DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto

Introducing Performance Geography

introDucinG perFormance GeoGrapHy 29 tHe worlD is a stage that forms the core of how we navigate or perform our being in the many worlds we occupy. Humans, then, can be seen as performing beings who live simply because they can act or perform, rather than merely observe. The term “performance” had early denotations (c. 1500s) of completion , executing action, restored behaviour, but from the 1960s it came to be used in academic circles to represent the visual effect of actualperformanceonstage,asdistinctfromthedramaticscriptsthat give birth to the artistic productions (Taylor 2003, 2–7). Since then the fieldofperformancestudieshassoughttoengagewithvariousaspects of performance as an object of study and a method of analysis. The analysis of performance events and acts has revealed much about howhumansperformthemselvesinthecontextoftheireverydaylives (see Pelias 2008), and the field has established connections with such disciplines as anthropology and sociology. One unique area of performancestudiesisperformanceethnography ,whichtakesaccountof theatre practitioners and academics who have adapted ethnographic field notes in order to stage them (see McCall 2000). With such crossdisciplinary terrain being created between sociology, anthropology and the performing arts, this book seeks to further interdisciplinary engagement by introducing performance geography. Performance is defined in different ways in different cultures. Broadly speaking, African performance stands somewhat apart from performance in the West because it is seen less as an object than as part of the fabric of life. For example, as Africans view it, music is not a thing of beauty to be enjoyed in isolation. Rather, it exists only as woven into the larger milieu, which also combines games, dance, words, drama and visual art. As Ruth M. Stone observes (1995, 258): The words that mean “performance” or “event,” whether the pele of the Kpelle [in West Africa] or lipapali of the Basotho [in Southern Africa], are applied not only to music-making, dancing and speaking , but also to children’s games and sports. Similarly, according to John Comaroff (1985, 111), among the Tswana “the verb go bina connoted ‘to sing,’ ‘to dance,’ and ‘to venerate,’ implying the act of honouring by means of the aesthetic of harmonious collective performance” (emphasis added). The arena of performance can therefore be much wider than the staged performances that are the objects of inquiry into “the performing arts.” A cursory examination of academic disciplines suggests that performance studies is different from geography. Performance is focused on the act and the stage, while geography concerns the locational dAncehAll 30 features of the physical, cultural and material world. With debates in cultural geography, and in cultural studies more widely, revolving around relationships of time and space, and the politics of space and identity,anincreaseintheuseofspatialmetaphors,suchasmapping, location,centre/margin,global/local,liminalspace,thecity,isapparent (see Keith and Pile 1993, 1 and 67). The reassertion of space, be it real,imaginary,symbolicoracombinationofthese,makesitclearthat space can no longer be constituted as a passive void, but that a new spatial imagination allows for a reading of its structures or surfaces of articulation, which include the body, the cosmos and the city. For example, Edward Soja (1993 and 1996) has argued for an integrative approach to the study of social existence. He documents the historical perspective as a master narrative through which temporality is set up against spatiality, constructing and configuring existence and its interpretation. Soja calls for a critical awareness of space as an interpretive context, and argues that comparable attention should be centred on the geographical imagination as on the historical. Here, Soja is engaging with Michel Foucault’s perspective on space. Such works bring into focus an understanding of spatial epistemology, the spatial imagination as a critical piece of human existence and therefore a significant part of the critical insight into, and interpretation of, this existence. Reference to Foucault (1986) highlights another dimension, that of the lived social space as a complex of sites and their relations to each other, in a social ecological perspective. Sites, then, are delimited by the set of relations among them. Sites speak to particular relations, and those such as the cemetery, the church or the brothel and the colony , determine how society views itself and is viewed. Power also lies in the juxtaposing of several spaces and their attendant relations. AccordingtoSoja (1993,143),Foucaultcreatedanotherunderstandingof spaceintheworldofspatialimaginings,conceptualizingan“actually lived and socially created spatiality, concrete and abstract at the same time, the habitus of social practices. It is a space rarely seen, for it has been obscured by a bifocal vision that traditionally views space as either...