Again, it may also mean a connection to community theatre with its undoubted
affective investments:
Such performances are not make-believe enactments, fictions. They are
individual or group ‘testimony’... performances at risk, socially, psycho-
logically and physically. The ‘body’ as a frail and multivalent vessel of life and
meaning is expressed, played with, compromised, celebrated, penetrated,
pierced, covered, pressed – done with in innumerable ways. Yet the bodies
are also persons, living subjects who are more than the objects of performance.
These persons are, to use Bill T. Jones’ phrase from his controversial 199 4
piece, ‘still here’. Persistent in their presence, present as concrete, physical,
transphysical and metaphysical beings, these persons are makers and receivers
both, doers together.
(Schechner 1998: 91)Dancing the city
The third way in which dance can help us to understand expressive potentials
is in its ability to capture the city (Thomas 1998). Here we can see dance as a
means of helping to understand some of those areas of experience which have been
so elusive. In particular, dance’s qualities of allusion can help us to us.
To begin with, dance can help us to understand urban ‘skills’. Day after day,
all kinds of skills of expression are constantly deployed in the city, delineating
time-spaces in which something significant and worthy of notice is to occur. These
‘minor’ skills include all the everyday means of negotiating the city – driving the
car, walking the pavement, crossing the street – and the knowledge stemming from
those encounters (sometimes formalized in City Guides and A–Zs):
What the relationship is between the published timetable and the real
timetable. What the likely effects will be of the visit of a president or a public
demonstration. Where to be able to meet people without fear of missing them
in crowded parts of the city. How long to hold the line. And Living in the
City is also a matter of developing certain psychological capacities. To not
take it personally when somebody is late; or cancels an appointment. To
have a sense of realism about what may be possible to practice, while only
having a partial knowledge of what goes on elsewhere. To develop a quite
sophisticated idea of what it might be possible to know, and what it might be
possible for others to know.
(Barry 2000: 23)In turn, these skills produce a city which is in continual flux. According to
Lefebvre (1995: 230–231) apprehending the to and fro of these skills of expression
itself requires the cultivation of special skills of ‘rhythm-analysis’, which will
apprehend the city as a series of times, polyrhythmically interacting with one
another to produce a ‘music of the city’.^25 To hear this music
144 Part II