Re-Imagining Urbanity: Performance and Collective Disruption in Our Cities
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- I investigated community-based performance as a means of centralizing the experiences of marginalized people in urban political discourses. While community-engaged city planning takes heed of citizens’ experiences in order to create more equitable cities, community-engaged art has the potential to steal through the cracks in regimented and exclusive institutions, transforming them in quiet but commanding ways. I argue that performance works to elevate the voices of oppressed communities in three major ways: it invites unlikely participants to remember and act upon their citizenship, allows those participants to experiment with modes of resistance against oppressive institutions, and finally, allows for the envisioning of new social fabrics through the act of collective imagination. I approached community-engaged performance through three primary channels. Firstly, I worked as stage manager for a multi-city, audience-participatory play called City Council Meeting: Performed Participatory Democracy, which is based upon actual transcripts of city legislative meetings and reflects and scrutinizes the way city governments address the issues that affect their residents’ lives. Secondly, I co-facilitated the creation of dance and spoken word performances with incarcerated youth at Hillcrest Juvenile Hall as the teaching assistant for a Stanford course called “Dance in Prison”. Finally, I drew from my personal experiences with organized political protest, understanding public demonstration as a form of cooperative performance. This research spanned the course of September 2013 through May 2015.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 11, 2015 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Weiss, Natasha Tamate |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Ross, Janice |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford University |
|---|---|
| Subject | Department of Urban Studies |
| Subject | Urban Society and Social Change |
| Subject | performance |
| Subject | civic engagement |
| Subject | incarcerated youth |
| Subject | community-engaged theater |
| Subject | participatory theater |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
| Related Publication | Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2005. |
|---|---|
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/ps496nk0533 |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Weiss, Natasha Tamate. (2015). Re-Imagining Urbanity: Performance and Collective Disruption in Our Cities. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/ps496nk0533
Collection
Stanford University Urban Studies Capstone Projects and Theses
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- Contact
- natamwe@gmail.com
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