you have to be out of it. Externality is necessary. And yet to grasp a rhythm
you must yourself have been grabbed by it, given or abandoned yourself
inwardly to the time that it rhythmed. Is it not thus in dance or music?...
If one attentively observes a crowd during peak times and especially if one
listens to its rumour, one discovers flows in the apparent disorder and an
order which is signalled by rhythms: chance or predetermined encounters,
hurried or nonchalant meandering of people going home to withdraw from
the outside, or leaving their homes to make contact with the outside, business
people and vacant people – so many elements which make up a polyrhythmy.
The rhythmanalyst thus knows how to listen to a place, a market, an avenue.
(Lefebvre 1991: 1 77 )Dance provides us, amongst other things, with an exaggerated example of these
urban skills of expression (Schechner’s ‘restored’ or ‘twice-behaved’ behaviour)
and their outcome, which Lefebvre was trying to apprehend, and, at the same
time, a medium through which they can be understood. Dance, in other words,
enables us to rediscover and rework the plural, performative skills of the city, stimu-
lating both a greater sense of extant situations, and a glimpse of new styles of urban
living which might simultaneously produce new senses of how the world is
(Spinosa et al. 199 7 ). In particular, the backward embodiments of gender and age
can be challenged by changing the value placed on particular bodily skills and
styles, and by showing just how skilled certain performances are.
Dance can also help in another way to apprehend the city. That is, by conjuring
up the imaginary worlds which lie just on or across the border of perception,
and which parallel all our urban journeys. This kind of tangential, oblique,
dispersed knowledge draws on the body’s memory to produce folds in experience,
and allows imaginative access from one dimension into others. Movements in one
zone allow corresponding exploratory movements in other zones.
Thus, the city can be prompted to ‘reveal’ itself in Baudelairean fashion through
‘a rhythmical prose capable of rendering the innumerable connections that
characterize “giant cities”, and especially of communicating their impact on the
city dweller’ (Sheringham 1996: 110). Thus a new category of experience is
founded which is the object of Breton, Benjamin, de Certeau, and other urban
writers and which can be accessed by cultivating the right stance: ‘knowing the
city is dependent on attunement to a particular wavelength, a process involving
the adoption of an attitude of lyrical expectancy and availability to experience’
(Sheringham 1996: 111). In turn, one might see this kind of knowledge of what
Lefebvre (1995) called, rather misleadingly, the ‘urban unconscious’, as opening
up the spaces of eventuality of the city, the glimmers of all the possibles that might
have but never did come about, each with their own senses of possibility. As Caygill
puts it in his study of Walter Benjamin:
The experience of a City is made up of a constant negotiation with the ghosts
and residues of previous experiences, most notably in Paris, with the ghosts of
insurrection and revolution, but also in Berlin which for Benjamin was aboveAfterwords 145