Presentation for UWS 'Performing Methodologies' seminar, November 26th 2015

1. Performance and community
Some brief reflections
Graham Jeffery

2. Double-edged discourses
• Community as slippery – invoked by policymakers and developers, inherently
‘defensive/exclusionary’ but also as a space of hope, solidarity and possibility?
• Spectacle and performance – living in an increasingly spectacularised/mediatized
society – constant recuperation of performance and spectacle to serve powerful
interests
• Foregrounds the politics of performance – in whose interest(s) are ‘community
performances’ taking place?
• Arguably, all performances are community performances – values, aesthetics,
representation, institutions, economics etc
• Double-edged narratives of regeneration, poverty and development: Markers of
disposability/obsolescence but also sites of opportunity – for whom?

3. Giroux and public pedagogy
• Histories of critical public performance practice and
community education
• The politics of public space – how is this secured,
defended, contested?
• How places are enacted and performed – both in the
everyday (see, e.g. Alan Read’s work on theatres of
everyday life) and through the rituals of art-making –
working in public – ‘special occasions’
• Ethics, agency, power and representation are all
important – as well as the ability to translate, mediate,
produce, dialogue – skills and principles together…

4. Principles
• Spatial agency and social agency: creative
methods which build active involvement and
participation
• Fran Tonkiss: ‘space at the margins, and room for
manoeuvre in the cracks & geographies of urban
power,…minor practices, ordinary audacities and
little anti-utopias that nevertheless create
material spaces of hope.... Such spaces may
matter most when...prospects are most bleak’

5. Spaces of possibility and hope?
• Under what circumstances?
• Connective approaches and the relationships
between the arts, activism and social change
• Artists working in public/across sectors/between
organisations – brokering, bridge-building etc – as
intermediaries/ambiguous actors/agents
provocateurs
• Complex politics of funding – question of
community arts relationship with the state (and
private sectors) has not really been addressed
since Owen Kelly (1984)

6. Odd Numbers – mythmaking in Milton
• Storytelling, ritual, play
• A place without much visible heritage (cf.
Govan..)
• High deprivation, and all the problems of power
and representation of poverty-stricken
communities
• Reverse archaeologies?
• Intergenerational practice
• Inviting people into a participative, performed
space

7. http://nadfly.net/ODDNUMBERS

8. Future research agendas
• Connecting performance/practice perspectives with
the sociologies, histories and geographies of contested
spaces and places – as well as with architecture/urban
design/planning
• Critical interventionist/public arts practices as a
catalyst for changing perceptions, challenging power
structures and revealing/uncovering identities and
histories
• The value of small gestures/small projects versus the
complexities of macro-social struggles – Harvey’s
‘spaces of hope’ and the ‘insurgent architect’

9. www.generalpraxis.org.uk
www.twitter.com/grahamjeffery
www.twitter.com/RemakingSociety
Graham.Jeffery@uws.ac.uk