Portable Dramaturgies : Performing Globalisation's Un/Specific Ground

Abstract

In this paper I consider portable dramaturgies that are specifically staged within the urban fabric and facilitated through the use of headphones. By portable dramaturgies I indicate performance practices that can be adapted for different cities around the globe without changing their core conceptual bases. Writing of Rimini Protokoll's Remote X, Konstantinos Thomaidis (2017) proposes that the voice in the headphones “serves to construct the urban space as the scenography of our theatre” (p. 5). Accordingly, each time this dramaturgy is repeated, a new scenography emerges; yet with each repetition the scenography of the global-urban fabric is extended: the city-streets emerge as elements in the globalised scenography of this site-un/specific theatre. Following Laura Levin (2014), I seek to think through portable dramaturgies as practices in which participants “perform ground.” Performing ground, in Levin's conceptualisation denotes “performance strateg[ies] in which the human body commingles with or is presented as a direct extension of its setting” (p. 13). The argument I wish to pursue here suggests that in the context of portable dramaturgies, as spectators/participants commingle with their urban surroundings they are constructed as performing subjects in the scenography of the global city — performing subjects camouflaged in cityscapes, but also performing subjects that stand apart from the cityscapes. Against the above backdrop, I ask: what kinds of performances might the global-urban fabric require from its dwellers and how might such dramaturgies both camouflage and emphasise neoliberal globalisation’s quotidian scenographies? How might the voices in the headphones and the subjects performing their instructions negotiate the experience(s) of globalisation?