This document discusses the politics of community performance and public pedagogy. It notes that community can be both exclusionary but also a space of solidarity. Performances always serve political interests and regenerate areas for some but not others. The document advocates for creative community practices that build participation and agency at the margins. Artists can act as intermediaries between organizations. While small projects have value, addressing macro social struggles is complex. Future research should connect performance perspectives with sociological analyses of contested spaces.

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