Negotiating New York: Performance in a Changing Urban Landscape

The cultural landscape of late-twentieth-century New York City, with its shifting economic landscape, its geographic and political marginalization of minority communities, and its increasing institutionalization of the arts, offers a rich environment for exploring how performance practices in urban centers respond to socio-economic change. From the Artaudian experimentation and countercultural productions of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the performance art scene of the 1980s and the emerging museum installation art culture of the 1990s, individuals and collectives—through direct engagement with New York City's often thorny cultural terrain—developed innovative aesthetic forms and novel models of production that have had lasting effects.

Two recently published studies—Hillary Miller's Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis in 1970s New York and Adair Rounthwaite's Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York—provide fruitful analyses of the varied aesthetic and structural responses to New York's unpredictable cultural environment during two distinct periods in the city's recent past. Miller fixes her attention on the mid-to-late 1970s when New York was steeped in a debilitating economic crisis, arguing for the connection between urban austerity policies and the institutionalization of theatrical organizations. Rounthwaite focuses on the following decade, the 1980s, narrowing her scope to the Dia Art Foundation and two performance projects, Group Material's Democracy (1988) and Martha Rosler's If You Lived Here … (1989). Rounthwaite's investigation, which seeks to historicize the emergence of participatory art forms in the late twentieth century, places particular importance on how the two productions Dia hosted directly engaged audiences on social issues such as education, homelessness, and the AIDS epidemic. While Miller's and Rounthwaite's texts are distinct from each other in their objects of study and methodology, when examined together, they present a twenty-first-century reader with essential historical perspectives for considering how contemporary artistic practices and the institutions that support them negotiate the previous century's social and economic systems.

Drop Dead—honored with both the 2018 ATDS John Frick Award and the 2017 ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award—examines the impact New York City's economic crisis in the 1970s had on the organization and practice of theatre. Taking its title from the now-notorious 1975 Daily News headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead," which referred to President Ford's initial refusal to provide aid to the bankrupted city, Miller's study is a fulsome investigation into the complex relationship between artistic production and economic scarcity. Seeking to bring theatre studies into existing multidisciplinary conversations about the economic chaos of late-twentieth-century urban centers, Miller argues for a reevaluation of our historiographical narratives of 1970s U.S. theatre. Her thesis, which she advances through meticulously documented case studies, asserts that New York's fiscal collapse and the logic of scarcity that guided its economic policies in the years that followed resulted in a reorganization of the city's theatrical landscape. It was a restructuring that fostered the institutionalization of certain performance practices and the containment of audiences within specific theatrical contexts.

Miller divides Drop Dead into three parts, with each one focusing attention on a particular aspect of the relationship between theatrical production and economic scarcity in 1970s New York. Importantly, Miller makes clear from the beginning that she is not attempting to advance the well-trafficked, romantic narrative that economic scarcity fuels theatrical creativity. Instead, she is supplying the reader with compelling portraits of how individual artists, collectives, theatrical organizations, and the private and municipal bodies that supported them rearticulated institutional borders in response to fiscal crises.

Part one of Drop Dead, "Ideologies of Austerity," employs two case studies—the establishment of Ellen Stewart's La Mama E.T.C. on the Lower East Side and the launching of the TKTS Times Square program—to examine how the city's austerity policies stimulated the development of alternative models of...