Professor Elleke Boehmer (Faculty of English, Oxford University)
Dominic Davies (Faculty of English, Oxford University)


Abstract

Elleke Boehmer (Network Convener) and Dominic Davies (Network Facilitator)

Our discussion paper will consider performance as a mode of resistance to structures of urban planned violence and the capacity of performance to mount a platform for effective political action. Throughout, the paper will respond to certain challenges and tensions surrounding performance as resistance that emerged out of the first Leverhulme Planned Violence workshop on 30th and 31st January 2014, held at KCL. We will explore how different kinds of performance including theatre and street art can deconstruct structural violence and initiate trajectories of resistance and social change within an urban context. With the increasing infrastructural regulation of spatial movement and the growing capitalist standardisation and engineering of physical space, to what extent do these performances actually resist, and to what extent can they become complicit? These questions will be brought to bear on several of the Planned Violence presentations, looking at: changing usages of urban space and the ability to walk through them, as discussed by Iain Sinclair and Ivan Vladislavic; the historical excavations of cityscapes as discussed by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe; and emerging forms of artistic and performative resistance such as graffiti, street art and the Greenwich and Lewisham Young People's Theatre's play, Brothers.