín. It analyses the way criminal actors and tourism entrepreneurs share a territory, by shedding light on the extortion of tour guides, street performers and business owners in some of its barrios populares (poor neighbourhoods). The main objective is to demonstrate how intimate relationships – between and among kin, friends, long-term acquaintances – impact what is considered the criminal governance of tourism. This contribution shows that extortion in Medellín meets only limited resistance from tourism entrepreneurs. It also emphasises how criminals, tourism actors and tourists themselves contribute to the creation of fragile secured spaces in the developing touristscapes of Colombia's second city.

Aretino: Conjuring the Sensuous City

AbstractThis article examines Pietro Aretino's promotion and critique of the sensorial aspects of the physical, the political and the sociable city through a selection of his letters and the three comedies La Cortigiana, Il Marescalco and La Talanta. It explores the shared physical and social experiences that Aretino counts on in order for his words to resonate with his readers, especially with regard to Venice and Rome, viewed at times through the lens of Venice. Aretino lives during a time of intense sensorial concerns, from the imitation of nature promoted in works of art to the regulation of the urban sensorium through the control of speech and print, sumptuary laws and public performance. Drawing upon his own early experience of painting, writing poetry and perhaps street performance, Aretino evokes those concerns and displays a particularly urban sensibility as he seizes the opportunities offered by printing and the expansion of vernacular texts to explore what it is to inhabit the early modern Italian city in all its jumbly, chaotic and colourful sensorial ‘noise’.