The Performance and Politics of Place: Mexico City, New York, Montreal

Performing Cities: The Performance and Politics of Place: Mexico City, New York, Montreal

Sunita Nigam Department of English McGill University, Montreal July, 2019

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………v

Résumé……………………………………………………………………………….….vii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….ix

Introduction: Performing Cities in North America……….…………………………….....1

Chapter 1: Acting Modern: The Total Design Environment of Mexico ‘68……………..39

Chapter 2: Ritualizing the City in Crisis: New York and The Placemaking Power of Disco

……………………………………………………………………………………….....106

Chapter 3: Teasing the Creative City: Urban Dramaturgy and Montreal’s Burlesque

Revival Scene…….…………………………………………………………………….161

Coda: Crafting the City?………………………………………………..……………....218

Works Cited……………………………………………………………...... 234

Abstract

“Performing Cities: The Performance and Politics of Place: Mexico City, New York,

Montreal” offers scholars interested in the relationship between performance and the city new strategies for reading the aesthetics and politics of performances that produce urban place. It is the first extended study venturing a taxonomy of ways in which we can understand the performance-city relation, advancing acting, ritualizing, and dramatizing as vital ways in which cities materialize through performance. W ith attention to cultural performances (or performances that occur beyond the frame of the theatre), “Performing Cities” uses a performance studies approach to consider the role of performance in producing urban place during and after moments of major economic transition.

Chapter One looks at how the Mexican state used modernist design to activate an industrializing Mexico City as an ‘actor’ of modernity on the world stage at the Mexico ‘68

Olympics. Chapter Two considers New York’s vibrant disco scene of the 1970s as a ritual response to the city’s fiscal and social crisis in the wake of massive suburbanization and deindustrialization. Chapter Three examines Montreal’s contemporary burlesque revival scene in the context of an official creative city development policy, reading both creative city development and the burlesque scene as competing dramaturgical arrangements of the cityscape.

The geographic framework of this dissertation aligns itself with a growing body of scholarship in the area of hemispheric studies. It takes seriously Latin America, Canada, and

Quebec, as part of “America,” which Diana Taylor defines as a practice of contestation and constant remapping (1417-19). My chapters model a comparative urbanism approach called for by Jennifer Robinson, through which scholars are encouraged to “launch” concepts generated from specific case studies into wider conversations about cities throughout the world (20).

Résumé

Cette thèse offre aux chercheurs s’intéressant à la relation entre la performance et les villes de nouvelles techniques pour analyser les dimensions esthétiques et politiques des performances qui produisent les lieux urbains. Cette thèse est la première taxonomie étendue des relations entre les performances et la ville. Elle met de l’avant les actions de faire semblant, de ritualiser et de dramatiser comme des processus vitaux à la production de lieux urbains. En portant attention aux performances culturelles (ou aux performances produites au-delà des cadres théâtraux traditionnels), cette thèse emploie une approche de performance studies pour évaluer le rôle de ces dernières lors de transitions économiques majeures en milieu urbain.

Le chapitre un examine comment l’état mexicain, lors des Olympiques de Mexico en

1968, a misé sur le design moderniste pour activer Mexico comme « acteur » (dans le sens de jouer un rôle ou de faire semblant) de la modernité sur la scène globale. Le chapitre deux considère la scène disco de New York dans les années 1970 comme une réponse ritualiste à la crise économique de New York due à la banlieusardisation et la désindustrialisation massives. Le chapitre trois examine la renaissance contemporaine du burlesque à Montréal dans le contexte d’un modèle officiel de développement urbain de « ville créative ». Il analyse les stratégies de développement de la ville créative et la scène contemporaine burlesque en tant qu’arrangements dramaturgiques concurrents du paysage urbain.

Le cadre géographique de cette thèse s’aligne avec la recherche croissante dans le domaine des études hémisphériques. Il prend au sérieux l’Amérique latine, le Canada et le

Québec en tant que parties intégrantes de « l’Amérique », ce que Diana Taylor définit comme une pratique de contestation et de remappage constant (1417-19). Mes chapitres sont inspirés d’une approche d’urbanisme comparé prônée par Jennifer Robinson, qui encourage les chercheurs à lancer des concepts générés par des études de cas particuliers dans des discussions plus larges portant sur des villes à travers le monde (20).

Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the support, guidance, and care of a great many people. One of the greatest fortunes of my life so far has been the many incredible mentors who have invested their time and energy in my intellectual growth. At McGill, Monica

Popescu and Ned Schantz provided me with valuable feedback on what would become my first publication. Monica, ever-warm (and ever-on-the-go!) also shaped my pedagogical practice, showing me how to teach theory by putting it into dialogue with creative texts as I worked with her as a Teaching Assistant for several semesters. Katherine Zien has sharpened this project with her astute, insightful, and invested feedback. Her attentive reading and her expansive knowledge of a remarkable range of subjects have enriched and will continue to enrich my thinking about the geopolitical dimensions of the performance of place. Derek Nystrom, who read drafts of parts of this dissertation as a member of my supervisory committee, offered much-needed encouragement at a time when I was doubting myself and this project the most.

I am especially grateful to my PhD supervisor, Erin Hurley. Erin stewarded my intellectual trajectory from literary studies into performance studies with an admirable amount of patience and enthusiasm. Throughout the writing of this dissertation, she gave me the creative room necessary for experimentation and risk, trusting me to (eventually) bring together an eclectic set of objects in illuminating ways, while always pushing me to think through each new idea as fully and as carefully as I could. Erin’s sparkling intelligence is matched by her kindness and sense of humour and it has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with her over these past few years of thinking and writing. My interest in the aesthetics and politics of the city was first sparked in Karina Vernon’s course The City as Archive, which I took as an MA student at the University of Toronto.

Karina’s guidance and support as I transitioned into my PhD eventually led me down a path to writing about the racial dimensions of popular performance in Quebec, and her research and teaching have long served me as inspiration for my own. My time in Julia Lupton’s seminar

Dwelling, Selling, Telling: Contemporary Design Topographies at the Cornell School of

Criticism and Theory was also enormously influential for this project. Julia’s expert course design engaged our group in fascinating discussions about the politics of architecture, design, and urban planning over an exciting six-weeks. I am thankful to my fellow seminarians, several of whom have since become close friends, for the lively conversations we had during that idyllic summer in Ithaca.

My brilliant friends, Krysia Michael, Casey McCormick, and Olivia Heaney provided much readerly wisdom and comic relief as I wrote this dissertation. They helped me to pin down ideas, held space for me in times of crisis, and made the process of dissertation-writing much less lonely. I am lucky to be able to call such phenomenal women my friends.

I have benefitted from a great deal of institutional assistance in completing this project.

This dissertation was written with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada through a CGS Bombardier Doctoral Fellowship and a Michael Smith

Foreign Travel Supplement. Together, McGill and the English Department provided an entry scholarship and departmental and faculty-level grants. During the later stages of this project, I held a Doctoral Fellowship at the Institute for the Public Life of Art and Ideas and Erin Hurley provided me with a generous stipend. The staff at the Archivo General de la Nación, the archives of the Escuela Bancaria y

Comercial, the Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de Las Revoluciones de Mexico, the

Pedro Ramírez Vázquez Archives, the New York Public Library, Fales Library and Special

Collections at New York University, and the archives of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and

Transgender Community Center in New York were kind enough to tolerate my presence as I leafed through endless photographs, blueprints, and what turned out to be an impressive volume of pornography. Marvin Taylor of Fales Library and Teresa Macías of the Escuela Bancaria y

Comercial were particularly generous with their time. While, in the end, no specific archival materials made their way into the dissertation, the time I spent in archives helped to give me a material sense of the contexts I was studying and guided the paths of my research.

Thanks are due to Eric Zolov of Stony Brook University, who provided feedback on an early draft of “Acting National,” and to Sheryl McCormick who read through each chapter of my dissertation for clarity while providing spirited encouragement throughout. Ruth Jones and Iván

Ramos also improved the project by commenting on early drafts of chapters. Velma Candyass, burlesque performer extraordinaire, helped me in mapping Montreal’s burlesque scene. I thank her for her many cultural labours as a performer, producer, and activist.

I owe more than I can say to my parents, Jane, Jyoti, and Lizy for their love, support, and the many sacrifices they have made to give me and my brothers a good life. These three colourful characters have big hearts and many talents, and I admire them for teaching their children to speak their minds, even when these minds disagreed with theirs. My brothers, Milan and Allan, and my cousin Selena were and remain my companions in growing up. It hasn’t always been easy, but we sure have had a lot of fun. Certainly, we’ve eaten very well. I’m proud of all of you. I look forward to the rest of it. The Nigam family, with whom dinners never seem to fail to be as dramatic as they are delicious, was the centre of my intellectual life when I was growing up. My late grandfather. Dr. Vijai Nigam paved the way for academic pursuits in our family and instilled in all of us a sense of duty to society. He also showed us what it looked like to not shy away from saying what one really thinks and how to debate subjects with passion. My grandmother, Uma Nigam imparted her adventurousness, open-mindedness, and generosity to our family while feeding us unreasonably delicious meals along the way. I am lucky to have special relationships with my aunts, Sonya, Tara, and Paola, who have shared with me their different gifts and wisdom. My family in its entirety has supported me in many different ways towards the completion of this dissertation, and for this, I am very grateful.

I dedicate this dissertation to my friends. You have housed me, fed me, flown me to different corners of the world to visit you, shuttled me to and from airports, taken middle-of-the-night phone calls, cheered me on, made me laugh until I cried, let me cry, inspired me, and given me precious advice. I love you without moderation.

Introduction: Performing Cities in North America

The central argument of this dissertation is that cities matter through performance.

They materialize as meaningful sites through aesthetic and embodied enactments and representations. And because of this, I contend, performance provides a vital epistemological lens for understanding how cities come to matter in the world as loci of importance. Since 2009, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities (United

Nations). By 2050, researchers predict that the percentage will be two-thirds of the population. As densifying nodes in global flows of people, money, and culture, cities are critical sites for negotiating power in an increasingly globalized world. In our current neoliberal economy, cities have exploited performance as a mechanism of urban development by commissioning theatrical architecture, instrumentalizing social diversity and effervescence as urban spectacle, and offering robust repertoires of cultural experiences to attract tourists, investors, and high-income residents. These theatrical urban representations are used to brand cities as attractive commodities in a global landscape of cities competing for capital. They also function as agents of gentrification and deepening urban inequality as they facilitate processes through which the needs of vulnerable urban populations are overridden by those of big business and higher-income groups. And yet, urban performances are also used to intervene in unequal power relations. Examples of movements that mobilize performance for political resistance include the Occupy movements, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s Marches in the US and beyond, Idle No More and the Quebec student movement in Canada, and the guerrilla urban tactics of the Mexican pedestrian activist group Camina, Haz Ciudad (“Walk, Make

2 the City”), enacted in the high-rise-laden business district of Santa Fe, which was built in the 2000s without pedestrian infrastructure. These urban interventions represent, actualize, and affectively invoke new social possibilities through theatrical and embodied acts.

“Performing Cities: The Performance and Politics of Place: Mexico City, New

York, Montreal” expands the field of performance studies by creating the first extended critical taxonomy of figures through which we might understand the relationship between performance and the city. I shine a spotlight on three cities, which are also major cultural capitals in North America, to examine some of the ways performance produces cities, and cities can be said to perform. Offering snapshots of Mexico City, New York, and

Montreal at flashpoint moments of economic transition in the lives of each city, before, during, and after the shift to neoliberalism, I show how performances—from spectacular representations, to the reenactment of urban scripts, embodied social rituals, and normative and resistant dramaturgical arrangements of the cityscape—make cities what they ‘are.’1 Attending to the performative dimensions of city-life illuminates the processes that (re)produce cities as ‘places’—which is to say, locations made meaningful to humans (Buttimer 1976; Relph 1976; Tuan 1977)—and offers clues as to how more democratic cities might be made.2

1 Here I adopt a performative view of the city—a kind of ‘being’ through ‘doing’. Indeed, I consider the ontology of the city as arising out of phenomenological practice. 2 The discipline of human geography concerns itself with how space (or location) becomes place through the human meanings that become attached to it via phenomenological experiences, affects, representations, and symbolic associations.

Mobilizing Performance and Performance Studies

Moving away from solely textual understandings of cultural expression, in performance studies we acknowledge an expanded set of objects as ‘performance.’ I engage the “broad spectrum” of performance, as Richard Schechner names it, which includes the performing arts, public rituals, ceremonies, embodied enactments, sporting events, popular entertainments, and aesthetically framed or heightened objects

(“Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach” 4). While this is a capacious view of what counts as ‘performance,’ the broad spectrum approach to performance does not assume that all the world’s a stage. While everyday life is frequently shot through with performative elements, we can distinguish performance from everything else as a communicative event that is in some way aesthetically framed, heightened, or newly defined (Blau 140; Lehmann 152; Bauman 41). 3 Influential definitions of performance have emphasized it as “restored” or “twice-behaved” behaviour (Schechner 35-36), as

“materially embodied experience” (Roach 33), as a meaningful display

(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1; Féral 105), or as an act which serves to influence an observer’s impression of a situation (Goffman 8). Because the concept of performance is a dynamic performative (or a process of constant reconstitution) rather than a stable ontological category, performance studies scholars tend to look to distinct cultural objects within their unique contexts of production and reception to discover how these objects function

3 Josette Féral distinguishes theatricality from the quotidian by describing them as that which emerges “through a c left in quotidian space” (“Theatricality” 97, my italics). Féral maintains that “The cleft can be the result of an actor’s seizing control of the quotidian and turning it into theatrical space; it can also be the result of a spectator’s gaze constituting space as theatrical” (97).

4 as performance. To reiterate performance theorist Jon McKenzie’s follow-up to the question, what is performance?: “which performance?” (95).

In recent years, geographers have looked to performance “as a means through which to examine how spaces are practiced and experienced through our bodies” (Rogers

60). The discipline of geography is increasingly animated by scholars interested in the material performativity of place, which is to say, in the ways in which place is produced beyond representation (Thrift 2004; 2007; Dewsbury 2000; 2015). Today geographers increasingly hold the view that “places are enacted” by the embodied activities of their users (Rickly-Boyd et al. 10). This performative turn in geography coincides with a spatial turn in performance studies which can be dated to 1995, when Una Chaudhuri, in her oft-cited Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama , called for a ‘geography’ rather than a ‘history’ of performance. Following Chaudhuri’s call, scholars of theatre and performance attended to: theatre as a spatial medium (McAuley 1999; Mackintosh

1993); the semiotics of theatre architecture (Carlson 1999; Knowles 2004); theatrical representations of place (Chaudhuri 1995; Fuchs and Chaudhuri 2002); site-specific theatre (Kaye 2000); and theatre ecologies of cities (Mckinnie 2007; Miller 2016). More recently, in a shift from examining the spatiality of the theatre to analyzing the theatricality and performativity of place, scholars of performance studies have theorized performance as a crucial social process through which place is constructed (Hill and Paris

2006; Hopkins and Solga 2013; Kwan 2013; Levin and Solga 2009; Morash and Richards

2013; Bennett 2005; 2017; Nagam 2017; Davis-Fisch 2017; McKinnie 2013). An attention to site-specific theatre (theatre designed to be performed in a specific location)

5 and environmental theatre (which attempts to break down the separation between the actors’ and the audience’s space) has played an important role in mediating this shift.4

Not only concerned with the ways in which places are enlivened by human actors—who figure as topographical ‘dramaturges’ of sorts—performance studies scholars are increasingly attentive to the performative collaborations of non-human matter and environments in the production of place (Levin 2014; Schneider 2015; Dickinson 2017;

Schweitzer and Zerdy 2014). A key argument, here, is that if places are ‘enacted’ by human agents, they also ‘perform’ in ways that cannot be fully determined by the humans that animate and stage them.

In its attention to materiality and embodiment, performance studies offers a framework for grasping urban place as a material experience. This approach differs from an urban ‘imaginaries’ approach that attends to the city as an imagined phenomenon arising out of webs of individual and collective images/fictions (Lynch 1960; Silva 1992;

Canclini 1997; Çinar and Bender 2007), and from structuralist and poststructuralist approaches that focus primarily on the city as a text (Duncan 2005; Simon 2006).5 I am centrally interested in performance as a ‘placemaking’ practice, or a practice that produces place by making space meaningful to humans. I use the term ‘placemaking’ as a concept distinct from, though not unrelated to, ‘placemaking’ culture. The culture of

4 British Theatre company Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More” (2011) is a contemporary example of both site specific and environmental theatre. 5 As the editors of P erformance and the City n ote: From Benjamin’s f lâneur to Guy Debord’s d ériviste to the influential work of De Certeau, the idea of ‘walking’ the city in an effort to jam the maps of urban power has taken its practice from performance, but its theory from the all-encompassing textuality of poststructuralism. (4) The practice of walking in the city can also be usefully illuminated by performance studies theory, which is attentive to embodiment, materiality, and performativity as well as to the meanings of objects and practices as they exist within sign systems.

6 placemaking refers to a contemporary approach to rural, and especially urban development and design influenced by the writings of journalist and activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, which were critical of urban renewal projects that failed to take community needs and desires into account. Placemaking culture solicits community feedback and participation in urban design projects.6 In today’s neoliberal cities, which increasingly instrumentalize creativity to stimulate urban economies ‘placemaking’ has also been co-opted as a buzzword for projects of urban development of different scales and a strategy for city-branding.7 Neoliberal instrumentalizations of placemaking culture give the appearance of being led by community, but in fact remain aligned with an urban culture that favours the interests of corporations and high-income groups over diverse community needs. I reclaim the language of placemaking from both the culture of placemaking that arose in the 1960s and the neoliberal use of placemaking as a branding strategy, emphasizing placemaking as any labour that works to make space meaningful.

To illustrate how a performance can produce a city as a meaningful site, let me offer a description of a tourist experience I had near the end of my first research trip to

Mexico City in November of 2014. This was an excursion to a system of canals and floating artificial islands (chinampas ) at the southern periphery of Mexico City in

6 The Project for Public Spaces based in New York City is an example of a placemaking ethos rooted in community. 7 The neoliberal moment is usually dated as beginning in the early 1980s. Neoliberalism has been defined as a set of socio-economic policies including “trade liberalization, privatization, […] the reduction […] of state-subsidized social services […], the lowering of wages, and the evisceration of labour rights” that affect the way culture is used and trafficked in a post-Cold War global context (Yúdice 82). It has also been defined, by people like Ulrich Beck, Wendy Brown, and Shannon Jackson as a ‘risk society’ that privileges ‘flexible selves’ and which encourages citizens to seek “individual solutions to systemic problems” (Jackson 213). Jen Harvie insists that the prioritization of individual rights over the collective good is neoliberalism’s defining quality. Much work on neoliberalism focuses on the precarity of post-Fordist labour and the encroachment of economic legitimation into all spheres of public and private life.

Xochimilco, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. Xochimilco is one of what were at the time known as the sixteen delegaciones (boroughs) of the metropolis, but since the urban reform of 2016 (which gave the city increased autonomy, making it similar to a state in its legal authority), are called the sixteen demar caciones territoriales (municipalities) of the Ciudad de México.

We floated along the canal, shaded from the sun by the brightly painted roof of the trajinera , a traditional gondola-like boat, steered by the hired driver. The boat was carrying me (from Montreal) and a group of visiting friends (one from Tijuana, the rest from New York and Chicago) through the canals of Xochimilco. We floated alongside other trajineras, full mostly of tourists from abroad and from other parts of the country, though a few carried groups of 20- and 30-somethings who appeared, from their accents and dress, to be capitalinos (residents of the capital) drinking liberally, perhaps celebrating some occasion. Another trajinera , this one full of mariachis, passed by, and we hired them for a song (it was my friend’s birthday, and he had selected this excursion for the day). We drank cold beers and sodas from the cooler at the back of the boat and chatted as we glided along the water. The system of canals and artificial islands for which

Xochimilco is known (we knew from abundant tourist materials, trips to museums, and conversations with locals) is what all of Mexico City used to be like, when it was still the capital of the Mēxihcah civilization (which some readers may know as the Aztec

8 civilization) and when it was still called Tenochtitlan. The Mēxihcahs, we had learned, had founded their capital (one of the very first city-states in the Americas) on an island in

8 M ēxihcah i s t he Nahuatl name for the Nahuatl-speaking people that founded the city-state of Tenochtitlan.

8 the middle of lake Texcoco, located in a valley called Anahúac, now known as the Valley of Mexico. Speaking in Spanish, the driver told my friend from Tijuana and me that after the Spanish conquest (in 1519), the lakebed around Tenochtitlan was drained to prevent flooding. The subsequent mass deforestation of the surrounding valley caused the city to fill up with silt.

Xochimilco, which is the Nahuatl word for “where the flowers grow,” is an endangered ecology and home to a groundswell of poor and racialized citizens who, pushed to the margins of Mexico City by poverty and lack of formal housing, are creating illegal settlements on Xochimilco’s protected zones. Inscribed within official tourist scripts mostly concentrated in the centre of the city (with the notable exceptions of the

Teotihuacan pyramids outside of the city and Frida Kahlo’s house in the southern neighbourhood of Coyoacán), the Xochimilco canals are routinely visited as a one-stop destination in the geographically and socially marginal part of the city.

The trajinera experience performs Mexico City in several important ways. The trajineras, like the pyramids outside of the city, are not only a visual object to be contemplated by a viewer, but also an immersive experience which is kinesthetically embodied by visitors. The embodied immersiveness of the trajineras is part of a dramaturgical apparatus for staging a particular representation of Mexico City history. In this staging, the passengers are delivered a temporal experience of the landscape which is framed—through official promotional material and unofficial tourist literature and websites, and through the aesthetics of the trajineras themselves, which, with their brightly patterned roofs draw from Indigenous craft aesthetics familiar from museums

9 and tourist boutiques—as a vestige of Mexico City’s vanished Indigenous past. The trope of Mexico’s remote but glorious Indigenous past, which privileges the Mēxihcah civilization above all others, is everywhere present in Mexico City’s tourism industry and national narratives, and so the trope registers as a smooth continuation of naturalized narratives that erase continued Indigenous presence in the land. But here, the trope is naturalized further in its staging through a literal natural landscape. The trope of a vanishing Indigenous past is staged (and stabilized) by the landscape, even as the landscape is staged by the trope of a vanishing Indigenous past. The trope and the land mutually animate one another.9

Crucially, the canals are symbolically activated, not as what they are today—a fragile ecology and lived environment of the city’s poor and brown citizens—but as a representation of what they are not: a romanticized idea of what all of Mexico City was like five hundred years ago. The present material realities of the land are supplanted by the land’s conversion into a theatrical representation of urban history. Passengers (both foreign tourists and Mexicans) are invited to consume this theatrical performance of place, embellished by dramaturgical elements like the soundtrack of mariachi music from

Veracruz, as they look out at the shore through the open sides of the boats, which create visual frames around the moving landscapes. Even when the landscape is only taken in distractedly, as it was by the groups of young people who seemed to be most interested in partying with their friends in a novelty or kitsch setting (which, local friends informed me, is often the attraction of Xochimilco for young middle-class capitalinos ) the

9 As the ecology of Xochimilco continues to be destroyed, and as the presence of illegal settlements and squatters become more visible in the landscape, the land threatens to be less compliant in its theatrical animations of the trope of a romantic, Indigenous Mexican past.

10 environment still functions as a source of ephemeral escape, a setting for a different kind of symbolic appropriation of the site. As a tourist performance, the trajinera experience worked to produce Mexico City as a particular kind of place by offering an embodied, temporally extended experience of a landscape that was aesthetically framed by a set of familiar tropes, which were inscribed within official scripts for experiencing the city. By converting the present realities of a site into a representation of something else (mimesis), the trajineras theatrically stage place.

This particular staging of place is designed to compete with other performances of

Xochimilco, especially those of its inhabitants who, in the absence of government services including electricity and running water, resourcefully cultivate the land and build homes through their embodied practices. Interestingly, in their “determination to build a home in an unfavourable environment,” the inhabitants of Xochimilco have more in common with the Mēxihcahs who decided to convert the site into a system of canals than with the Mexican state and tourist industry that has transformed the site into a spectacle of a lost time (Carpentier and Bausells). The diverse and competing performances that seek to produce place attest to the problem of reading such a multiple and dynamic phenomenon as a city from the perspective of any single performance. While I momentarily dwell on the distinct placemaking labours of different urban performances throughout this dissertation, each of my research objects must be understood as part of a multiplicity of simultaneously occurring performances of place. Each urban performance provides a unique lens through which to understand a city at a given moment in time.

“Performing Cities” focuses on different kinds of cultural performances like the trajinera experience that dynamically (re)produce city life. Cultural performances occur beyond the frame of the theatre. Performance theorist Jon McKenzie breaks down his definition of cultural performance into three primary actions, namely: reflecting something already familiar (mimesis); presenting imagined alternatives (possibly utopian, dystopian, or fantastic); and conserving or transforming (performative actualization).

More specifically, cultural performances arise through: “1) social reflection through dramatization or embodiment of symbolic forms, 2) the presentation of alternative arrangements, and 3) the possibility of conservation and/or transformation” (31). Far from being mutually exclusive, these can occur simultaneously. For example, reiterative narrative or visual representations of a nation (reflection) can work to conserve

(re-actualize) a specific idea of nation (performativity).1 0 Such a conservative reflection occurred in the trajinera experience, which reiterated familiar national narratives that erased realities of continued Indigenous presence from representations of the modern

Mexican nation. The trajinera experience thus both reflected and conserved an idea of nation. Rather than focusing only on performances in or about cities, I consider cities, as do the contributors to the collection Performing Cities edited by Nicolas Whybrow, to be

“complex performing phenomena” in their own right, arising from interactions between a multiplicity of materials and practices (3). Cities perform and are performed through/as webs of distributed agency.

10 See Erin Hurley’s argument about the relationship between national reflection and national construction in her book N ational Performance: Representing the Nation from Expo ’68 to Céline Dion. Hurley argues that national performances both reflect and construct an idea of nation. The constructive force of representation can be thought of in terms of performativity— in terms o f a ‘doing.’

Like McKenzie, I am interested in cultural performances that manifest through acts of reflection, presentation, and conservation or transformation (of shorter and longer durations). I explore the first most fully in Chapter One through the figure of urban

‘acting,’ and examine acts that conserve and transform parts of the city in Chapter Two through the figure of ‘ritualizing.’ Finally, I turn to the presentation of alternative urban arrangements most closely in Chapter Three, which I theorize through the figure of

‘dramatizing.’ My theorization of urban acting in Chapter One is tied to definitions of performance that emphasize its theatrical, illusory, and dissimulative qualities, as well as to notions of reenactment. I ask, how do cities ‘act’ in ways designed to hide urban realities through the projection of idealized representations of place? And how do they

‘act’ by reenacting (restoring) certain pre-existing scripts of place borrowed from elsewhere? I define urban ritualizing as the materialization of the city through a process of urban crisis, redressive actions enacted to heal the crisis, and subsequent urban transformation. Finally, urban dramatizing, in my theorization, refers to a principle of spatiotemporal urban arrangement that may or may not be created through conscious human actions. Cities accrete as meaningful sites by being made to perform as actors on the world stage, through ritual processes of crisis and transformation, and through official and unofficial dramaturgical arrangements of the cityscape. This dissertation shows that the strategies through which cities perform, or fail to perform, a sense of place are intertwined with their economic development, their discursive codings on national and world stages, and the bodies with which they are symbolically and materially aligned.

My project begins with Mexico City’s hosting of the Olympics in 1968, during which the Mexican state mobilized industrial, graphic, and urban design to transform an industrializing Mexico City into a performer of national industrialization and modernity on the world stage. By making the city perform from a First World repertoire of scripts for performing modernity, and by camouflaging signs of racial and class difference within the cityscape, the Mexican state made the city ‘act’ modern in accordance with a First

World logic of development. Moving from a theorization of urban acting in Mexico City in the 1960s, I turn to New York in the 1970s, a moment of deep fiscal crisis for a city hollowed out by deindustrialization and suburbanization. Partly owing to New York’s increasing concentration of bodies deemed ‘other’ within a national imaginary—namely,

African Americans, Latinx, immigrants, poor people, and non-family households—as the city plunged into a dire fiscal crisis, it was treated by policymakers like “a developing nation that needed to be reprimanded for wasting funds on social services” (Miller 3). In this context of urban crisis, a vibrant disco scene emerged and thrived, making the city pulsate with bodies and sound. I examine New York’s disco scene as a redressive response to the urban crisis, a response that recalibrated body-environment relations through a ritual process bound towards transformation.

From this focus on urban placemaking through ritual, I shift to the use of an urban dramaturgy—a principle of aesthetic and temporal urban arrangement—of

‘spectacularization’ as a strategy for urban development in present-day Montreal, which has adopted a neoliberal creative city development model. Chapter Three asks, in a city that values all things spectacular, what does cultural resistance look like? I examine

Montreal’s contemporary burlesque revival scene as formulating a counter-dramaturgy to creative city ‘spectacularization’—or the exploitation of sensually enthralling productions of the cityscape for urban development—by performing a dance between urban visibility and invisibility. My case studies respectively portray: 1) an industrializing city produced through major state investment and spatial regulation; 2) a deindustrializing city produced through major state divestment and spatial abandonment; and 3) a postindustrial city produced by increased private investment and spatial regulation in the form of private-public partnerships. To each of these top-down productions of the city, diverse urban users respond with their own enactments and representations that produce the urban as a material and imagined phenomenon.

A foundationally interdisciplinary discipline, performance studies applies a range of approaches, including Marxist and feminist analysis, critical race theory, affect theory, history, and formal and semiotic analysis, to interpret its objects in their conditions of production and reception. Much performance studies scholarship attends to the social and political effects of representational and performative practices, specifically the ways in which performance negotiates power relations. “Performing Cities” mobilizes the approaches listed above as needed. I draw most frequently on analysis of interdisciplinary theoretical and historical scholarship, journalism, photographic documentation, and close readings of my selected objects. I use these methodologies of content analysis and close reading to uncover the aesthetics and politics through which urban performances have been mobilized to create meaningful places. I do not underestimate the importance of having spent time in each of my selected cities—wandering their streets, observing daily

15 interactions, conversing with their residents and tourists, visiting their museums and archives, in the case of Montreal, participating in its burlesque scene as an active spectator, and even just looking at, listening to, and smelling these cities—in informing the paths of my research and thinking throughout the writing of this dissertation. While these experiences did not result in measurable findings, and while not all insights gleaned from them found a home in this dissertation, they were indispensable autoethnographic components of my research practice; they gave me an embodied sense of my selected cities as densely storied, affectively provocative, multisensorial phenomena, in which certain traces of the past persist, while still others fall away.

In keeping with performance studies practices, I situate my selected objects within their broader historical contexts, and dissect the power relations through which they operate and which they (re)produce. Performing Cities offers scholars new strategies for reading the aesthetics and politics of performances that produce urban place.

Interventions in Scholarship on Performance and the City

This project contributes to a recent groundswell of scholarship in the discipline of performance studies on performance and the city, which has insisted that “Performance and performativity are intrinsic to urban life and design” (Makeham 152). D.J. Hopkins’s,

Kim Solga’s, and Shelley Orr’s Performance and the City (2009), which called for a departure from solely textual understandings of the city, was the first edited collection devoted specifically to examining the relationship between performance and the city. Jen

Harvie’s Theatre & the City (2009) is another important text in this research area; in this

16 book, Harvie details urban performance’s ambiguous or opposing uses to hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ends, a focus she continued to develop in her book Fair Play: Art,

Performance, and Neoliberalism about the economic politics of contemporary art and performance in London (2013). Recent scholarship on performance and the city has focused on performing arts scenes in specific cities (Hamera 2006; McKinnie 2007;

Harvie 2013; Kruger 2013; Knowles 2017), intercultural urban performance (Knowles

2017), performance and the global city (Hamera 2006; McKinnie 2007; Hopkins and

Solga 2013), and the politics of performance, mega-events, and creative industries within the neoliberal creative city development paradigm (Harvie 2009; 2013; Levin and Solga

2009; Janssen 2013; 2016; Bennett 2017; Dickinson et al. 2016; McKinnie 2016).1 1

Performance studies scholars working on the performance-city relation view the city as a theatre of social action, a representational and performative practice, a commodifiable product, and, increasingly, as a material actor within distributed networks of agency.

I am particularly engaged with the analysis of the politics of performance within the ‘creative city.’ Through the implementation of a so-called ‘creative city’ development model, elaborated in the mid-1990s through the 2000s by creative city ‘gurus’ Richard

Florida and Charles Landry, (especially post-industrial) cities around the world have mobilized cultural display and creative innovation as an instrument for urban revitalization (Landry and Bianchini 1995; Landry 2000; 2006; Florida 2002; 2004). As

Paul Makeham comments:

11 This scholarship also includes a focus on the production of the city or bordering cities through embodied mobility, predominantly walking and dance (Dickinson 2017; Levin and Solga 2009; Hamera 2006; Kwan 2013), on site-specific performance (Levin and Solga 2009; Pearson 2010; Harvie 2013), and on the many tensions between the city as capitalist spectacle or neoliberal product and as site of political resistance (Harvie 2009; 2013; Levin and Solga 2009; Janssen 2013; Hammond and Janssen 2016).

Where it was once dependent upon its capacity for economic production and

distribution, the post-war, postindustrial city is being radically re-structured

towards residential accommodation and cultural consumption. Working against

the modernist, instrumentalist legacies of their predecessors, contemporary urban

planners increasingly are attuned to culture and creativity as drivers of urban

design and redevelopment. (151)

In post-industrial creative cities, the hard, durable products of industry have been replaced with the soft, flexible and often ephemeral products of culture.1 2 The politics of these soft new urban practices/products remain up for debate. Creative city policy belongs to a broader neoliberal urban development model that embraces free-market relations, the reinvestment in cities through public-private partnerships including developer-driven urban renewal, the privatization of (especially downtown) public spaces and of social services, and general cuts in state spending on social programs and infrastructure (public austerity). Critiques of what Laura Levin and Kim Solga have dubbed the “creative city script” (38) have focused on its exacerbation of the displacement and segregation of vulnerable (low-income, migrant, racialized) populations through gentrification (Levin and Solga 2009; Atkinson 2007; Loison 2013; Wilson

2017; Florida 2017); its cooptation of the experiences of those they marginalize (Levin and Solga 2009; McLean 2014; Loison 2013); its displacement of urban problems to the suburbs (Florida 2017); its erasures of local histories and communal uses (McLean 2014;

Loison 2013); its destruction of ecologies of cultural creation by landscapes of cultural

12 See David Calder’s book S treet Theatre and the Production of Postindustrial Space: Working Memories (2019) for Calder’s analysis of the role that street theatre has played in processes of deindustrialization and urban development.

18 consumption (Poirier 2015; Loison 2013); and its ultimate exacerbation of urban inequality (Gyuris 2017; Gerhard et al. 2017). My third chapter directly intervenes in this discussion about the role of performance in the creative city.

Though the interventionist thrust of this dissertation is theoretical rather than historical, together, my chapters—which move forward in time from the 1960s, through the 1970s, to the present, and move northward, from Mexico City, to New York, to

Montreal—tell a story about how performance has been part of the machinery of urban and economic transition in North America through processes of industrialization, deindustrialization, and postindustrial cultural centralization. This story reveals performance to be a vital part of the formal apparatus through which policymakers and stakeholders represent cities and their modes of production to local and global spectators.

Judith Hamera has argued that performance is “central to the ways shifts in modes of production have been figured in the United States since the dawn of the industrial age” a statement with which I agree, and which my case studies support by extending this claim to include Mexico and Canada (Hamera 1). I also examine performance as a motor of economic, spatial, and affective transformation during liminal periods between different modes of production, as well as a resource for challenging dominant economic systems and the ideologies that underpin them. If performance has been used to solidify and represent urban modes of production, it has also been used to undo them, or instead, to formulate ways of experiencing the city beyond the participation in capitalist relations.

The ebbs and flows of performance make cities objects of constant doing and undoing. I ask: How has cultural spectacle shaped official performances of the urban in both

19 industrializing cities and postindustrial ones? How have processes of deindustrialization and economic decline eroded top-down theatricalizations cities, as well as their ability to perform as efficient systems of material and affective support for their residents? How have industrial performances of modernity been bound up with national ideology in ways that postindustrial, neoliberal performances of modernity are not? How have contexts of urban crisis created liminal spaces in which urban users have innovated creative approaches to redressing experiences of lived crisis? And how have cities differently positioned vis-à-vis globally and nationally dominant ideas about ‘development’ been differently pressured to perform their modernity, and to perform whiteness, in the urban space? Finally, what performance strategies can community artists use to protect living performance ecologies and sustain the embodied archives of old ones in contemporary neoliberal urban contexts? In modern urban contexts of cultural spectacularization, artists and activists—to resist being absorbed by the urban spectacle, on the one hand, or being wiped out by it, on the other—must find innovative strategies for negotiating urban visibility.

My propositions that cities might be usefully read as actors (and scriptive reenactors) on the world stage, that certain urban scenes might be read as ritual responses to urban crisis, or instead as alternative dramaturgical arrangements of the urban form, constitute fresh contributions to discussions of performance and the city. In advancing acting, ritualizing, and dramatizing as critical ways in which cities materialize through performance, my goal is to model novel and versatile strategies for analyzing the

20 aesthetics and politics of performances that produce urban place across a range of national contexts and time periods.

Geographic Frame

America is a most unhappy performative. Few agree on who has the power to invoke it, whom it addresses, and what it enacts.

—Diana Taylor, “Remapping Genre through Performance: From ‘American’ to

‘Hemispheric’ Studies”

“Performing Cities” is a rare example of scholarship in theatre and performance studies that considers Mexico, Canada, and the United States alongside one another.1 3

The geographic scope of my project mirrors my own locatedness in North America, and aligns itself with a growing body of scholarship in the area of hemispheric studies (Taylor

2003; 2007; Levander and Levine 2008; Alvarez 2013a; 2013b; Rivera-Servera and

Young 2011; Riggio et al. 2015). Spearheaded by the Hemispheric Institute for

Performance and Politics in the Americas based at New York University in 1998, hemispheric studies takes “the Americas,” both north and south, as its chosen object of inquiry, and understands “America,” not as a static object, but rather as a highly contested performative that is constantly remapped (“Remapping Genre through Performance”

1417-19). As a performative remapping of ‘America,’ “Performing Cities” takes seriously Latin America and Quebec as part of North America, viewing this as a challenge to a white, anglophone, and US-centric North American imaginary, and

13 Other monographs that consider the US, Canada, and Mexico together include: Felicia Hardison Londré and Daniel J. Watermeier (1998); Natalie Alvarez, Sasha Kovacs, and Jimena Ortuzar (2015); and T.L Cowan (forthcoming).

21 responds to what Alvarez has noted to be Canada’s limited inclusion in this body of scholarship (see Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance). By examining cities in

Mexico, the US, and Canada together, I acknowledge the place of Mexico and Canada in the performative ‘North America,’ where these countries have been routinely elided, or arrive as marginal afterthoughts to the US.

This dissertation traces meaningful connections between my selected sites to tell a story of urban difference, similarity, relation, and transformation across three different

‘American’ cities and nations. Because cities in Mexico, the US, and Canada have different timelines of colonization, industrialization, and economic and infrastructural development, and different cultural, linguistic, and national histories, an examination of the performance and politics of place in my case studies occurs through “the multiple challenges of actually reading across borders, charting their uneven implications, and

‘figuring’ what is articulated within, between, across, and through them” (Siemerling 1).

At the same time, beyond the local differences that span the continent, North America serves as a unique context for thinking about the performance of cities. Perhaps most importantly is the fact that the condition of emergence of the places we now call Mexico,

Canada, and the United States was the dispossession of Indigenous populations. The countries of North America, though different in many ways, all went through a phase of monarchical imperialism before they eventually became settler-colonial nation-states.

The work of Lilian Mengesha, Anita González, Dylan Robinson, Julie Nagam, and others working on Indigenous theatre and performance of ‘North America’ (Mengesha 2017;

2018; González 2009; Robinson 2014; 2017; Nagam 2017), a space which for many

Indigenous peoples is Turtle Island—a landmass that cannot be contained by the new boundaries of settler nations—is relevant, here. As Gregory Jay writes, national boundaries “are less the origins of our history than the products of it” (182). Turtle Island literature reminds us that any discussion of place in North America is haunted by colonial ruptures with Indigenous spatial meanings.

And indeed, one of the arguments of this dissertation, which I take up in Chapter

One in the context of Mexico, is that the performance of place in North America has unfolded in ways that are inextricable from its colonial histories. Settler colonial performances of place in North America have involved negotiations of both the reality of local Indigenous difference and settler relationships to the colonizing European powers.

Through colonization, the territories of Turtle Island were transformed into spatial performances of the ‘New World,’ a discourse which articulates itself in relation to both the European ‘old’ world and the Indigenous world, which was discursively produced as

‘pre-modern.’ The discourse of the New World is, to be sure, incredibly intricate. As

Winfried Simerling has written:

To think about the ‘New World’ in terms of ‘newness’ is profoundly paradoxical.

As the term ‘colony,’ ‘return,’ or ‘errand into the wilderness’ suggest in aspects of

their meaning, the enterprise of European settlement in the ‘New World’ was

directly predicated upon the assumption of replication of identity and sameness.

(4)

The ‘newness’ of the ‘New World’ is, to be sure, reliant on a logic of repetition or

‘twice-behavedness,’ to borrow Schechner’s term for describing the reiterative logic of

23 performance. In their efforts to perform a ‘new’ version of the world, the colonial spaces of the New World performed what I refer to in Chapter One as ‘spatial drag,’ or the use of spatial scripts borrowed or ‘dragged’ from elsewhere. Through spatial drag, the New

World performed a reiterative sense of place. This idea of spatial drag is implicit in the idea and practice of the ‘colony,’ which, as Winfriend Siemerling argues, has to do with

“the replication of sameness elsewhere” (4). Initially, the modernizing ‘children’ of

Europe, Mexico and the United States would eventually frame their national revolutionary myths through violent, heroic fights for independence from their European

‘parents.’ Canada, by contrast would become a Commonwealth Dominion in 1867, when it acquired semi-independence from the British Crown. Through these ruptures with

Europe (some more violent than others), the nations of North America broke away from a reiterative colonial imperative in favour of settler-colonial performances of place that sought to establish their difference from (rather than their similarity to) the Old World.

In addition to articulating itself against/with the ‘old’ European world, the New

World articulated itself against Indigenous space and bodies, which were produced as a

‘savage,’ pre-modern wilderness against which a modern world of monarchical imperialism, and then, settler colonialism, could emerge. In breaking away from the imperative to ‘re-perform’ the old world in a new place through revolutionary wars of independence or, in the case of Canada, the establishment of a Dominion, the new settler-colonial North American nations managed the fact of Indigenous presence in diverse ways. While Canada, the US, and Mexico all used strategies of Indigenous dispossession and elimination and white possession, Mexico, like many other Latin

American countries, institutionalized discourses of creolization and racial mixing

(mestizaje ) in an effort to justify and romanticize its colonial practices. While the distinction between discourses of mestizaje and creolization on the one hand, and practices of systematic Indigenous dispossession on the other, has been used to minimize continuities between Latin American and North American models of colonialism, as M.

Bianet Castellanos argues, “the logics of dispossession and elimination, which are key tenets of a settler colonial model, were not isolated to British imperialism; they were also central to Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects” (778).1 4 Discourses of creolization and mestizaje have so often been used in Latin America (including Mexico) as a technique to gloss over uneven power relations between disenfranchised Indigenous populations and European settlers. The latter frame themselves through narratives of racial and cultural mixing with local populations and of heroic independence from

European monarchical powers.

While the argument I make in Chapter One about the state’s management of

Indigenous difference through theatrical strategies for performing Mexico as a modern place is focused on Mexico City, the performative of North America as an enactment of a

‘New World’ has been, since its beginnings, invested in a theatrical and reiterative

14 In a recent special issue of A merican Quarterly o n “Settler Colonialism n Latin America,” M. Bianet Castellanos discusses the resistance to thinking Latin America through the lens of settler colonialism. She writes: Considered a key distinction of Anglophone imperial projects, it is rare to find settler colonialism applied to Latin America. This resistance reflects entrenched divisions precluding North–South dialogues, problems regarding the concept’s translatability to a Latin American context, and an emphasis on binary divisions within settler colonial theory” (777). Castellanos continues: Efforts to distinguish regimes of colonialism in the Americas by their method of dispossession, as rooted in e ither land or labor expropriation, ends up reproducing binaries (land/labor, settler/native, Latinx/Latin American) that mask articulations spanning imperial and colonial regimes. (778)

25 performance of place. This performance of place was initiated by a spatial crisis brought about by Indigenous dispossession and a rupture with Indigenous spatial practices. North

America thus proceeds as an ongoing crisis of place.

North America can also be understood as what Naomi Klein calls a ‘fortress continent.’ A fortress continent, Klein writes, “is a bloc of nations that joins forces to extract favourable trade terms from other countries, while patrolling their shared external borders to keep people from those countries out.” Klein continues, “if a continent is serious about being a fortress, it also has to invite one or two poor countries within its walls, because someone has to do the dirty work and heavy lifting.” Klein writes of the fortress continent in North America as having been entrenched post-9/11: “After the attacks,” Klein writes, “it wasn’t an option for the US simply to build higher walls at the

Canadian and Mexican borders; in the Nafta era, the business community wouldn’t stand for it.” “So what’s a wildly pro-business, security-obsessed government to do?,” she asks,

“Easy. Move the border.” Klein argues that the Mexican and Canadian borders have been converted into “glorified checkpoints” that “seal off the entire continent.” She emphasises that, while being inside the fortress may be preferable to being locked out of it, “it’s no guarantee of equal status.” She writes of North America as a three-tiered system, in which the “the US rules by decree, Canada and Mexico serve as guards, and Mexican workers are banished to the continental equivalent of the servants’ quarters.” And indeed,

Mexico has been invited into the North American fortress as a source of cheap labour

(including ‘illegal’ Mexican labour in the southwest US) and trade as its people continue to be patrolled, turned away, and detained out at the US-Mexican and, to a lesser extent,

US-Canadian borders. Because of their economic and geopolitical histories, Mexico,

Canada, and the US are locked into relationships of uneven circulation and exchange.

While they exchange money, commodities, and people, they also exchange ideas—or what I refer to as ‘scripts’—about how to carry out their development and perform modernity. One of the ways that modernity has been performed is through aesthetic mobilizations of the urban space. Unsurprisingly, in North America, many of the dominant scripts for performing modernity and development through the urban form have been established by the US, though Mexican and Canadian cities have not always merely reiterated US urban scripts of modernity. While the US has relied on tropes of newness and America exceptionalism in the creation of its national myth, which (at least on the surface) seems to have freed the US from a reiterative logic, Mexico and Canada have had to establish their credibility within the world system through more frequent performances of mimesis (specifically, the imitation of hegemonic modernity codes established elsewhere). For Canada and Mexico, the imperative to re-perform modernity scripts established elsewhere has no doubt been accompanied by considerable anxiety of influence that is not shared by US performances of place.

The eclecticism of my selected cases permits me to test approaches to thinking place through performance by analyzing a diverse and, hopefully in some ways, exemplary, set of objects. While the case studies I select are grounded in particular urban and national histories, the theoretical approaches I model in each chapter might also be used to interpret very different cities throughout the world.

My selection of case studies, which includes Mexico and Canada as meaningful sites through which urbanism in North America might be thought through, participates in a movement in urban studies towards “conceptual and methodological experimentation in pursuit of a more global approach to understanding cities” (Robinson 3). Influenced by postcolonialist critiques of comparative methods for studying the urban which focus on categories of relatively similar cities, such as “Mega,” “Global,” “African,” “Latin

American,” “Western” “Third World,” and so forth, geographer Jennifer Robinson has called for a flattening of hierarchies of the urban in a global context, and for a consideration of all cities as “ordinary” (2005; 2015). Robinson argues that a cosmopolitan comparativism that places all cities within the same analytical field offers a way out of binaries which, for example, divide the world into “innovative” rich cities in the Global North and “imitative” poor cities in the Global South. She insists on the potential for generating theoretical insights about cities from a broad range of settings.

Robinson identifies launching as one useful methodological tactic for practicing a cosmopolitan comparativism. Here, the idea is that one can ‘launch’ concepts generated from specific case studies into wider conversations about cities throughout the world, being careful to adapt and revise concepts launched from one site as they are used as starting points for thinking through any number of ‘elsewheres.’ Robinson refers to this practice of launching investigations and insights from any urban site into broader conversations about diverse urban sites as a tactical practice of “thinking cities through elsewhere” (“Thinking Cities through Elsewhere” 5).

North America offers a productive geographic framework for ‘thinking cities through elsewhere’ because of the diversity of the countries and cities that fall within its borders. Activating North America as a contested performative, this dissertation brings together: a developing Latin American, predominantly hispanophone, largely mestizo and

Indigenous city from the Global South (and, during the Cold War, part of the Third

World); a predominantly anglophone cultural capital in the global superpower nation of the United States at a moment in its history in which it was poor, racialized, and treated as ‘underdeveloped’; and an officially francophone city and historical cultural capital in the nationally distinct province of Quebec within Canada, which itself figures in a global imaginary as a kind of ‘second-nation’ perpetually in the shadow of the United States.

Rather than stabilizing ‘North America’ as an object, this project reveals North American to be a diverse, complex, and dynamic practice.

Temporal Frame

1968 is a powerful starting point for discussions of urban performance for several reasons. A year of social unrest, 1968 saw cities transformed into stages for social protests, including Vietnam War protests and Prague Spring and student and civil rights protests, such as the massive student movements in France, Warsaw, Madrid, and Mexico

City. The year in which Martin Luther King was assassinated, 1968 was also the year in which the first black power fist was seen on television, when African American medalists

Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists as the

American national anthem began to play on the Olympic podium at the Mexico ’68

Olympics, as a protest against black oppression in the United States. Importantly, the sixties also saw the rise of many Indigenous decolonization struggles, which in North

America, are known as “Red Power.”1 5 A flashpoint event in the Red Power movement was the occupation of Alcatraz Island by 89 Native Americans and their allies for nineteen months beginning in November 1969. This occupation was an attempt to reclaim the land after it had been declared as surplus federal property. Their protest was eventually forcibly ended by the US government.

1968 was a year of resistance and violence. Many of those who dared to resist war, sexism, racism, and other oppressive social structures were brutally repressed, shunned, murdered, or disappeared by their states.1 6 It was also in 1968 that Marxist intellectual Henri Lefebvre wrote his oft-cited The Right to the City, a book in which

Lefebvre called for the city to be reclaimed by the people from the grip of capitalism and state oppression as a space of democratic social action and connection. To have the right to the city, in Lefebvre’s view, urban users needed not only to have the right to use public urban spaces, but also the right to cr eate them. This was a call to rebuild the city as an infrastructure for supporting collective life.

The editors of New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global

Consciousness argue that the ‘sixties,’ imagined not as a single decade, but rather a

15 As Scott Rutherford writes, “Commonly known as ‘Red Power’ in North America during the 1960s and 1970s, indigenous movements for sovereignty, land, cultural reclamation, and human rights carried with them a critical transnational imaginary connecting them to radical movements globally” (358). 16 I n August 1968, Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia to violently crush the Prague Spring movement led by liberal reformist Alexander Dubč e k. In the same month, a nti-Vietnam War Protest groups gathered at the 1 968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The protests ended in a police riot on August 28th. On October 2, 1968, after a summer of massive student protests, the Mexican military opened fire on a group of peacefully gathered students in the public square of the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex in Mexico City, killing or disappearing and estimated 300 people.

30 stretched out era that stretches across a minimum of three decades (this era might be said to have begun with the Algerian War of 1964 and to end with the Chilean coup in 1973, or even the Contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980s) still has unfinished legacies that extend into the new millennium ( Dubinsky et al. 2-6). The editors of this collection flag the sixties as an era that a “crucial moment in the birth of a distinctive and novel kind of global consciousness” that “exhibited a heightened consciousness of global injustice”

(Saul, qtd. in Dubinsky et al. 3; Dubinsky et al. 6). During this era, citizens “demanded a place as subjects rather than as objects of history” (4). As contributor to the collection

George Katsiaficas points out, these dimensions of the new left, which are centered on bringing about a greater collective good, are “carried into contemporary struggles against war and neoliberalism” (349). Many struggles that gained global prominence in the sixties, including struggles of Indigenous decolonization, feminism, antiracism, and environmentalism, remain very much ongoing today. In urban contexts, we are still in the same moment announced by Lefebvre, in which it remains urgent that society claim the city back from the powers that systematically disenfranchise the majority of the populace.

Cities remain powerful sites for political action. This dissertation follows shifts and continuities in the politics of the urban from the 1960s to the present.

Engagement with Scene Thinking

An important interdisciplinary involvement of this dissertation arises out of my theorization, in Chapters Two and Three, of the placemaking labours of urban scenes. In

Chapter Two I examine the ability of a scene to recalibrate urban experience through

31 embodied ritual processes. In Chapter Three I attend to how a scene produces the city as an aesthetic object through its interventions into the cityscape. ‘Scene theory,’ sometimes also referred to as “scene thinking” (Woo et. al) emerged in the early 1990s and the early

2000s with the work of Will Straw (1991) and Barry Shank (1994). It was developed further by Alan Blum in his book The Imaginative Structure of the City (2003). During this period, ‘the scene’ was activated by these scholars as a dynamic term for studying affinity cultures (cultures composed of people who share certain affinities) that are connected to a place even as a scene, always effervescent, cannot be tied down to any stable topography. Within popular music studies, the concept of the ‘scene’ offered a way of studying music not only as a text, aesthetic, or industry, but also as embedded in material social relations and places in which it was produced and circulated, including clubs, bars, streets, record shops, and so on (Woo et al. 287).

As a shifting performative, the concept of ‘scene’ undergoes regular remappings.

One important definition of scene arises out of its dual structure, which involves both cultural work/expression, and an excess of sociability—or the social relations that emerge around the engagement with cultural production. Scenes also include any secondary and tertiary economies that crop up around a central cultural production. According to Straw, a culture of only sociability amounts to little more than leisure and consumption, whereas only cultural work amounts to “little more than a network or a production centre”

(“Above and Below Ground” 408). So, a theatre scene is not only composed of the performances that occur within theatre venues, but also of the scenes of sociability that occur in venue lobbies and on the streets outside of venues, in the bars and restaurants

32 and parties that performers and spectators frequent, and in the online blogs and media buzz that it generates. These latter phenomena are extensions of the central acts of performing and spectating and examples of the kinds of social effervescence that transform a cultural production into a ‘scene.’ In performance studies, we would understand many of these supplements of sociability that emerge around the central cultural production as part of the ritual process of performance, which includes the training, workshop, rehearsal, warm-up, cool-down, and aftermath activities and spaces that flank the central performance event. While scenes have been understood by scholars of cultural studies as important producers of the theatricality of city life, the theatricality of scenes has generally been located in the social performances of scene participants—for example, their styles or codes of interaction and dress (Blum 2003; Silver and Clark

2016). I propose that, beyond the embodied performances of scene participants, the material ecologies of urban scenes—their built and natural environments and the interactions that occur within them—also have important theatrical dimensions that contribute to the meanings of scenes and the places they shape.

Engaged most closely with performance studies, I do not always signal the specific interventions I am making into traditions of scene thinking within cultural studies. However, I hope to offer two distinct interventions into scene thinking. Each of my selected scenes—New York’s disco scene of the 1970s and Montreal’s contemporary burlesque scene—is conceptualized, on the one hand, as creating a powerful affective atmosphere that responds to an urban crisis of state care, and, on the other, as performing the city as an aesthetic object. In my chapter about disco in New York I follow one

33 important direction in current cultural studies thinking on scenes that increasingly attends to the affective and atmospheric labour of scenes (Sevin; Anderson 2009; Shaw 2014), which occurs at the same time as a turn to atmospheres and environments in architectural theory (Böhme 2017).

Because of its attention to embodied experience, spatiality, liminality, and transformation, performance studies might offer useful approaches to thinking through the affective, atmospheric, and socially transformational powers of urban scenes. In the subsequent chapter, which examines Montreal’s burlesque scene as a dramaturgical assemblage, I am engaged with two other directions in scene thinking that have been gaining momentum in recent years. The first of these looks at scenes as total ecologies

(Sevin 93) or assemblages (Shaw 87), and the second examines the visuality of scenes

(Casemajor and Straw 2017; Straw 2015). In Nathalie Casemajor’s and Will Straw’s

March 2017 introduction to a special issue of Imaginations on the “The Visuality of

Scenes,” Casemajor and Straw note the paucity in scene thinking of scholarship on the visual properties of urban scenes and seek to remedy this lack. I supplement an attention to the visuality of Montreal’s burlesque scene in the cityscape with a consideration of its temporality. Considering the cityscape as a spatiotemporal phenomenon, I argue that the burlesque scene as an urban assemblage activates a dramaturgy of the urban in which it performs a dance between high and low visibility.

Chapter Breakdown

In Chapter One, “Acting Modern: The Total Design Environment of Mexico ’68,”

I examine an industrializing Mexico’s urban national performance during its hosting of the Mexico ’68 Olympics. I argue that the Mexico ’68 design team, which operated under the aegis of the Mexican state, mobilized complex theatrical strategies of reenacting and camouflaging to make the urban space of Mexico City ‘act’ modern for foreign spectators. I tease out the racial politics of Mexico’s urban national performance, focusing on the state’s manipulation of signs of uneven development and Indigenous life within the cityscape, and its performance of a white(r) modernity through (1) the reenactment of First World modernity scripts and (2) the foregrounding of industrial and cosmopolitan imagery in the urban space. Mobilizing Erving Goffman’s theory of the presentation of the self in social interactions, I theorize urban acting as a selective and possibly disingenuous representation of the city that nevertheless contains an aspirational truth. Urban acting involves the use of techniques including the reenactment of spatial, narrative, aesthetic, or behavioural scripts dragged from elsewhere. I bring Goffman’s theories about the performance of self in social interactions into conversation with Laura

Levin’s theory of ‘performing ground,’ and Mexican writer and diplomat Octavio Paz’s theory of ‘Mexican masks.’ I ultimately read the machinery of Mexico’s urban national performance at Mexico ’68 as carrying out a topographical racial passing that manipulated Indigenous aesthetics, histories, and populations. With this opening chapter,

I hope to contribute a conceptual vocabulary and approach for reading the histrionics of place as well as the racial dimensions of theatrical performances of the city. With this

35 chapter, I also offer a relatively early case study, and a Latin American one, to burgeoning scholarship in performance studies on “the local politics of global placemaking” in mega-events like the Olympics, the World Cup, and World’s Fairs

(Dickinson et al., abstract).

In Chapter Two, “Ritualizing the City in Crisis: The Placemaking Power of

Disco,” I analyze New York’s disco scene in the early 1970s as a response to New York’s urban crisis. In a moment between industrial and post-industrial modes of production, disco rushed in to make the city vibrate with alternative cultural and affective experiences. The disco scene, which was sustained by the labours of some of the city’s most marginalized populations, including black and Latinx people, gay men, and women, negotiated the crisis through ritual processes of creative spatial production. Shifting from the consideration of the role of performance in producing the city as an optical environment in chapter one, this chapter examines how performance produces the urban through the creation of sonic, kinesthetic and affective atmospheres, in which the distance between body and environment is diminished. This chapter returns to concepts of ritual developed by Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, which have been foundational for performance studies. Focusing on disco’s urban practices of domesticating and affecting,

I read disco as a counter-response to suburbanization in the 1970s. In their edited collection on the role of urban construction through ritual Ritualizing the City (2017), medieval studies scholars Ivan Foletti and Adrien Palladino write: “the city has always been, and remains, the ideal place of collective rituality. It is the city that has hosted, since Antiquity, collective celebrations of victory, important religious ceremonies, but

36 also ritual consecrations of the elite.” (7). This chapter stakes a place for the relevance of ritual processes of social transformation and historical change (with a special focus on atmosphere and affect) in the production of urban place in scholarship focused on performance and the city. It also contributes to a lively interdisciplinary scholarly conversation on disco (Lawrence 2003; 2008; 2011a; 2011b; Echols 2010; Nyong’o

2008; Crimp 2008; Hughes 1994; Straw 1990; 2008; Shapiro 2005) by insisting on the disco scene as a fundamentally placemaking phenomenon and as a response to urban crisis.

Chapter Three, “Teasing the Creative City: Urban Dramaturgy and Montreal’s

Burlesque Revival Scene,” attends to Montreal’s adoption of a creative city development model since 2005, to the effects that this urban development model has had on the women’s community arts scene of burlesque, and to the ways in which the burlesque scene is resisting both extinction and cooptation by the creative city. I argue that

Montreal’s creative cityscape can be understood through a dramaturgy of

‘spectacularization,’ and propose that the burlesque scene adopts a counter-dramaturgy to creative city spectacularization in a dance (a tease) between high and low visibility in the cityscape. In this chapter I continue to develop an understanding of the city as an aesthetic object and theatrical performance (a project begun in Chapter One) produced through the arrangement of specific dramaturgical components. While Chapter One focused on a performance of the city that reenacted scripts and involved a logic of selective representation, in this chapter, I take inspiration from burlesque as a theatrical form to theorize Montreal’s burlesque scene as a visual and temporal urban arrangement

37 that variably moves above and below ground. The ‘urban tease’ (which I theorize as a logic of urban appearance that alternates between high and low visibility) mobilizes aesthetics of dispersion and incrementality to eschew the dramaturgical logic of the creative city spectacle. I argue that the ‘slow,’ dispersed space created by Montreal’s burlesque scene tactically intervenes in the ‘fast’ and concentrated space of creative city spectacularization. This chapter joins emergent scholarship in performance studies on burlesque revival scenes, particularly in Canada, first consolidated in Shelley Scott’s and

Reid Gilbert’s special issue of Canadian Theatre Review ( CTR ) in spring, 2014 on burlesque. To this scholarship, I contribute a focus on the resistant placemaking labours of burlesque, and to the theatrical qualities of burlesque scenes as they emerge into the cityscape as visual and temporal objects in potentially tactical ways.

My hope is that each of my chapters will perform the kind of ‘launching’ described by Robinson, thus opening themselves to global comparisons. How might the insights generated by Mexico’s dissimulative and reenactive performance of urban national identity at Mexico ’68, which functioned as a kind of racial passing, be revelatory for other dissimulative or racialized performances of place in diverse global contexts? Can an understanding of the environments created by New York’s disco scene in the 1970s as a ritual response to an urban crisis be generative for an understanding of different cultural responses to other kinds of urban crises around the world? How does an understanding of the dramaturgical logic of Montreal’s official performance as a creative city, and of the resistant dramaturgical logic of the city’s underground burlesque scene enrich more general conversations about the workings of creative cities, and about how

38 cultural resistance might have something to gain from operating at the level of urban dramaturgy? Such questions encourage discussions about the relationship aesthetic lives of cities and their political lives, about the relationship between their politics and their poetics.

Chapter One: Acting Modern: The Total Design Environment of Mexico ’68

For the 1968 Olympics, held from October 12 to 27, the Mexican state arranged

Mexico City into a dazzling visual display. Myriad candy-like colours expanded across the face of the national capital as the Mexican Olympic Committee (MOC) transformed the city into a cohesive visual environment through an extensive Olympic design program. Multi-coloured balloons featuring the official Mexico ’68 logo flooded the airport and floated above Olympic venues. Colourful abstract sculptures by international artists lined La Ruta de la Amistad (The Route of Friendship), which connected Olympic venues along the southern periphery of the city. Virtually everywhere the visitor could look, Mexico ’68’s eye-catching graphics were reproduced in bright hues on surfaces of different scales, from the pavement outside Olympic venues, to Olympic signage, street furniture, souvenirs, and even the short dresses of the 1,170 edecanes (hostesses), who, along with the colour-coded signage and kiosks, guided visitors between the twenty-five sports venues and other Olympic sites.

At the centre of the design program was the now iconic Mexico ’68 logo created by New York-based industrial designer Lance Wyman, which combined the word

“Mexico” with the number 68 overlapped with the five Olympic rings, all rendered in a multistroke typeface that radiated outward. In its bold lines, geometric shapes, and vibrant colours, the Mexico ’68 design vocabulary channelled the contemporaneous

OpArt movement occurring in New York at the same time as it evoked the colours and

40 patterns of Indigenous textile traditions.1 7 Through its aesthetic integration of local heritage and global innovation, the design program produced Mexico City as a spectacle of Mexican modernity. As the Olympic logo and aesthetics vividly communicated, this was “Mexico,” but it was also Mexico in “68.” While creating a message of local specificity, the design program also positioned Mexico within a global modernity linked to industrial production, a cosmopolitan cultural avant-garde, and modernist design.

If the spectacular cityscape created for the 1968 Olympics seemed, on the surface, to plant Mexico within a global modernity without severing ties with local roots, there were actually important limits to how much local specificity the Mexican state wanted to showcase at Mexico ’68. Indeed, as the Mexico ’68 graphic design program was serially reproduced throughout the cityscape, many undesirable local differences were camouflaged within or otherwise concealed by a buoyant image of a coherent Mexican modernity. As Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar wrote, “Even the walls of the encroaching slums” had been painted in “shocking pink, purple and yellow—temporarily hiding the misery” (“Wonderland of Color Welcomes Olympics,” 189). “Only in the background,” Salazar reported, were “the sad reminders of the violence between students and police and soldiers that culminated in a bloody clash Oct. 2” (Bor der Correspondent

188). The Los Angeles Times reporter was referring to the massacre of a still unknown number of peaceful student protesters by the Mexican state at the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco modernist housing complex in Mexico City just ten days before the Olympic opening

17 OpArt, or Optical Art, was an abstract style developed during the 1960s associated with figures like Frank Stella and Bridget Riley. OpArt used shapes, line patterns, and vivid colours, to create a sense of depth, movement, and other optical illusions.

41 ceremony, a massacre the state took great pains to repress in local and foreign media and in the urban space.

In its aggressive foregrounding of modernist design at Mexico ’68, the state created the appearance of a city and country that was more evenly cosmopolitan, developed, politically harmonious, and temporally removed from its Indigenous heritage than it was in fact. Through careful negotiations of urban visibility, the Mexican state compelled an urban performance of Mexican modernity that was more aspirational than it was a reflection of national realities. This chapter argues that this state-performance of a modern Mexico City can be usefully understood through the figure of urban acting.

Mexico City’s performance of urban national modernity on the world stage could only be carried out through techniques of scriptive reenactment, backstaging, urban camouflage, and aesthetic backgrounding and foregrounding. By mobilizing these techniques, the

Mexican state made the city perform in a manner that fulfilled its institutional agenda, but which did not faithfully represent the uneven realities of Mexican life. It made the city act modern.

In my usage, here, ‘acting’ implies not the material agency of the city, but rather the instrumentalization of the urban space as a performing object that is made to reenact scripts and participate in theatrical illusion. ‘Acting,’ in this sense, is a synonym for

‘playacting,’ and stands in contraposition to ‘being.’ Urban acting, or the mobilization of cities as representational spaces caught up in processes of theatrical illusion, dissimulation, and scriptive reenactment, is the first performance-city relation examined by this dissertation.

Crucially, Mexico’s performance of urban national modernity at Mexico ’68 was also a racial performative. While design was used to obscure signs of uneven development and racial and class difference in the cityscape, the selection of design as the choice performer of Mexican modernity positioned machines and the intellectual labour of Mexico’s educated (and whiter) elite—presented as having superseded the manual labours and craft cultures of the country’s racialized majority—as the means and mode of production of modern national culture. Through the strategic use of design, the state compelled the city and nation to perform as a place of emergent modernity and whiteness relative to what was presented as a vanishing Indigenous past. The pressure on Mexico to perform a white modernity on the world stage at Mexico ’68 was intensified by its geopolitical location in Latin America and by a racist First World conception of modernity that associated Indigenous and racialized populations and practices with pre-modernity.

This chapter joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to revisit the Mexico

’68 Olympic campaign with attention to its aesthetic, discursive, and urban dimensions.

This body of work redresses an early overshadowing of the Olympic campaign by a focus on the large middle-class student movement that animated Mexico City in 1968, which reached a tragic climax with the Tlatelolco massacre.1 8 I contribute a performance studies

18 This scholarship was pioneered by Ariel Rodríguez Kuri, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, and Eric Zolov, and continued by Luis Castañeda, Claire Brewster and Keith Brewster, Kevin Witherspoon, Amy Bass, and George Flaherty. As Eric Zolov (“Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow’” 160-1) and Claire Brewster and Keith Brewster (“Mexico 1968: Skyscrapers and Sombreros” 99) have noted, a focus of the Mexico ’68 student movement and the Tlatelolco massacre in early scholarship about the 1968 Olympics overshadowed and distorted the historiography of the Mexico ’68 Olympic campaign. Susana Draper’s new book 1 968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy (2018) revisits the student movement to apprehend it beyond what are now stale narratives of male leadership, or simplistic narratives that either simply celebrate the movement, or lament its failures. Draper’s book is a welcome revisiting of narratives of Mexico ’68.

43 approach in my analysis of the aesthetics and politics of the Mexico ’68 Olympic campaign. With my reading of the campaign through the lens of urban acting, I hope to open up new and productive avenues for future investigations of Mexico ’68, and for reading the theatrical strategies and political meanings of state-compelled performances of the city.

Image 1. Mexico ’68 site map. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Image 2.The progression of the Mexico ’68 logo. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Image 3. The Mexico ’68 icons created for the different sporting events. Wyman created similar icons for the Mexico City metro system in 1969. These remain key features of Mexico City’s visual landscape today. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

I. Performing Modernity in the 1960s: Spatial Scripts

Between October 12 and 27 1968, 14,805 foreign accredited participants and tens of thousands of tourists descended upon Mexico City, joining the city’s nearly 7 million residents (Mexican Olympic Committee vol. 2, part 2, 165). Meanwhile, the televisual broadcasting of the Olympics (in colour, for the first time!) vividly documented the city’s live urban environment as a flow of images for over 600 million viewers around the world, an unprecedented number for an Olympic broadcast. While the coverage of the

Olympic games was a watershed in terms of viewership, the eyes of the world were fixed on Mexico City long before the Games began. For the first time in the modern Olympic

Games, the Mexican Olympic Committee (MOC) revived the ancient Olympic tradition of the Cultural Olympiad, a year-long program of cultural events leading up to, and then running parallel to the athletic competitions. With the spotlight shining on Mexico City throughout 1968, Mexico’s national capital was under intense pressure to perform as a safe, modern, and culturally exciting destination. Such a performance of place promised to rehabilitate Mexico from a long history of stereotypes that had painted it as a land of lazy, backward people, and to secure it a spot within a global imaginary as a country worthy of tourism and foreign investment.1 9 That the opening ceremony for the Mexico

’68 Games on October 12 fell on el Día de la Raza (Columbus Day, to most anglophones), Zolov points out, was not a coincidence; the Mexico ’68 Olympics were symbolically framed as a rediscovery of the Americas (“Showcasing the ‘Land of

Tomorrow’” 175-6).

The Olympic Games, like other mega-events, put pressure on their host cities to create simplified narratives and images of place that can be easily fronted on the world stage. The pressure on Mexico City to perform at Mexico ’68 was heightened by

Mexico’s status within global power relations. Mexico was the first ‘developing’ country, the first country in Latin America, and the first Spanish-speaking country to host the

Olympic Games. Anne-Marie Broudehoux writes about the uneven stakes of hosting mega-events for nations from the east and the south.2 0 For these nations, hosting such events “is seen as a test of modernity, a performance indicator, and an occasion to

19 See Zolov’s article “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow’: Mexico and the 1968 Olympics” for his reading of the stereotypical framing of Mexico as a “land of mañana,” as in “I’ll get to it tomorrow.” 20 A mega-event can be defined as a large-scale cultural or sporting events that attract a broad international audience, and which require significant capital and spatial transformations.

47 establish themselves as models of organization and responsible management” (116). A successfully passed test holds out the promise of building these nations’ “credibility as worthy players on the world stage” (116).

Importantly, in the 1960s, the role of mega-events as tests of modernity was tied to a Cold War logic of development.2 1 Eric Zolov argues that in the 1960s, not only was

Mexico’s ‘underdevelopment’ “an inseparable discursive component to perceptions of the nation abroad,” but Mexico “held out for many the hope of fulfilling modernization theory’s expectations that third world countries would advance along the spectrum of democratic, capitalist development by allying with the United States” (“Showcasing the

‘Land of Tomorrow’” 162). Aware that Mexico would be evaluated on the terms of its apparent modernity, the Mexican state seized the Olympics as an opportunity to perform what Susana Draper calls its “developmentalist fantasy” by staging Mexico’s arrival into the developed world (10). In this staging, the urban space of Mexico City was mobilized as both star performer of Mexican modernity, and as metonym for the nation.

Michel de Certeau’s theory of urban strategies provides a framework for understanding mega-event performances of place. Created to serve the agendas of institutions of power, urban strategies produce the city from the top-down as a predetermined idea, or closed text, in a process that ignores (and works to repress) the unpredictability of urban life, and specifically the placemaking practices of everyday

21 W ithin a Cold War developmentalist logic, countries not officially aligned with either the eastern bloc (the Second World) or the western bloc (the First World) and their competing communist and capitalist modes of development were classified as belonging to the ‘underdeveloped’ Third World. The Third World was viewed as temporally lagging in the ‘race’ to modernity, needing to catch up to the the developed world.

48 urban users.2 2 As a mega-event city, Mexico City in 1968 was shaped by a host of top-down strategies that represented and constructed the city as a modern place for consumption by foreign spectators.

Scriptive reenactment was one strategy through which the state transformed the city into a performer of modernity. Indeed, what Zolov calls ‘the spectrum’ of First World development, which served as a model for Mexico’s self-presentation at Mexico ’68, might be understood as a repertoire of scripts for performing a developmentalist model of modernity. “Scripts,” Richard Schechner writes, “mean something that pre-exists any given enactment, which act as a blueprint for the enactment, and which persist from enactment to enactment” (6). Broudehoux’s description of the hosting of mega-events by nations from the east and south as a “test of modernity” and “performance indicator” suggests that a successfully passed test is achieved through the convincing performance of generic protocols already legitimated within a dominant worldview as indicators of a nation’s modernity. The successful performance of First World modernity was contingent, for example, upon the enactment of scripts of industrialization, urbanization, technological advancement, high standards of living, cultural cosmopolitanism, and liberal democracy. Through the successful enactment of these scripts, cities and nations could be legitimated as modern on the world stage.

Significantly, performances of modernity are bound up with performances of race.

As Homi Bhabha argues, the discourse of First World modernity has symbolically

22 De Certeau opposes urban strategies to urban tactics. Whereas strategies, wielded by institutions of power, produce the city from the top-down as an idealized and closed text, tactics, which De Certeau calls “the art of the weak,” are e veryday interventions into the city’s by diverse urban users (37). Tactics, such as his famous example of walking in the city, produce the city from the bottom-up.

49 produced both race and the Third World as “time-lagged” relative to a temporally advanced First World (339-367). Performances of First World modernity thus functioned as a kind of racial rattrapage (or catching up) by which certain nations were put in the position of having to catch up with the racially unmarked ‘developed’ world. First World nations, in turn, secured their own whiteness relative to what they discursively produced as the racialized hinterlands of the globe. Mexico’s topographical performance of modernity at Mexico ’68, which was orchestrated by members of Mexico’s minoritarian middle class sought to challenge Mexico’s positioning as a racialized hinterland in relation to the so-called developed world, but it did so without challenging the racist logic that structured dominant views about modernity. As Mary Shi argues, although Mexico in the 1960s “wanted to claim the right to shape the international system, to move from dominated to dominator, it did not want to overthrow the system of values and ideologies it had [been working] so hard to claim as its own” (par. 13). Thus, the Mexican elite internalized the same system of values that sought to disavow Mexico in the formulation of a notion of modernity. Shi maintains that Mexico’s self-consciousness about its own modernity credentials within a dominant global system “belied its own desire to leave the established systems of domination in place – its recognition of the lines already drawn in the sand across which it was being tentatively invited” (par. 13). Thus, Mexico City’s performance of modernity at Mexico ’68 was designed as a strategy of racial unmarking that would allow Mexico to pass as modern on a racist world stage. Specifically, this performance disavowed Mexico’s Indigenous, poor, and rural populations (the majority

50 of Mexicans) whose existence and practices threatened Mexico’s ability to pass as modern in the terms established by the First World.

During the Mexico ’68 Olympics, the Mexican state used architecture, graphic design, and brutal policing to create an aspirational image of modernity that made the city into an actor, with the state as dramaturge. In what follows, I will examine how this modernity was enacted, utilizing Erving Goffman’s theory of frontstage and backstage,

Laura Levin’s theory of camouflage. I ultimately argue that the aspirational image of modernity that Mexico City was made to enact at Mexico ’68 was intended as a form of topographical racial passing that might situate Mexico within a repertoire of First World spatial scripts for performing modernity. However, the extent to which Mexico was able to successful pass as modern according to a First World protocols for performing modernity was limited by the racist logic built into First World modernity scripts.

Through the medium of design, the Mexican state activated the cityscape of

Mexico ’68 as an aestheticized display for live and remote audiences; in its ‘look’ the city instantiated an image of modernity: industrial production, urbanization, technological advancement, cultural cosmopolitanism, and modernist design—all generic scripts for the performance of First World modernity. This image was designed to showcase the perceived successes of a period of rapid economic expansion, industrialization, and urbanization begun in the 1940s known as the ‘Mexican miracle.’

Indeed, by 1968, Mexico’s middle class found itself in the afterglow of Mexico’s economic ‘miracle,’ and an expanding and industrializing Mexico City was exhibiting signs of urban development that were legible to a global public as ‘modern.’ The national

51 capital was becoming particularly well-versed in enactments of architectural modernism, also known as the International Style. Modernism in architecture is usually explained as a rationalization of space, supported by the use of grids, clean lines, cheap, durable materials like concrete, steel, and glass, by the separation of residential and commercial spaces, and by high-density construction. In the post-WWII period, architectural modernism, which was produced through techniques of industrialized mass-production, was embraced for being functional, economical, and universally applicable. Modernism in architecture functioned as a universal blueprint that could be applied in any geographical context to the same, modernizing effect; this was a global blueprint—a kind of script—for the spatial enactment of modernity. 23 Important iterations of architectural modernism in Mexico City included the Le Corbusier-inspired housing complexes designed by Mario Pani called multifamiliar es erected in the 1940s and 1950s to house middle class families and the the stunning Anthropology Museum (completed in 1964) designed by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, eventual president of the Mexican Olympic

Committee, which evocatively hybridized modernist and pre-Columbian aesthetics.

While Mexico localized the modernist blueprint by producing it in bright colours and hybridizing with local Indigenous and colonial forms and Arabic influences, Mexican modernism still looked to Europe and North America for basic points of reference. Marta

Almeida describes the international design scene of the 1950s and 1960s as “a dynamic network between the central countries of Europe and North America, and Latin

23 Le Corbusier’s modernist buildings in Casablanca and Chandigarh and Oscar Niemeyer’s and Lúcio Costa’s modernist architecture and planning in Brasília are other examples of the enactment of the First World modernist blueprint in the Third World during the Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, modernist architecture also began to punctuate landscapes in Nigeria, G hana, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, and Senegal.

America,” but she also notes that within this scene, Latin America remained peripheral

(58). Designers hailing from the Latin American peripheries frequently needed to gain prestige in the major metropolises of the north and west “where the rules for acceptance and success [were] ultimately decided” before making their mark back home (59). Thus, the Latin American design scene was largely marked by an initial turn to European and

American repertoires, which provided the basic blueprints for modern design.

Through a logic of historical progress, modernist interjections into Mexico City’s varied landscape, which featured pre-Columbian, colonial, and vernacular forms, were mobilized by the state as exhibits of Mexico’s evolution into modernity out of a glorious

Indigenous past. This architectural performance of progress was a spatialization of institutional mestizaje , a term that refers to the racial mixing of Indigenous and European populations, on the one hand, and to an ideology of this racial and cultural mixing, on the other. Appearing to flatten differences in a culturally and linguistically fragmented country, Mexican mestizaje , which was institutionalized by Mexico’s post-Revolutionary government, explicitly presents a homogeneous view of a shared national culture while implicitly preserving a racial and class hierarchy of national legitimacy. This ideology

(still dominant today) celebrates Mexico’s pre-Columbian civilizations, especially the

Aztecs (in Nahuatl, the Mēxihcahs), as part of Mexico’s classical past (the post-Revolutionary government aligned Aztec culture with the culture of ancient Greece), while working to assimilate living Indigenous populations into a new, hispanophone, national future. Through a logic by which racial and cultural mixture was figured as a process that could redeem Mexicans from racial characteristics deemed to be inferior,

53 mestizaje promised to vanish many of the physical traits and cultural practices of

Indigenous life.2 4 Entry into the legitimated national future required that the country’s

Indigenous populations leave behind their traditional customs as they adopted legitimated scripts of national belonging.

The largest of the modernist multifamiliar es, the Conjunto Urbano

Nonoalco-Tlatelolco (the eventual site of the Tlatelolco massacre), gave vivid expression to what I will call ‘architectural mestizaje.’ The main square of the Tlatelolco complex, which was constructed around the ruins of an Aztec (Mēxihcah) temple and a Catholic church from Mexico’s colonial period, was dubbed the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas (the

Plaza of Three Cultures) for what was framed as the harmonious architectural union of the three major periods in Mexico’s history—the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence periods. But what was explicitly presented as a harmonious union of

Mexico’s periods functioned implicitly to assimilate and appropriate Mexico’s pasts into an urban, middle-class present represented by Tlatelolco’s modernist design and the middle-class populations that it housed. This modernist middle-class present was mobilized as a spectacle of Mexico’s arrival into modernity. Luis Barragán’s iconic multicoloured towers constructed in the late 1950s at the gateway of the Ciudad Satélite

24 Post-Revolutionary Mexican philosopher and Secretary of Public Education from 1921-24, José Vasconcelos’s eugenic philosophy of l a raza cósmica ( the cosmic race) profoundly influenced the consolidation of national m estizaje. Vasconcelos believed that racial mixing could lead to a future, universal, and supreme ‘cosmic race.’ His 1925 essay “La Raza Cósmica” demonstrates his personal system of racial hierarchies, which includes a preference for whiteness and the civilizing effects of European religion and culture as well as his belief that races he views as uglier and inferior should be educated so that they might have fewer children. As Linette Manrique writes, “In Vasconcelos’ notion of mestizaje, the Indian must become modern, or disappear, and blacks, deemed already too ugly and deficient, must simply disappear” (9). See Manrique’s article “Dreaming of a cosmic race: José Vasconcelos and the politics of race in Mexico, 1920s–1930s” for a fuller reading of the eugenic logic underpinning Mexican m estizaje.

(Satellite City), a new middle-class suburb located in the north of the city, were an especially vivid enactment of modernist monumentality triumphantly surging out of an eclectic Mexican landscape—a vanishing relic of the old Mexico(s). The Satellite Towers towers functioned in the cityscape as a powerful architectural performance of middle-class aspirationalism, aligned with an institutional vision of Mexican futurity.

The alignment of state and dominant middle-class interests in Mexico in the

1960s can be explained by Mexico’s unique history from colonization through the post-Revolutionary period. Mexico was colonized by the Spanish in the early sixteenth-century after Hernán Cortés fought and won a battle against the Aztec

(Mēxihcah) empire, centred in Mexico City (then Tenochtitlan) between 1519-21.

Mexico City then became one of the most important European centres in the Americas.

The colonial period, which lasted from 1521 to the French occupation of Spain in 1808 was characterized by the criollos , or creoles (of full or nearly full Spanish descent but born or living in the colonies), who were greatly outnumbered by Mexico’s Indigenous tribes, trying to prevent an insurgency. The Mexican War of Independence from

1810-1821 released Mexico from colonial rule. The Mexican elite that ascended after the

War of Independence severed themselves from Spanish colonial dependence while also distinguishing itself from the majoritarian Indigenous populations through, “an ostentatious appreciation of European cultural tastes” (Brewster and Brewster 17).

Mexico’s post-independence period was marked by a series of liberal reforms and political revolts, including Napoleon III’s successful conquering of Mexico from 1862 to

1867, and the long rule of Francophilic Mexican General Porfírio Díaz. Díaz served as

President of Mexico for a total of thirty-five years (a period known as the Porfiriato) from

1876 to 1880 and from 1884 to 1911, during which time, Díaz endeavoured to rebuild

Mexico City in the image of Paris. Between 1910 and 1920, a violent popular revolution with elite landowning, peasant, and military factions took over the country. Tired of being ruled by a Europhilic political elite centred in the urban capital, revolutionaries fought for agrarian reforms and a popularization of national culture. The post-revolutionary period saw these reforms launched along with the institution of the National Revolutionary Party

(PRN), later changed to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). As the twentieth century advanced, Mexico became a single party state in practice, ruled by the PRI, and underwent numerous reforms that progressively shifted the party politics from the left to the centre-right of the political spectrum. The PRI has been described by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa as the “perfect dictatorship” because of its ability to autocratically rule the country (co-opting almost all of the country’s institutions) while upholdinging a façade of democracy.

This truncated history of Mexico from colonization through the rule of the PRI shows that Mexico City has been controlled by an oligarchic succession of minoritarian elites, who have defined themselves in distinct ways against the country’s poor, rural, and

Indigenous populations and geographies—what I refer to as Mexico’s ‘racialized hinterlands.’2 5 From the post-Independence period onward, Mexico City has been a

25 T his geographic, racial relation can be understood through María Saldaña-Portillo’s concept of “racial geography,” an analytical category Saldaña-Portillo uses to describe how i ndios (the Mexican term for Indians) have been imaginatively produced in contradistinction to colonists through relations to the land (20-1). Saldaña-Portillo argues that i n Mexico, space has been racialized through the figure of the Indian, and that the notion of the Indian has also emerged through ideas about the Indian’s connectedness to landscape. In Mexico, the figure of the Indian, S aldaña-Portillo argues, has been produced within a colonial imaginary “in and as landscape” (17; 8).

56 privileged site for the performance of Mexican modernity according to a repertoire of scripts established in Europe (notably, Paris), and, eventually, in the United States.

Because of Mexico’s unique colonial and postcolonial history, the state’s social, economic, and cultural aspirations to modernity in Mexico are difficult to separate from its racial aspirations. In 1978, Stuart Hall et al. wrote that “Race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in which class relations are experienced” (394). In modern Mexican society, this is very much the case. Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa writes,

“Whiteness [in Mexico] appears [...] as a social norm that is relational and contextual, normalized and ambiguous. Mexican people can, at times, occupy the space of privilege, and, at others, because of relational readings, are located on the other ‘side’” (397).

Figueroa’s explication of race in Mexico suggests that Mexicans are regularly repositioned vis-à-vis whiteness. This points to the notion that in Mexico race is less associated with a Fanonian epidermal schema (that is, with bodily features) than it is performed through the intersections of other axes of power, such as class, education, language, dress, tastes, housing, traditions, geographic location, and other embodied practices. As Figueroa writes, “Mestizaje enables whiteness to be experienced as both normalized and ambiguous, not consistently attached to the (potentially) whiter body, but as a site of legitimacy and privilege” (387). It follows that a Mexican can never be white, but can only act and appear white(r). And even this whiteness is highly provisional, relative, and precarious, in need of constant reactivation through performance. The architectural performances of the Mexican state and of Mexico’s middle classes were one axis of power through which race was performed in Mexico City in the 1960s. These

57 reenactments of global architectural modernity scripts can be understood as spatial expressions of state and middle-class racial aspirations.

I read the Mexico ’68 design campaign as continuous with the evolutionary and racial design logic already shaping Mexico City in the 1960s, which positioned Mexican architectural modernism and the middle class populations that they housed (and by whom they were designed) at the vanguard of Mexican futurity against the majoritarian poor and racialized classes and their architectural traditions.

Wyman’s emphasis of geometric line patterns in the Mexico ’68 typeface was an application of modernism’s cult of clean lines, pure geometry, mathematically defined grids, and related proportional systems. This design was an enactment of the modernist blueprint in graphic form, which also involved the importation of design blueprints from elsewhere. Indeed, as graphic design was not taught in Mexico until 1969, the MOC was particularly dependent on international designers for this component of the Olympic campaign (Almeida 61).2 6

The logic by which the Mexican state presented the modernist designscapes of

Mexico City as representative of the ‘new’ Mexico City and Mexican nation was flawed at best, and disingenuous at worst. While the national economy in 1968 was thriving, and while the quality of life of Mexico’s middle classes had greatly improved, the gains of the

Mexican ‘miracle’ were in fact only distributed to a small minority of the population. In actuality, 60 percent of the nation’s wealth was shared by a mere 30 percent of the

26 S ome of the first professional design jobs carried out in Latin America were for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and the 1978 World Cup in Buenos Aires. M arta A lmeida p inpoints the invitation of North American designers for these two mega-events as interchanges that were determinative for the trajectory of Latin American design (58).

58 population, and the poorest 40 percent of Mexicans shared but 14 percent (Young 708-9).

Less than half of the population had received an education beyond primary school

(México, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía cuadro 23).2 7 What is more, many

Mexicans lived in makeshift houses built with non-durable materials (cuadro 57). In fact, only about 39 percent of Mexicans had running water inside their homes, and while a little more than half of them had electricity, 44 percent of Mexicans still used firewood or charcoal for cooking (México, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía cuadro 59).2 8

Finally, the nation’s wealth and middle class were disproportionately concentrated in the national capital; during the 1960s, the centralizing government spent a staggering 49.3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product on the Mexico City Metropolitan Zone (Garza

285).

The concentration of Mexico’s wealth in Mexico City did not mean that the city was evenly developed, either. The urban space was being animated by a swelling population of recent migrants from rural areas motivated by a combination of harsh agrarian conditions and the promise of job opportunities in the city. National realities of poverty and uneven development were reflected in the mass expansion of Mexico City’s

27 A bout 60 percent of the population lived in concrete, brick, and wood homes (M éxico, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía c uadro 57). The rest of the population lived in houses made of palm and other, less durable materials, and many households could not afford to purchase milk, bread, meat, eggs, and fish on a regular basis (cuadro 57; cuadro 60). Out of the segment of the population 6 years and ol der (38,370,438 people) 1 3,364,134 were without any type of education, 21,398,508, more than half of this population, only had some primary school education, and 10,856,687 were illiterate (cuadro 19; cuadro 22; cuadro 18). While the national census did not collect information about ethnicity directly, we know that in 1969, 3,111,415 people spoke an indigenous language, and 859,854 did not speak Spanish at all ( cuadro 17). 28 A bout the same percentage of Mexicans had no access to running water close to their homes and more than half of the population had no drainage systems in their homes ( M éxico, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía c uadro 58).

59 exploding informal economy and informal housing system. 29 In Mexico City, shantytowns grew out beyond the city limits, and slums appeared in “pockets of the city that had been overlooked by more formal developments” (Brewster and Brewster 83). As

Brewster and Brewster write:

Often having no running water, electricity, or sanitation, these haphazard

settlements of cardboard, wood and tin houses served as stark reminders of

Mexico’s lopsided economy. The expectation of employment exceeded the

number of jobs available and many families were forced to rely on the informal

sector of the city’s economy to survive. An ever-present, but increasingly

significant, aspect of Mexico City life became the unofficial markets and stalls

that filled the streets near all hubs of transport and pedestrian traffic. (83)

The everyday practices of street vendors, domestic workers, craftspeople, and manual labourers punctuated the cityscape, as did the capital’s expansive slums referred to as ciudades perdidas (lost cities), in which many of these manual and service workers lived, and which were constructed through the manual labours of their inhabitants using rural technologies.3 0 As spectacles of poor, rural, and unevenly ‘developed’ life, these ‘lost’ landscapes clashed with the image of urban national modernity the state desired to

29 Mexico’s informal economy is its untaxed and unregulated economy, which is not reflected in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Mexico City’s informal housing system compensates for the state’s failure to adequately house the population. Mexico’s informal economy saw a rapid expansion in the 1950s and 1960s. See Sandra Mendiola García’s book S treet Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico (2017), in which Mendiola García argues that street vending was a key zone for (especially women’s) urban placemaking in Puebla in the 1970s and 1980s (25). Mexico’s informal housing is constructed through vernacular and manual construction practices, and is often erected on land to which inhabitants have no legal claim. 30 I f in 1952, squatter settlements “constituted 23.48 percent of the built-up area and 14.2 percent of the population,” by 1970, “they had extended to somewhere between 35 percent and 40 percent of a total population of 8.5 million [Turner et al. 1971-2; Harth Deneke 1966], and 41.5 percent of the urban area” (Ward 5).

60 showcase at Mexico ’68 and were processed through a racial ideology that framed signs of rural, Indigenous, and poor life as relics of a vanishing Mexico.

Even beyond the signs of uneven development in the cityscape, there was also trouble in Mexico’s miraculous middle-class paradise, which differently threatened the state’s aspirational performance of national modernity. The enormous middle-class student movement that galvanized Mexico City in 1968 revealed a tense generational fissure within Mexico and connected the country’s youth to protestings students around the globe. In addition to wanting to secure the autonomy of the National Autonomous

University of Mexico (UNAM) from police presence, The National Strike Council

(CNH) demanded the release of political prisoners, the abolishment of the granader os

(the tactical police corps), and the repeal of articles that prohibited the gathering of three or more people. The Mexican student movement called attention to the state’s failure to abide by principles of centrist liberal democracy, an important script for performing First

World modernity in the postwar period. Here, student protestors performed a version of an emergent global anticolonial modernity that competed with the developmentalist model of modernity performed by the state. The students’ version was connected not to industrialization, urbanization, elite cultural tastes, and the use of urban space for monumental ideological display, but instead to youth, civil rights, educational access, a back-to-the-land ethos, economic redistribution, and the reclamation of public space for revolutionary political participation.

Lest Mexico City’s rugged landscapes of uneven development and political dissent in 1968 be read as a sign of Mexico’s Third World retroversion, the state relegated

61 these landscapes to the backstage of the urban space, hid them in plain sight, or instead framed them as mere relics of a vanishing past in its activation of Mexico City as a performer of modernity. I mobilize three theoretical frames to illuminate the strategies through which Mexico City was made to act modern at Mexico ’68: Erving Goffman’s theory of the backstage and front stage of performance, Laura Levin’s theorization of camouflage in performance, and Octavio Paz’s linkage of mimicry with dissimulation.

Backstaging: The City as Front

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Erving Goffman mobilizes dramaturgical theory to argue that, when we interact socially, we use techniques to present a certain image of ourselves, or a “front,” while concealing undesirable elements in the “backstage” of our social performances (13; 69).3 1 The activation of Mexico City by the state as a dissimulative performer of national modernity functioned as a dramaturgical urban process that can be compared to the social dramaturgy described by

Goffman.3 2 Adapting Goffman’s theories for understanding urban performance urges us to think of the city as a negotiation of expressive terrains of relative visibility, namely an urban frontstage and an urban backstage. It also provides a model for thinking about how cities are arranged by stakeholders to act out a specific urban ‘character’ by performing

31 Goffman defines “front” as “the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance” (13). “As part of personal front” Goffman writes, “we may include: insignia of office or rank; clothing; sex, age, and racial characteristics; size and looks; posture; speech patterns; facial expressions; bodily gestures; and the like” (14-5). 32 I n his classic essay “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Tourist Space in Social Settings,” sociologist Dean MacCannell uses Goffman’s theories to read the staging of tourist spaces, arguing that, once one enters a space as a tourist in search of an “authentic” experience of place, the tourist is trapped in “an infinite regression of stage sets,” a continuum of front stages, front stages decorated as backstages, backstages decorated as front stages, and so on (602).

‘parts’ or ‘scripts’ before an audience. Employing the language of ‘routines’ rather than

‘scripts,’ Goffman describes the fronts of social performances as scriptive regions. In a passage that is illuminating for reading the performance of modernity at Mexico ’68,

Goffman writes:

However specialized and unique a routine is, its social front, with certain

exceptions, will tend to claim facts that can be equally claimed and asserted of

other, somewhat different routines; For example, many service occupations offer

their clients a performance that is illuminated with dramatic expressions of

cleanliness, modernity, competence, integrity, etc. While in fact these abstract

standards have a different significance in different occupational performances, the

observer is encouraged to stress the abstract similarities. For the observer this is a

wonderful, though sometimes disastrous, convenience. Instead of having to

maintain a different pattern of expectation and responsive treatment for each

slightly different performer and performance, he can place the situation into a

broad category around which it is easy for him to mobilize his past experience and

stereo-typical thinking. Observers then need only be familiar with a small and

hence manageable vocabulary of fronts and know how to respond to them in order

to orient themselves in a wide variety of situations. (16)

Here Goffman points to the use of performance scripts as a shorthand for orienting people in the world across social landscapes of difference and sameness. The visible front region of performance is used to conveniently manage and minimize specific (or local) difference through scriptive abstraction to prompt a desired response. As Goffman writes,

“When an actor takes on an established social role, usually he finds that a particular front has already been established for it” (17). In 1968, Mexico City was made to perform a front of modernity already established by the First World. Goffman’s front is analogous to what Elin Diamond calls the “thing done” of performance, which she contrasts with the “doing” of performance (5). Where the “doing” of performance refers to “certain embodied acts, in specific sights, witnessed by others,” the “thing done” of performance indicates “the completed event framed in time and space and remembered, misremembered, interpreted, and passionately revisited across a pre-existing discursive field” (5). The MOC used actorly urban performances involving acts of urban designing

(the doing) to manifest an image of modernity (the thing done).

In a description that reveals Mexico City as differentiated terrains of visibility,

Luis Castañeda recounts that in a March 1967 interview, Mexican intellectual Elena

Poniatowska asked Ramírez Vázquez about the costly new lighting that was being installed throughout the sports venues so that the Olympics could be televised in colour while “thousands of poor slums with no lighting that demand lighting desperately” were left in the literal dark (qtd. in Spectacular Mexico 112-3). Left out of the city’s brilliant pictorial field, the city’s slum-dwellers were relegated to the backstage of the urban theatre, produced as the unfit performers and spectators of Mexican modernity. Through the backstaging of the city’s slums through what amounted to an urban lighting design, the MOC’s live staging and televisual images misrepresented urban truths to comply with a First World modernity script of even development.3 3

33 Out of Mexico’s 8,286,369 dwellings in 1970, only 2,589,051 (about 31 percent) had televisions (México, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía cuadro 59).

Other landscapes of poverty and racial difference were also banished to the backstage of the urban theatre at Mexico ’68, including the city’s street vendors. These citizens were systematically framed by the Mexican elite as isolated residues of Mexico’s past lingering within its ‘miraculous’ modernity. This framing was evident in the MOC’s official Olympic report:

In the not too distant past, a great variety of peddlers, hawkers, and

pitchmen—never too difficult to spot because of the large crowds they

attracted—made their living in Mexico City’s many plazas and parks. These

elusive itinerants are now only found at small town fairs and circuses, and today

people fill the plazas and parks in search of public attractions of a different nature:

Plays sponsored by the National Institute of Fine Arts, poetry readings, concerts,

ballets, recitals, painting exhibitions and lectures—things that enrich the cultural

life of Mexican people. (qtd. in Brewster and Brewster “Cleaning the Cage”

805-6).

The cultural tastes of the Europhilic Mexican elite are here presented as having superseded the apparently bankrupt cultures of Mexico City’s “elusive itinerants.” These vendors, who would have been selling fresh and packaged snacks, handicrafts and other local products to a variety of consumers of diverse social backgrounds, are here not only presented as temporal relics but also as spatially marginal, isolated in small town fairs and circuses. For the Olympics, the state took measures to remove vendors from the most showcased parts of the Olympic territory, “predominantly the tourist hotel region of the

Zona Rosa, and the southern outskirts of the city near to the main Olympic sporting installations” (Brewster and Brewster “Cleaning the Cage” 806).

This dissimulative presentation of the urban space engages a notion of theatricality that is tied to artifice, to “the acts and practices of role-playing, illusion, false appearance, masquerade, facade, and impersonation” (Davis and Postlewait 4). While

Mexico’s performance of modernity at Mexico ’68 did reflect emerging realities of economic expansion and urbanization, it was also a false front (a fiction) that worked to dissimulate many realities of Mexico as a more diverse whole. Through the state’s illusionistic arrangement of the urban space, Mexico City was compelled to playact a version of modernity that could be taken up on the world stage.

Understanding the state’s presentation of Mexico City at Mexico ’68 as a performance of place dependent on dissimulation and illusion elicits a reading of the cityscape as a deceptive mask, a kind of topographical fiction or lie. Here, a gap is widened between what we might call, adopting anthropologist Michael Taussig’s terminology, the “real” city and the “really made up” city (86).3 4 Significantly, however,

Goffman also offers insight into how disingenuous self-presentations can contain a certain truth. Writing of our social performances, Goffman maintains, citing Robert Ezra

Park that, “In a sense, and in so far as [the] mask [we create] represents the conception we have formed of ourselves—the role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be” (qtd. in Goffman 12). For Goffman, our social performances contain an aspirational truth in the misrepresentation of actual realities.

34 In M imesis and Alterity, writing about a “magical series of transfers” that occurs between theatrical mimesis and reality (or the realm of representation and the realm of the “real”) Taussig contends that “Mimesis sutures the real to the really made up—and no society exists otherwise” (86).

And indeed, “the really made up” city becomes a dimension of an urban real even if it does so only as a representation of a misrepresentation. Insofar as many aspects of the state-orchestrated performance of Mexico City at Mexico ’68 reflected a broader imaginary of Mexico’s elite classes, the transformation of Mexico City at Mexico ’68 might be read as a truthful (if troubling) expression of Mexican middle-class longings.

Mexico ’68’s urban national performance can be understood as an aspirational performance of place, a kind of urban dreamscape that disavowed urban and national realities marked by the stigma of Indigenous and class difference in an expression of racial, class, and cultural desire. This aspirational city was concretized via aesthetic practices on and through people’s bodies, movements, and appearances as much as on and through the built environment.

Whereas the Mexican elite and the Mexican state shared a longing to stake a place for Mexico as a modern, cosmopolitan nation within a global imaginary, the desires of the state and the middle class were less clearly aligned when it came to the state’s repression of political dissent. In September 1968, as the Games approached, President Gustavo

Díaz Ordaz became nervous about the threat the students, and their revelation of the state’s repressive practices, posed to Mexico’s performance of modernity. Most worrisome to the state was the fact that much of the movement was centered on the

UNAM campus, just across the street from Olympic stadium, which was being refurbished to be used for the Opening and Closing Olympic Ceremonies. Josette Féral argues that “we may situate the actor’s theatricality in a process of displacement in which his very self is at stake—in a dynamic whose symbolic structures are riddled with static

67 moments during which the actor must confront the ever-present menace of the return of the self,” indeed, the return of the material reality of the actor (100). As material enactments of urban life, the students presented a menace for the actorly mobilization of the urban space at Mexico ’68. The students threatened to expose Mexico City, not only as a space of uneven development, but also as what Mary Shi has called, in her article on the student protests, a politically “unstable ground” (see Shi’s article “Unstable Ground:

The 1968 Mexico City Student Protests”). Throughout September there were several violent confrontations between the army and police and students, which led to numerous arrests (Castañeda 125). On October 2, 1968 approximately 10,000 university and high school students gathered in the Plaza de la Tres Culturas in the middle of at the new modernist Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex to listen peacefully to speeches. On this day, the state opened fire on the crowd for a period of five hours, killing and disappearing a number estimated to be over 300 people.3 5

This spectacle of state terror might have punctured the state’s competing Olympic spectacle had it not been for its largely successful repression of the local media, and its control of the narrative of events in the international sphere. These measures hid evidence of the state’s brutal massacre in the backstage of Mexico’s Olympic performance.3 6

35 The PRI would claim that the students fired at the soldiers first, which warranted the military’s violent response. But filmed footage of the massacre as well as documents that were declassified following the defeat of the PRI by Vicente Fox and PAN in 2000 (the first break in the PRI’s one-party rule since the Revolution) reveal that the state had actually planted snipers disguised as civilians in the upper floors of the buildings surrounding La Plaza de Las Tres Culturas. These snipers fired at the soldiers on the ground so that they would think the students were shooting at them and fire back. The snipers wore a white glove on their left hand so that they could be identified by fellow military. 36 Z olov has emphasized the US mainstream media’s selective reporting on Mexico and the repressive practices of the PRI in the mid-1960s as a strategy for maintaining the US’s valuable alliance with Mexico in the context of the Cold War and maintaining a favourable climate for US businesses in Mexico (“Toward and Analytical Framework” 42). The mainstream media’s initial reaction to the student movement was dismissive; it framed the movement as “riots” started by rebellious youth, but perceptions began to change

Through such strategies of backstaging at Mexico ’68, the state compelled the city to playact modernity on the world stage. While some of these strategies expressed broader middle-class aspirations of belonging within a global modernity, others revealed tensions between the state and the Mexican population as a whole.

Collapsing and Camouflaging: The City as Background and Foreground

Beyond Goffman’s theory of the frontstage and backstage, the city was made to act out modernity through manipulations of the urban background and foreground. Laura

Levin’s theorization of relations between the foreground and background of performance provide a productive model for understanding cities as performers. In Performing Ground

(2014), Levin, on the one hand, addresses the troubling legacies that position women and racially marked subjects in/as the background against which the performances of white, male subjectivity can emerge. Figured as place, Levin argues, women and racialized subjects have been routinely left without a place. On the other hand, Levin devotes her book to exploring less the normative production of woman and racialized others as objectified spatial background—as extensions of an endlessly exploitable environment—than to the agential thrust of the environmental background, and to that which might be gained by marginalized subjects in acts of blending into the environment.

She asks, what would it mean to consider how “the body functions as space,” where space is re-figured not as resource, but as agent?” (41; 97-8). In her chapter, “Camouflage

Acts,” Levin interprets the resistive uses of acts of ‘blending into the background’ on the

about six weeks into the protests, when the media adopted a more sympathetic attitude towards the organizing student (51).

69 part of women and racially marked subjects in performance. This meshing with the environment does not, for Levin, constitute a disappearance from the visual field, but instead inscribes itself in the pictorial frame as an unsettling ambivalence, a kind of standing out while blending in, that is, it inscribes itself as camouflage.

Exploring histories of animal camouflage as a form of environmental mimicry—an act of formal sympathy between body and environment—Levin conceives of camouflage acts in performance as a dialectic that is “as much about revealing as concealing” (97). Levin calls spatial acts of merging of figure (self or foreground) with ground (background), “performing ground.” At first glance, the structure of Levin’s foreground and background is similar to Goffman’s front stage and backstage, but an important difference between the two is that, whereas Goffman’s backstage is a zone that the social actor seeks to keep invisible, Levin’s visible background is an aesthetic territory that serves as the condition against which the foreground can emerge.3 7 Whereas

Goffman offers us a model for thinking about urban hiding out of sight, Levin’s theory provides a framework for thinking about a kind of urban hiding in/standing out in plain sight. Levin focuses primarily on the resistive potentials of ‘performing ground.’ The

Mexico ’68 Olympic design campaign illustrates some of their normative uses.

At Mexico ’68, the state’s design program made urban actors perform ground through strategies of urban camouflage. More than merely emerging out of an eclectic background as a triumphant foreground to a racialized urban background (mobilized as metaphor for a national past), the Mexico ’68 design program also sought to integrate the

37 B oth Goffman and Levin are attentive to the disruptively expressive force of the background/backstage of performance. While backstaged elements can erupt into the front stage of a performance, background elements can unsettle that which is foregrounded.

70 urban space through a totalizing aesthetic logic that minimized the distance between urban background and foreground. Notably, the Mexico ’68 design campaign was the first Olympic program to coordinate itself into a unified visual experience—what Luis

Castañeda has called a “total design environment.” 3 8 “Total design” refers to the modernist expansion of design “to touch every possible point in the world,” from

“structure, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, doorknobs, light fittings, dinnerware, clothes, and flower arrangements” through the embrace of industrial modes of production

(Wigley). Total design was used at Mexico ’68 as an instrument of aesthetic cohesion that could integrate, in particular, the diverse architecturescape of Mexico’s Olympic venues.

Because of the Mexican Olympic Committee (MOC)’s relatively small budget building numerous new venues was not an option.3 9 The Mexican state therefore repurposed as many existing venues as was possible, leading to a dispersed urban experience as visitors commuted between the centre and south of the city. Reused sites included the Estadio

Azteca (Aztec Stadium) in Santa Úrsula in the southern borough of Coyoácan, the

Estadio Olímpico (Olympic stadium) located in the south of the city in UNAM’s

University City, and the Arena México located just west of the city’s historic centre.

In a move designed to ward off comparisons with the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, and which was complicit with the design logic shaping Mexico City as a whole, President of the MOC, Ramírez Vázquez, branded these venues as showcases of Mexico’s rich architectural heritage while Mexican architect Félix Candela’s new, modernist Palacio de los Deportes (Sports Palace), which was reproduced around the world on the pages of

38 S ee Chapter 4, “Total Design of an Olympic Metropolis” in S pectacular Mexico. 39 The budget was only $175 million, compared with the $1.9 billion Tokyo spent in 1964.

71 glossy architectural magazines, and figured prominently in Olympic publications and broadcasts, became the star architectural performer of Mexico ’68. The Sports Palace was a dazzling copper-skinned building located en route to the airport. Its modernist vocabulary (its clean lines, geometric patterns, cheap and durable materials like concrete, steel, and copper, and its industrial aesthetics) worked with the geometric patterns of the

Mexico ’68 graphic design program to produce an image of an expanding and spectacular modernity. Importantly, even the reused Olympic venues were given an updated look through the application of modernist graphic design elements in and around them. For example, the radiating line patterns of the Mexico ’68 design vocabulary were painted on the pavement outside of both new and old sporting venues. A total of 100,000 square feet of the city’s pavement were painted in the concentric patterns of the Olympic campaign for the Games (The Mexican Olympic Committee “Official Report, Vol. 2” 299).

Appearing to flatten difference in its presentation of a visually integrated national culture while implicitly preserving an aesthetic hierarchy, total design at Mexico ’68 was another spatial analogy for institutionalized mestizaje .

Bound up with an aesthetics and discourse of modernization, Mexico ’68’s total design environment produced for foreign spectators an image of the city that was evenly and reassuringly industrial, clean, functional, efficient, dependable, familiar, navigable, cosmopolitan—indeed, evenly developed. Mark Wigley writes that, “Total design is a fantasy about control, about architecture as control [...] The result is a space with no gaps, no cracks, no openings onto other possibilities, other worlds”4 0 Mexico ’68’s total design

40 T otal design derives from Bauhaus co-founder Walter Gropius’ concept of “total arc hitecture” (See Gropius’s S cope of Total Architecture (1964)). I n Total architecture, “the architect is authorized to design

72 worked to produce the area connecting the Olympic sites as a smooth, saturated surface, the ultimate closed text, in De Certeau’s terms.

Not only was the total design environment of Mexico ’68 an attempt to control the impression Mexico City would make on the world stage (à la Goffman), but Mexico ’68’s total design logic collapsed the distance between urban foreground and background by camouflaging signs of racial and class difference in plain sight. While the illegal street vendors who enlivened the public parks and squares of Mexico City could be (and were) removed for the duration of the Games, not all racialized and classed elements could be disappeared into the backstage of the urban theatre.

Chief among the potentially symbolically threatening elements that could not be removed from the city’s pictorial field were informal housing and the city’s service workers. After all, the Olympic production required the live labours of service workers—taxi drivers, hospitality workers, hostesses, and other urban maintenance workers—in order to be carried out at all. But how could these service workers, the indispensable stagehands of Mexico’s urban performance of modernity, largely members of the poorer and racialized classes, appear within the urban picture without reading as signs of the country’s premodernity? Similarly, how could informal housing be made to function as signs of local colour rather than abject poverty?

Rather than being hidden in the backstage of the urban space, informal housing was camouflaged to become an extension of the objectified modern environment. As described at the opening of this chapter, the state’s provision of buckets of colourful paint

everything, from the tea spoon to the city” (Wigley par. 4). In ‘total design’ as in ‘total architecture,’ design is multiscalar and ubiquitous.

73 to inhabitants of the city’s slums and informal housing to brighten up the façades of their homes reflects the state’s use of camouflage as a theatrical urban strategy. Conscious of how a spectacular urban foreground standing out, jarringly, against a destitute background would create an image of uneven development, the state recruited the city’s popular classes as stagehands directed to camouflage the environmental traces of their everyday lives. As George Flaherty writes, “Homes and businesses adjacent to the official routes were given cans of paint and flower pots to tidy up the edges of neighbourhoods” (Hotel Mexico 70). Through their unpaid camouflage acts, these brown urban stagehands merged the city’s landscapes of poverty into Mexico ’68’s foregrounded total design environment of Mexico ’68. In this way, would-be background elements of the city were hidden in plain sight.

Whereas Levin, like other theorists of camouflage, is interested in how ‘figures’ morphologically assimilate into a ‘ground,’ at Mexico ’68, it was precisely the urban ground that was exploited as the showcased ‘figure’ in the state’s performance of national modernity (14). In a reversal of the traditional move of camouflage as a blending into the background, at Mexico ’68, slums and vernacular architecture were made to merge with the foreground. Here, acts of performing ground occurred within an optical environment in which the background and foreground of the city were flattened by the state into a smooth surface of modernity, produced as a kind of ‘total foreground.’

Interestingly, the collapsing of background into foreground extended to the bodies of the city’s service workers through processes of aesthetic assimilation that were both visual and scriptive. In the cityscape of Mexico ’68, in the photographs featured in the

74 official Mexico ’68 Olympic reports, and in photographs circulated by the international press throughout 1968, the Olympic hostesses figured prominently. In the photographs from the reports and press, the hostesses were frequently pictured in their psychedelic dresses against the isomorphic patterns of the spatial background. Through their uniforms, emblazoned with the same radiating Olympic graphics as the city’s signage and pavement, and through their photogenic presence in the cityscape, the hostesses’ bodies mimicked site, becoming morphologically continuous with the total design environment.

As in Roger Callois’s description of animal camouflage, here “the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others” (qtd. in

Levin 38). Instrumentalized as human surfaces and visual displays, the hostesses, like the façades of the slum dwellings painted over with bright paint, figured as aesthetic extensions of the modern urban space. They, too, become part of Mexico ’68’s total foreground.

The camouflaging of the hostesses and other service workers of Mexico ’68 was not only a process of visual correspondence between human body and urban space; it was also carried out by acts of mimicry involving scriptive reenactment. Historians Claire and

Keith Brewster have written about how service workers in Mexico City were trained as

“actors” in Mexico’s performance of national modernity (Repr esenting the Nation 95).

Fearing their countrymen’s failure to measure up to appearances and comportments associated with Eurocentric modernity, the Mexican elite, through the MOC, launched a huge media campaign to train “Mexicans who simply could not be removed from sight” in codified comportments that would signify as modern for foreign and elite spectators, or

75 what I call ‘modernity scripts’ (97). The campaign consisted of a series of comedic shorts featuring the beloved Mexican comedian Cantinflas (who normally portrayed a peasant or someone from the lower classes) and was designed to educate the popular classes in formal expressions of national hospitality. This training included “how to behave on public transport” generally, and in front of foreigners, specifically (97). Most importantly, the campaign intended to “correct” perceived flaws of Mexican character, including

“prevarication and lack of punctuality” (97). The city’s taxi drivers and hospitality workers, as reported by The Nevada Daily Mail, reported on March 5, 1968, were also

“offered the chance to go to night school to learn English, Mexican history, and courtesy”

(“Olympics will help Mexico’s Tourism”). This offer was designed to protect Mexico’s modern image from being undermined though encounters with actual Mexicans

(Brewster and Brewster). The “1,170 young, attractive, and mostly light-skinned multilingual [Olympic] hostesses,” also underwent an intensive, nine-step training program in preparation for the Games, complete with simulative rehearsals of interactions with foreigners (Zolov “The Harmonizing Nation” 206). The program included:

1) selection of applicants; 2) language examinations; 3) preliminary training; 4)

definitive selection on the basis of performance; 5) designation of group heads

and supervisors; 6) training period for administrative personnel; 7) signing of

contracts; 8) intensive training program; and 9) a period of simulation during

which each group maintained contact with foreign visitors, embassy personnel

and resident foreigners. (The Mexican Olympic Committee “Official Report, Vol.

2” 167).

The training program, the MOC reports, “consisted of twenty-two conferences and twenty-one special guided tours. Historians and other authorities provided the edecanes with basic information about the country, the capital, the Olympic Games and the

Organizing Committee” (167). Through this paternalistic modernity training, the Mexican state foisted upon Mexicans literal scripts of embodied behaviour that were to be learned and reenacted before foreign spectators as a performance of modernity.

These scripts of embodied behaviour functioned as a type of camouflage that allowed service workers to blend into the urban space. With their ‘modernized’ appearances and comportments, Mexican service workers became environmental coordinates, used to enhance the foregrounded urban space without pulling special focus from the ‘total’ urban image. Performing an orientational function, the Mexico ’68

Olympic hostesses also functioned as living extensions of Mexico ’68’s elaborate wayfinding graphic design system. Eric Zolov argues that the image of the ‘liberated woman’ created by the Mexico ’68 hostesses was also intended to distance Mexico from foreign views of the country as a machista society “where middle class women were routinely denied access to social mobility” (205). Here, the implication is that the Mexico

’68 hostesses were instrumentalized to enact scripts of female liberation, involving displays of female empowerment, hints of sexual liberation through their somewhat risqué short skirts, and displays of education, multilingualism, and sophistication. The mobility of the hostesses throughout the city was thus activated as synecdoche for the social mobility of Mexican women at large.4 1 Through their dramatic and aesthetic

41 To be sure, one of the ways in which the service workers, and especially the Olympic hostesses, performed environment was also through their emotional labours, which Erin Hurley, citing Arlie Hochschild, defines as the “‘management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily

77 inscript ion into the ‘total’ design environment, Mexico City’s service workers in Mexico became continuous with a modernized urban space: they ‘performed ground.’

The labours performed by the Mexico ’68 hostesses functioned as what Shannon

Jackson would call the “maintenance work,” or the often repetitive labours performed by service workers and domestic labourers (usually women and/or racialized people) that create the “sustaining infrastructure” of human welfare and social life (60-2). Through the re-enactment of repetitive physical labour, bodies can become systems of environmental support that are in fact not just supportive of the environment, but part of the environment. Levin reads the becoming-environment through repetitive, supportive labours as a kind of performing ground. Through their scripted labours, Mexico City’s

Olympic hostesses, and its other, racially marked service workers became part of the sustaining infrastructure of the city, and continuous with its aestheticized environment.

Their labours, which worked to assimilate their bodies into the foregrounded total design environment, were indispensable supportive infrastructure for the image of modernity designed by the MOC. As such, the bodies of these workers were designed into place.

display,’ which is sold for a wage” (53). Hurley writes of the use of vital role of Montreal’s Expo ‘67 in holding together the environmental tissue through their emotional labourers and mobilization as visual displays (54).

Image 4. The Mexico ’68 logo painted on a wall in Mexico City. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Image 5. The Olympic line patterns painted on the pavement outside of the Olympic stadium located in the Ciudad Universitaria (University City). Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Image 6. An Olympic hostesses blends into the Olympic urban space. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Urban Scripts as Masks

What are we to make of the fact that this blending into the environment occurred through the reenactment of scripts? Mexican writer and diplomat Octavio Paz offers a compelling model for reading processes of humans becoming-environment through acts of environment mimicry (or enactments of a kind of aesthetic script). In the chapter

“Mexican Masks” in his classic 1950 book on Mexican identity The Labyrinth of

Solitude, Paz argues that, because of its unique history, and in the absence of a clear memory of its origins, Mexico has, from a place of national insecurity and inferiority,

80 looked abroad for cultural models of national identity.4 2 Paz discusses Mexico’s “love for

Form,” where “Form” is understood as all manner of external appearances from embodied facial expressions, social niceties, ceremonies, formalities, and roles (including the projection of an ideal of manliness and womanhood), to aesthetic and architectural forms (32). He maintains that such forms, which proliferate in all aspects of Mexican culture, are really masks—mechanism of defense against vulnerability—that allow

Mexicans to hide from others and from themselves. As a whole, “Mexican Masks” portrays Mexico as a dissimulative and dissembling culture that has emerged out of its unique colonial history. Interestingly, Paz, like Goffman, spies an aspirational truth in

Mexico’s culture of pretending: “At first, the pretense is only a fabric of inventions intended to baffle our neighbours, but eventually it becomes a superior—because more artistic—form of reality. Our lies reflect both what we lack and what we desire, both what we are not and what we would like to be” (40-1). Still, while Paz compares acts of cultural dissimulation in Mexico to the work of actors in a theatre, he maintains that while actors surrender themselves to their role for the duration of the performance, the dissembler never forgets himself (42). It is the gap between the ‘mask’ and the ‘truth’ that becomes a new kind of truth.

There is much to regard with suspicion in Paz’s essay. His generalizations about a common Mexican character in a country that was in fact culturally diverse as well as divided by deep power imbalances invite problematic stereotypes about Mexicans as a whole. Paz’s own location within a Mexican middle class that systematically appropriated

42 B rewster and Brewster cite historian Tom Nairn, who argues that that a “Janus-like form of nationalism” emerges when a so-called “backward country” tries to appropriate images of modernity that have been created elsewhere (100).

Mexico’s Indigenous histories as their own also makes the narrative of a common

Mexican colonial history less than convincing. But whereas Paz may leave much to be desired as an authority on something like a general ‘Mexican character’ (the internalized inferiority complex and the love of foreign forms actually seems more descriptive of

Mexico’s minoritarian elite than of all Mexicans), he provides intriguing insights as a theorist of camouflage.

Most relevant, here, is Paz’s linkage of formal dissimulation and mimicry. In a description that dates Mexico’s culture of dissimulation back to relations between Indians and colonizers, Paz writes:

In its most radical forms dissimulation becomes mimicry. The Indian blends into

the landscape until he is an indistinguishable part of the white wall against which

he leans at twilight, of the dark earth on which he stretches out to rest at midday,

of the silence that surrounds him. He disguises his human singularity to such an

extent that he finally annihilates it and turns into a stone, a tree, a wall, silence,

and space. I am not saying that he communes with the All like a pantheist, or that

he sees an individual tree as an archetype of all trees, what I am saying is that he

actually blends into specific objects in a concrete and particular way. (43-4)

Thus, the Indian (a problematic figure for Paz to choose given the colonial production of

Indian in/as landscape, but which he uses as a symbol of Mexicans in general) blends into the landscape by becoming it. Here, mimicry is a mode of becoming invisible. This description is offered in the context of a generalized theory of Mexicans’ tendency to camouflage themselves through mimicry: “The Mexican is horrified by appearances,

82 although his leaders profess to love them, and therefore he disguises himself to the point of blending into the objects that surround him” (44). Paz’s description of an Indian disappearing into the landscape by blending into it, indeed, by becoming it, is the inverse

(almost startlingly so) of what Levin describes as standing out by blending into the background. Instead, Paz describes a kind of environmental mimicry that allows the

Indian to disappear. In this case, mimicry functions as a radical form of dissimulation.

As a whole, dissimulation and mimicry do not figure in “Mexican Masks” as acts of cultural resistance, but instead as an internalization of colonial values that has given rise to an inferiority complex, and a desire to disappear behind masks.4 3 Paz’s model for understanding mimicry as a form of radical dissimulation is revelatory for reading the total design environment of Mexico ’68. For, like Paz’s Indian who blends into the landscape, the training programs worked to turn the bodies of Mexicans into a graphic, an image, a colour, a gesture, a strip of behaviour, space. My point is not that Mexico City’s service workers could ever fully or permanently disappear into the urban environment

(and a different project would try to identify the ways in which these urban actors found ways of standing out, even while blending in), but that the MOC trained them to; this blending into the environment was carried out through mimicry, specifically through the reenactment of behavioural and visual scripts for appearing modern.

43 Here Paz differs from other theorists of camouflage. Like Levin, Homi B habha in his 1984 essay “Of Mimicry and Man” is interested in how forms of camouflage contain within them a disruptive, unsettling, ambiguous, force. Whereas Levin is interested in artistic camouflage, Bhabha focuses on forms of social camouflage. For Levin, unsettling force of camouflage threatens to undermine the ground of the performance; for Bhabha, it threatens to undermine the originality and authority of the white, colonial culture that is being mimicked. Both theorists focus on how forms of mimicry and blending in can never be total, and thus, how mimicry contains within it a disruptive force that can be harnessed to politically resistant ends.

Given the entanglement of performances of modernity and whiteness in Mexico, the camouflaging of bodies and built spaces into the designed urban environment of

Mexico ’68 can also be understood as racial camouflage—as a kind of topographical racial ‘passing.’ The Olympic hostesses and other service workers were visually arranged in their outfits and behaviours, just as the urban environment was visually arranged in its appearance, to become less marked by racial and class difference within a global landscape of modernity. Through acts of scriptive and visual mimicry they were made to blend into this landscape of modernity through the dissimulation of Mexican differences deemed undesirable by the state and middle class.

Image 7. A Huichol yarn painting. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Image 8. The Mexico ’68 information “totems”. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Image 9. The totems at Tula. The totems, which are located about two hours outside of Mexico City, were built by the Toltec empire between the fall of the mysterious civilization that built the pyramids of Teotihuacán and the rise of the Mēxihcah Tenochtitlan. Photographer unknown. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Image 10. An early sketch for the Mexico ’68 design program. Notice the image of what appears to be an Indigenous mask or the top of a totem pole. Mexico ’68 designers were noticing early on the visual affinities between Indigenous line patterns and aesthetics and the Mexico ’68 design vocabulary. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Crafting the Past, Designing the Future: Industrial Design against Indigenous Craft

In this final section, I turn more closely to the aesthetics of the Mexico ’68 design program to argue that another key way the designscape of Mexico ’68 was made to act modern was through its negotiation of Indigenous aesthetics. I maintain that, in a repetition of the design logic shaping Mexico City as a whole, the foregrounding of total design at Mexico ’68 occurred against a background of Indigenous aesthetics, which were appropriated as aesthetic resources by the MOC designers. These aesthetics were framed—both visually, and in the narratives of the MOC—as signs of Mexico’s pre-modern heritage, rather than part of innovative and ongoing Indigenous modernities.

In this section I argue that the meaning of design in Mexico’s performance of urban national modernity at Mexico ’68 was inseparable from the meaning of Mexican craft.

The MOC secured Mexico’s performance of modernity by presenting Mexico as what can be called a ‘post-craft’ nation, which is to say, a nation informed by a history of craft which it has nevertheless surpassed.

Writing about the discipline of art history, Donald Preziozi argues that:

The pragmatic and immediately beneficial use or function of art history in its

nineteenth-century origins was the production of pre-modernity; the production of

a past that could be effectively placed under systematic observation for use in

staging and politically transforming—that is, performing—the present. A past that

could be imagined as bearing a causative relation to the present, yet at the same

time a pre-modernity that could be imagined to be a detached object,

‘independent’ of the analytic gaze of the present. (“Performing the

Body/Performing the Text” 31)

Preziozi’s argument is that one of the functions of the study and writing of history is the production of a past for the purpose of performing the present. It follows that performances of modernity need to be interpreted for, amongst other things, the techniques that they use to produce a “pre-modernity” against which they can materialize.

Preziozi’s ‘pre-modernity’ is analogous to Levin’s ‘background,’ which supplies the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the foreground as such. Within the cityscape created for Mexico ’68, Mexico City’s pre-Columbian architecture functioned as the backgrounded premodernity against which Mexico’s modernist modernity could emerge. Within the Mexico’ 68 design program, craft aesthetics were produced as the pre-modernity against which the modern, urban nation could emerge. In a design program

87 that sought to pitch Mexico as both modern and uniquely Mexican, Mexico’s folk practices served as a rich fount of culture on which the MOC could draw to provide ‘local colour’ to the Olympic program.4 4 The campaign evoked Indigenous aesthetic tastes and the pre-industrial practices of the country’s rural, Indigenous, and poor populations while framing these as ‘heritage’ as well as a public resource. Marta Almeida writes that

Mexico ’68 design “merged to aspects of Mexico: that of a country rooted in its Hispanic past and that of a modern nation-state” (61).While Almeida describes Mexico’s Hispanic past as the first aspect of Mexico evoked by the campaign, it would be more accurate to refer to this aspect as Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past. Moreover, rather than a simple visual

‘merging’ of pre-Hispanic past with modern aesthetic traditions, the relationship between both aspects might better be described in terms of foregrounding and backgrounding.

In addition to the design campaign’s extensive colour palette, which evoked the bright colours of Indigenous craft, the campaign’s references to the Huichol yarn painting are the most frequently cited example of Indigenous influence for Mexico ’68 design. If the radiating line patterns of the Mexico ’68 logo channelled the contemporaneous OpArt movement occurring in New York, associated with figures like Frank Stella and Bridget

Riley, they also evoked the vibrant radiating line patterns of the yarn ‘paintings’ of the

Huichol (Wixáritari) people of the state of Nayarit. In the yarn paintings of the Huicholes,

44 As Zolov explains, this strategy was continuous with a 1950s Mexican dialectic between the cosmopolitan and the folkloric for consolidating a new national representation that was particularly geared towards US tourists who could be enticed to visit what the N ew York Times C alled the “new Mexico” that promised “both picturesqueness and comfort” (qtd. in Zolov 2001, 235). By the 1960s, Zolov writes “scores of countercultural tourists (beatniks and hippies)” were also flocking to Mexico as part of an exoticized performance of a “back to the land” ethos that could help them to transcend “their own modern selves” (235). In the 1960s, Zolov writes, “the cosmopolitan and the folkloric had become inextricably linked as key referents along a continuum of representation of the modern nation-state” (236).

88 shamans from the Huichol community apply their rich floral and animal iconography, materials, and skills to a flat surface covered in beeswax, into which they press brightly coloured colourful yarn into radiating patterns. While the paintings were originally created for their market value in the 1950s and 1960s, “it was not long before the shaman-artists realized the paintings’ potential to tell the stories and myths of the

Huichol, and to record their sacred visions” (Indigo Arts Gallery). Importantly, though the yarn paintings were appropriated by the MOC as a source of national heritage , they were in fact a fellow modern art, one that reflected modern Indigenous contexts, worldviews, and aesthetics, as well as commercial interactions. The yarn painting of the

Huicholes demonstrate the enmeshment of tradition and modernity.

While the Huichol yarn paintings served as a rich aesthetic reference for designers eager to create a visually striking and culturally specific design vocabulary—whether or not the Mexico ’68 designers used them as dir ect inspiration, which they maintain they did not—the clear positioning of Indigenous aesthetics as a raw, even ‘natural’ aesthetic resource that could be liberally used and transformed into ‘real’ art by ‘real’ Mexican artists was imperative for the Mexico ’68 designers. This point is made clear in a recent article written by Eduardo Terrazas (head of urban design) and Beatrice Trueblood (head of publications) in the graphic design magazine Eye revealingly titled “This is not

Mexico” (2006). The article is a response issued by Terrazas and Trueblood to another article written by design historians Daoud Sarhandi and Carolina Rivas in the same magazine called “This is 1968...This is Mexico,” in which Sarhandi and Rivas bring together separately conducted interviews with Ramírez Vázquez, Terrazas, and Alfonso

Soto Soria (a Huichol craftsman), about the campaign. The segment on Soto Soria focused on his and his peoples’ involvement in helping in the creative process for the campaign’s logotype through the creation of traditional yarn paintings of the Olympic logo, which are today housed in the Pedro Ramírez Vázquez archive. In an angry response to this article, Terrazas and Trueblood, head of urban design and of publications for the campaign respectively, write that Soto Soria took the MOC’s designs to “have the

Huicholes imitate them on the tablitas” but are insistent that “there were no Huichol

Indians involved” in the design program. They write: “How can it be said that an Indian, who lives in isolation by choice in the mountains of Jalisco and Nayarit, with his own perception of the universe, who does not know what a logo is, could have created something as complex as an international image programme for a country?”

In the initial article by Sarhandi and Rivas, Terrazas states that the extensive colour palette used in the Olympic program “came out of the vivid rainbow of Mexican folklore.” Terrazas uses the passive voice to describe this process. The colours “came out of the vivid rainbow of Mexican folklore,” as if they emerged from a landscape of natural resources ready to be exploited, and the “Indian” is also aligned with the rural landscape; he “lives in isolation by choice in the mountains.” In Decolonizing Methodologies, Māori writer Linda Tuhiwai Smith explores how “design history has until recently favored progressive evolutionary timelines, just as the nineteenth-century colonizer built Empire on a series of boundaries, charts and maps. In this context craft, like the unexplored territories of the potential colony, becomes a kind of Hinterland” (“Editorial

Introduction” Journal of Modern Craft 8-9). The Olympic program’s use of what

Terrazas calls the “vivid rainbow of Mexican folklore” might be understood as such a colonial exploitation of the “Hinterland” of Mexican folklore.

In the discourse of the MOC, folk art was consistently framed as ‘inspiration’ for the designs of the campaign, but folk artists were never regarded as active participants in

Mexico’s modern aesthetics. Whereas the authorship of the design campaign by official members of the MOC is jealously guarded by Terrazas and Trueblood, Mexican folklore is claimed as a kind of communal property from which the designers belonging to

Mexico’s elite are entitled to take, and which they feel entitled to privatize. As such, designing in Mexico becomes a cultural technique for dispossessing Mexico’s Indigenous artists of their claims to artistic authorship and authority.4 5

While the cultural authorship of the Mexico ’68 Olympic campaign is probably best described in terms of a triangulation between Mexican designers, international designers from the Global North (centrally Lance Wyman), and Mexican craftspeople, the Mexican and international designers involved in the campaign (even amongst one another) have fought hard to be recognized as the sole authors of the Mexico ’68 design program. Terrazas and Trueblood continue in their 2006 article to disparage both the artistic capacities of Indians and the artistic merit of Mexican handicraft, saying, “The geometric development of the logo speaks for itself, as a modern, contemporary design that an Indian could never create. It is a major disservice to Mexico, to limit its vast,

45 D aoud Sarhandi, who became embroiled in this debate in E ye after writing his article with Rivas about the campaign, has noted the astonishingly “contradictory claims of genesis” amongst the designers behind the Mexico ’68 Olympic program. Sardhani and Rivas interviewed eight key designers and organizers from the Mexico ’68 office for 25 hours in total, and five or six Mexican designers with background knowledge of the campaign. The contradictory claims of these designers and experts cloud the real story behind the campaign’s authorship.

4000-year culture (pre-Hispanic, colonial, modern) to Huichol designs on wooden boards.” By his geographical location and association with pre-modern modes of production, the Indian is marked as brown in the discourse of Terrazas and Trueblood, a marking that helps Terrazas and Trueblood to secure their own whiteness and modernity.

Thus, if Indigenous aesthetics were formally backgrounded in the design program, in professional narratives about the campaign’s authorship, Indigenous craftspeople were pushed to the backstage of Mexico’s performance of modernity—into the mountains—disallowed from emerging at all as artistic or national agents in Mexico’s modernity project.

The views expressed by Terrazas and Trueblood about the impossibility of an

Indian being a significant author of the campaign regurgitate long-held assumptions on the part of the Mexican elite about the artistic capacities of the country’s Indigenous population and about the need of the designs of the elites to make art out of mer e craft. In

1920, the Comisión de la Exposición de Arte Popular (Exhibition of Popular Art

Commission, hereafter “Comisión”) reached out to state governors across Mexico asking them to help the commission in its search for objects of popular art for the Exhibition of

Popular Art being organized for the following year. However, “State governors originally reported that their indígenas produced no art” (Stephen E. Lewis 292-3 my italics “for produced no art”). As Stephen Lewis writes, “Doctor Atl (Gerardo Murillo), who wrote the exhibition catalogue, claimed that ‘Indian’ art was a natural, agentless manifestation of Mexico’s collective racial and spiritual unconscious. This view denied Indigenous artisans a political, economic, and creative voice” (293). This belief that Indigenous

92 popular production was not art, and was also authorless, was disseminated in the 1920s by the education minister José Vasconcelos and by one of the country’s most reputed art critics, Francisco Zamora. Zamora, in his ‘evaluation’ of the vernacular arts, stated that

“The aesthetic expression of the popular classes was crude and unformed” (López 73). As historian Rick López reports in his book Crafting Mexico (2010), Zamora argues that

“The ‘decorative arts of our anonymous artisans, the songs of our unknown musicians,’ and ‘the traditional dances of our Indigenous collectivities’ offered themselves as raw materials that ‘men of talent’ could take as inspiration in the creation of real art [...] around which they could mould an ethnicized national identity” (73-74).

This view of folkoric culture as an agentless communal production was echoed by the

MOC in its official report for the Olympics:

Folklore—a compound word meaning “people” and “wisdom” or

“learning”—includes all of those artistic expressions of unknown origin that are

transmitted from one generation to another and that form the common heritage of

a people. The folk artist neither signs his works nor receives royalties. Once he

creates a new design, anyone can copy it; once he composes a new song, anyone

can sing it. Folklore, a common heritage, implies community. (Official Report,

Vol. 4 part 2: 419-20, my italics)

That the word ‘design’ comes from the Latin word designar e, ‘to mark out,’ both ‘to designate’ and ‘to sign’ ( signare) signals the importance of authorship to the meaning of design. By contrast, “The folk artist neither signs his works nor receives royalties.”

Unlike architectural blueprints, folklore is here described as uncopyrightable because it is

93 considered to be part of a cultural commonwealth. Indigenous aesthetics were backgrounded by the campaign as a kind of natural resource that could be artistically transformed through industrial form, the latter of which emerged as the aesthetic foreground of the design program.

The foregrounding of modernist design at Mexico ’68 must be understood in relation to the meanings of Mexican craft, specifically to the displacement of Mexican craft and the bodies of its producers, coded as rural, Indigenous, poor, and pre-modern, by design, which was mechanically produced by machines, and intellectually conceived by the members of Mexico’s urban elite. Indeed, in positioning the machine (through which many elements of the Olympic campaign were produced) and the creative intellect

(by which it was designed) as the means and mode of production of national culture respectively, what the MOC sought to symbolically cut out were the intellects and the hands—specifically the br own hands—of Mexican craftspeople and of the Mexican workers that erected the design campaign through their manual labours. These brown hands were disappeared from the scene, produced as illegitimate producers of mexicanidad.

The fibreglass Judas figures used by the MOC encapsulated the two aspects of post-craft Mexico: industrial production and the disavowal of bodies and their labour. For example, the MOC used Mexico’s Judas figures as giant effigies traditionally exploded in town plazas on Sábado de Gloria (the day before Easter, or Holy Saturday) since the beginning of Spanish colonization as a symbolic cleansing of political corruption and social harm as “the inspiration for prodigious reinforced fiberglass sculptures

94 representing players of each of the Olympic sports” (The Mexican Olympic Committee

“Official Report, Vol. 2” 338). The MOC decontextualized and de-ritualized the giant

Judases, rendering them in industrialized form, transforming popular, embodied ritual into disembodied aesthetic inspiration, resource, and display. This process dissociated

Mexico ’68’s references to craft and folk traditions from the bodies and creativity of

Mexico’s living popular classes. By using design as a machine for processing Indigenous craft aesthetics, the MOC created the image of a city and a country that had moved forward into modernity by becoming post-craft. Here, the MOC was playing into a nineteenth-century logic of modernity that dissociated manual and intellectual labour, craft and design, in which craft and manual labour were framed as being displaced by the design and intellectual labour with the advent of modernity.4 6

Images of mechanical reproduction stood as the aggressive foreground of the urban environment of Mexico ’68 as the cityscape became saturated with industrially produced graphic design images as well as new architectural spectacles of industrialization. For the Sports Palace, the “most critically acclaimed of all of the new venues created for Mexico ’68,” Candela used his signature paraboloid shell (saddle-like structures that required only a small quantity of steel reinforcing), which were partially inspired by Mexican roofing traditions (Castañeda Spectacular Mexico 101). He created them with tubular aluminium and covered them with waterproof copper-sheathed plywood. In the repetition of this form over the entire structure, and in the metallic sheen

46 See Rafael Cardoso’s “Craft Versus Design: Moving Beyond a Tired Dichotomy” in T he Craft Reader (2009) for a history of the dissociation of manual and intellectual labours and of craft and design in the nineteenth century (322-3).

95 that the building gave off, the Sports Palace possessed a futuristic, machine-like character and served as a display of industrial imagery.

Crucially, the machine was central to architectural modernism as both a theme

(modernist architect Le Corbusier famously declared in 1927 that a house was “a machine for living in”) and as a means of production. Developments in industrial production meant that much modernist design was mass-produced with the use of machines, and the visible traces of this means of production became integral to the modernist aesthetic. The prevalence of modernist design in the World’s Fair pavilions in the 1950s and 1960s, including Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes (which he initially designed to be efficient, low-cost shelters) exemplifies the desire on the part of many nations to showcase the modern technology they possessed as it was exercised for the production of architectural form in modernism. As Castañeda points out, “Fuller’s forms, which he produced by “exploding” the icosahedron over the surface of a sphere, could

[…] be expanded indefinitely, and the basic formal principle of Fuller’s structure was thus defined by the logic of fordist mass production” (138).

But Candela’s paraboloids only wore the form (or the mask, in Paz’s sense) of mechanical reproducibility. While Fuller’s domes were machine-made, Candela’s paraboloids were produced manually using cheap Mexican labour—the labour of other unseen stagehands. The Mexican architect Alberto González Pozo published a significant essay in Artes de Mexico about the Olympic architecture as it was being created.

González criticized what he saw as the “technological emphasis” of the new 1968

Olympic architecture, “not merely on a level of function or construction techniques, but

96 also in terms of this architecture’s formal language” (135). “Not functional by any means, exhibition spaces” such as Candela’s Sports Palace and Manuel Rosen’s hanging roofs in the Olympic Pool and Gymnasium derivatively “aestheticized the imagery of the first world’s industrial might” (González 135).4 7 This industrial aestheticization of what was in fact disguised manual labour proliferated through the numerous photographic and televisual reproductions of the Sports Palace in the mass media. Castañeda writes:

Since its completion for the games, the Palace’s distinctive silhouette and

shimmering copper roof have been ubiquitous in the mass-media landscape of

Mexico as well as in the eyes of critics and historians. The Palace’s

notoriety—which has arguably eclipsed the rest of Mexico ’68’s architecture—has

usually been understood as a result of its spectacular exterior form, which has lent

itself to reproduction and dissemination in a variety of media. (101).

Castañeda makes the argument that, as sites of controlled media representations as well as of surveillance, Olympic sites became ‘image machines.’ In their careful design of

Olympic venues combined with their overseeing of media representations of them, the

MOC transformed the city into a controllable, reproducible, photogenic text.4 8 The

47 The use of industrial design imagery as a purely formal device in Mexico rather than as an expression of an industrial base in not unique to the Mexico ’68 design aesthetics. In M odernity and the Architecture of Mexico (1997), scholar of Mexican architecture Alberto Pérez-Gómez comments in an interview with fellow scholar of Mexican architecture Edward Burian, on the modelling of the northern Mexican architectural Polytechnic after the Illinois Institute of Technology and its investment in the work of German modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (ITT) (45-6). Pérez-Gómez notes that “While at ITT there is a kind of rationalization that has to do with the industrial base of the United States, in Mexico it becomes a formal device that is then carried out with conventional craftsmanship [...] So there is a kind of contradiction where the connection with Mies becomes purely formal rather than related to the means of production” (46). 48 B y placing cameras throughout the venues and the city, the MOC also transformed the urban space into a panopticon that could police the behaviours of bodies. Castañeda notes the sinister tone of Ramírez Vázquez statement that “The placement [of cameras] has n ot been disclosed in order not to interfere with the sports events; but they will be i n every angle and place so as to reveal to the remote observer aspects of

97 aesthetics of mechanical reproducibility of the Sports Palace spanned the form of the hyperbolic parabaloids themselves, to the venue’s inscription within networks of mechanically reproduced images.

Acting as a network of images of mechanical reproduction, the total design environment of Mexico ’68 worked to ward off race and class anxieties (those of foreign visitors to Mexico City and of the Mexican elite) connected to manual labour and underdevelopment—anxieties about its lack of standardization, durability, reliability, or punctuality. The industrial-appearing environment of Mexico ’68 seemed safe, reassuring, dependable, and standardized, perhaps largely because it did not appear to be produced by the bodies of popular Mexicans, but only by the intellects of distinguished figures of the Mexican intelligentsia. Capitalizing on the power of mechanical reproduction, the MOC flooded the city with topographically unifying images, so that each new copy of the same functioned as an encounter with the increasingly familiar, so that each new copy functioned as a r e-assurance that one was in the same place, a unified place, a reliable place, a beautiful place, a clean place, a safe place, a place possessing the technologies and tastes of a developed nation. The visual vocabulary of Mexico ’68’s total design environment was almost incantatory in its spatial reassurances. The design program used imagery of mechanical reproduction as a technique for performing a stable ground that promised to both comfort and enchant foreign visitors. Through industrial design imagery, the city manically reenacted itself at every glance, as if its repeated spatial utterances were “I am here,” “I am modern.”

the development of the competitions that those sitting in the grandstands will naturally be unable to pe rceive” (qtd. in Castañeda 107).

The Mexico ’68 Olympic program thus grounded its performance of national modernity in the foregrounded space of Mexico City as a modern, industrially

(re)produced and intellectually designed environment. Traditional background elements of the city, including popular bodies, spaces, and aesthetics were made to mesh with this foreground through forms of urban camouflage, while Indigenous aesthetics were formally backgrounded in the design campaign as the premodern aesthetic ground against which an image of modernity could emerge. The bodies and creative bodily labours of poor rural, and racialized Mexicans were both physically (as in the case of street vendors) and narratively (as in the case of Huichol artists) banished to the backstage of the urban

(national) theatre because of their incompatibility with the modern image Mexico was trying to create. In positioning the machine and the urban intellect as the means of production of national culture, the MOC excluded the creative bodies and intellects of

(brown) Mexican craftspeople and manual labourers from the legitimacy of national and urban cultural production. In the MOC’s calculated foregrounding of design in the urban space, the Indigenous, rural, and poor populations of Mexico (most Mexicans) were produced as illegitimate producers of city and of modern national culture.

In these ways, design at Mexico ’68 belonged to a First World script of modernity tailored to Mexico City and its unique social, aesthetic, and historical contexts. Design enabled the cityscape to perform modernity on a world stage that associated racial and rural difference with premodernity. Through the camouflaging of material urban realities, the backgrounding of Indigenous aesthetics, and the saturation of industrial environmental imagery, designing helped dissimulate undesirable local differences so that

Mexico might itself ‘blend into’ a landscape of global modernity. Mexico, too, was made to hide in plain sight by blending into global modernity scripts on the world stage.

Through this blending in, Mexico City, and by extension, the Mexican nation, were made to act modern.

Whether this urban and national performance could ever be fully and successfully achieved is another question. In the manner in which, as I have argued, Mexicans can never ‘be’ white but only act and appear white(r), as they are constantly being re-positioned vis-à-vis whiteness, forced to iteratively re-activate their whiteness through performance, so too might Mexico be viewed as only able to act and appear more modern on a world stage that is ultimately rigged. For indeed, the project of First World modernity is, ultimately, a colonial one, and its performance must be understood within what Homi Bhabha theorizes as colonial mimicry and its “forked tongue” (85). “Colonial mimicry,” Bhabha writes, “is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite,” “almost the same, but not white”

(86; 86). “In order to be effective,” he explains, “mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (86). While Bhabha focuses on how this slippage creates a crack in the foundation of colonial discourse, it can also be experienced as a trap on the part of the colonial subject who desires to play the rigged game of assimilation, or, in Levin’s terms, of ‘blending in.’ The Mexican state’s and middle class’ desire to perform from a repertoire of First World modernity scripts meant they walked into modernity’s trap. Within a First World logic, countries from the east and south could never truly and finally pass what Broudehoux calls the “test of modernity” (116). They

100 could only act and appear more modern. This tricky logic put industrializing countries seeking to improve their reputation on a world stage in the position of having to become performance machines, constantly working to secure the degrees of perceived modernity they have achieved by reenacting themselves as modern. The urban space of Mexico City in 1968 was transformed into a performance machine of modernity, condemned to enact and re-enact itself as ‘modern’ at every turn. Mexico City could be compelled to act modern at Mexico ’68, could project images of modernity along a spectrum of capitalist development, but it could never really, fully, or finally be legitimated as modern on the world’s rigged stage. The case of Mexico ’68 illustrates the performative, as opposed to the ontological, nature of the project of modernity.

Image 11. Mexico’s politically activated youth and the Mexico ’68’s modernist Olympic image come together in simultaneous performances of place, and as competing performances of Mexican modernity. Photograph by Lance Wyman. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman.

Conclusion

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On the morning of October 16, 1968, African American medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos mounted the Olympic podium for the medal ceremony shoeless and in black socks to represent black poverty in a gesture of protest against black oppression in the United States. As the American national anthem began, each raised a black-gloved fist and bowed his head, turning their bodies towards the American flag. Beside them,

Australian silver medalist Peter Norman wore the pin of the Olympic Project for Human

Rights (OPHR), a US organization created in 1967 to protest racial segregation in organized sports. This rousing gesture of protest against black oppression caused a furious uproar, as it defied the supposedly apolitical ethos of the Olympic Games. Not only were the athletes booed as they left the podium, but Avery Brundage, President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ordered Smith and Williams to be banned

49 from the Olympic Village and suspended from the US team for life. All three athletes were ostracized by their national sporting establishments when they returned home. This performance of protest made front page news around the world, visually capturing the civil rights struggles in the US while also transcending US national boundaries. This action connected with the protest of African nations against South Africa’s participation in the 1968 Olympic Games, and made a link with the global struggles of black people and the exploitation of their labour within organized sport and beyond. While Smith’s and

Carlos’s performance of protest did not, upon first glance, challenge Mexico’s performance of urban national modernity at Mexico ’68, it exposed the moral and logical

49 The US Olympic committee at first refused. When Brundage threatened to ban the entire US track team, Smith and Carlos were expelled from the Games. Thirty-two years earlier, when he was president of the US Olympic Committee, Brundage had made no objection to the use of Nazi salute during the 1936 Berlin Games.

102 fragility of western ideas about modernity on which Mexico was basing its national performance. The ostensibly ‘modern’ US was using the bodily labour of the black athlete to perform its national excellence while at the same time depriving these athletes of equal human rights. What is more, the figure of the ambiguously national virtuosic black athlete representing US excellence disruptively conjured the US’s failure to reckon with the foundational position of black slavery, labour, experiences, and creativity to US

‘modernity’ within a national imagination—a failure which mirrored Europe’s failure to do the same. While Norman’s, and especially Smith’s and Carlos’s anti-racist Olympic protest did not directly undermine Mexico’s performance of national modernity, their actions did indirectly undermine this performance by pulling the rug out from under the very western repertoire of modernity scripts Mexico aspired to perform.

In its protest against inequality and uneven development, as well as in its subsequent authoritarian repression, Smith’s and Carlos’ performance also connected to the protests of Mexico’s students. Indeed, both protests might be viewed as belonging to a larger movement of Third World Solidarity and Tricontinentalism, the latter of which was formulated just two years earlier at the Tricontinental Conference (also known as the

Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America) in Havana. The

Tricontinental Conference brought together 82 delegates from anti-racist and anti-imperialist liberation movements around the world (including from Mexico) to create transnational imagination of anti-imperial resistance.5 0

50 I am grateful to Katherine Zien for emphasizing the continuities between the Mexico student protests and Smith’s and Carlos’ protest as part of the Tricontinental movement. See Anne-Garland Mahler’s book F rom the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity ( 2018) for a history of the global anti-racist politics of Tricontinentalism and their present-day legacies.

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While one of the postage stamps designed for the Mexico ’68 Olympic campaign featured an image of Martin Luther King, a choice intended to present Mexico and the

Olympics as aligned with universal principles of depoliticized racial equality, Smith’s and

Carlos’ performance asserted itself as an uneasy presence in the Olympic spectacle. Their unscripted intervention into the spectacle exposed the hypocrisy of the Olympics’ aestheticized discourse of global peace and harmony by making realities of systemic racial and class difference stand out, strikingly, in the visual foreground of what would become one of the most iconic images of Mexico ’68.5 1 Smith’s and Carlos’s failure to blend into the Olympic spectacle, or instead, to be jettisoned backstage, tactically challenged some of the central visual strategies the Mexican state had deployed in its transformation of Mexico City into a performer of modernity. By going off script, Smith and Carlos, like the student protesters of Mexico ’68, called attention to the limits of a state’s ability to coordinate all of its human and non-human actors into a single performance of place.

Lest Mexico City’s performance of modernity at Mexico ’68 be read as an ephemeral anomaly, it is important to appreciate the lasting impact Mexico ’68 had on

Mexico City’s character that persists even today. Most impressively, Lance Wyman was invited back to Mexico City to create the iconography for the Mexico City metro system, iconography which riffed off of that of Mexico‘ 68. The sculptures and buildings created for the Olympics and for the Mexico City metro leave lasting impressions in the urban landscape, and the aesthetics of Mexico ’68 are frequently showcased in museum exhibits

51 This was the first time that Dr. King had been represented on a postage stamp anywhere.

104 throughout the city. The blending of global modernism and global avant-garde aesthetics with local and Indigenous ones remains perhaps the defining signature of middle-class design aesthetics in Mexico City today. Here still, answers to questions about cultural authorship and appropriation remain hazy even as the middle classes are clearly the ones to benefit most, both culturally and economically from the cultural hybridization they give themselves permission to perform. Goffman writes that:

The decorations and permanent fixtures in a place where a particular

performance is usually given, as well as the performers and performance usually

found in it, tend to fix a kind of spell over it; even when the customary

performance is not being given in it, the place tends to retain some of its front

region character. (75-6)

Mexico City’s state-compelled performance of modernity at Mexico ’68 cast a spell over the city that has still not worn off even as many other performances of place have since animated the national capital in any number of ways. Through the actions and representations of its middle-class citizens, Mexico City still reenacts, dissembles, aspires, and pretends in ways continuous with its performance at Mexico ’68.

I have opened this dissertation with the complex theatrical and racial dimensions of Mexico’s performance of urban national modernity at Mexico ’68. This case study is an example of a strategic performance of place by a mega-event in the 1960s that sought to produce the city as a fixed, predetermined idea that would advance a state agenda. The

Mexican state directed Mexico City as an actor of modernity on the world stage, where a repertoire of scripts for the performance of modernity had already been established.

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Through different forms of urban, architectural, industrial, and urban, graphic, and event design, and through the training of Mexican people to perform ground, the MOC employed synchronized theatrical strategies of reenacting, backstaging, foregrounding, camouflaging, and backgrounding to control Mexico City’s appearance before the eyes of the world. The numerous theatrical strategies by which Mexico performed its modernity at Mexico ’68 support an argument that, because of its precariousness vis-à-vis a dominant global logic of modernity, to perform modernity Mexico was required to become a performance machine, condemned to endlessly re-perform its modernity on a rigged stage. With this chapter, I hope to stimulate thinking about state-compelled performances of the city as well as about the racial and class dimensions of urban appearance. I launch the concept of ‘urban acting’ into global discussions about the production of urban place, a concept which may be adapted and revised to interpret dissimulative or racialized performances of place in a diversity of global contexts.

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Chapter Two: Ritualizing the City in Crisis: New York and The Placemaking Power

of Disco

An extraordinary culture of all-night dancing to pre-recorded music selected by

DJs flourished in New York City in the 1970s. This culture, which would eventually be dubbed ‘disco,’ originated in 1970 with invitation-based parties and public discotheques like The Loft and the Sanctuary, two of the original incubators of the disco scene. The

Loft was a bi-monthly invitation-based event held by a musicophile named David

Mancuso in his 1,850 square foot loft at 647 Broadway, just north of Houston. Known for its familial ‘come-as-you-are’ atmosphere that congregated a diversity of black, white, brown, gay, straight, old, young, rich, and poor New Yorkers, the Loft welcomed its guests with a buffet of free snacks and fresh fruit juices in a dark space flooded with multicoloured balloons. But the space was devoted, above all else, to dancing. Mancuso drew from an eclectic range of records to create slow-building musical journeys for his guests, who would progressively lose themselves in the energy of the room and the beat of the music, which was played through a sound system created out of two sets of

Klipschorn speakers. The Sanctuary was an initially straight club located in a former

German Lutheran church in Hell’s Kitchen, re-opened as Manhattan’s first explicitly gay discotheque within a few weeks of Mancuso’s space. The club catered to a mix of upwardly mobile men, street kids, and sex workers.5 2 As the building’s altar was converted into a DJ booth, the former church became a place of a different kind of

52 T he club created a scandal with New York Roman Catholic representatives with a large mural (eventually partially covered up with clusters of plastic fruit) that portrayed the devil surrounded by angels engaged in various sex acts.

107 devotion and surrender.5 3 Like the Loft, the Sanctuary was organized around the cathartic pleasure of dancing to the beat of the music.

Designed to foster interactions between dancers, DJs, and the room, New York’s early discos were spaces in which a broad range of New Yorkers could gather and release energetic tension as their bodies merged with disco’s environments through music and dance. By creating experiences of merging-with-environment, discos unleashed the power of music to attune people and place. Spaces like the Loft and the Sanctuary gave rise to a robust underground party network concentrated mostly downtown, and later, in

Midtown, but which also linked up with discos in the outer boroughs. By the end of the decade, disco had so influentially reshaped the fabric, feel, and sound of New York that, in 1978, New York City Mayor Ed Koch proclaimed that “the beat of the disco is the heartbeat of what makes New York City a special kind of place” (qtd. in Lawrence 308).

The connection between music and place in disco is signalled by the slippage between ‘disco’ as denotative of a musical genre (at first, the music played in disco, and after 1974, a distinct musical genre for playing in discos) and ‘disco,’ meaning a spatial unit, namely the interior space of a club. This chapter examines the role that New York’s disco scene played in shaping New York as a distinct place in the 1970s by understanding the scene as part of an urban process engendered by New York’s urban crisis during this era. Indeed, disco’s inviting environments contrasted dramatically with the urban space of

New York in the 1970s.

53 Disco historian Tim Lawrence points out that, in its “fervor-friendly” nature, “the fledgling culture of the discotheque was beginning to exploit its neo-spiritual potential” (18).

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While most major US cities in the northeast and midwest were, at this point in history, gutted by deindustrialization, subsidized suburbanization, and state divestment, no city plummeted as drastically as did New York. The formerly quintessential American metropolis was experiencing a peaking crime wave, dramatic rates of building abandonment, and steep slashes to municipal jobs.5 4 The suburban boom of the 1970s systematized segregated white privilege as vital resources were reallocated to the overwhelmingly white margins from an increasingly poor and racialized city. Meanwhile,

New York was disavowed by the nation as a “fiscal junkie” that had brought its crisis upon itself (Miller 2). The federal government repeatedly refused to assist New York in repaying its $453 million debt, and by 1975, the city was on the verge of bankruptcy. On

October 29, the day after President Gerald Ford gave a speech in which he refused to come to New York’s assistance, the front page of The Daily News read “Ford to City:

Drop Dead.”5 5

New York’s disco scene can be understood as a response to the abandonment of the urban population by the state and the nation. Whereas the city in general was in a state of free fall that left it unresponsive to the needs and desires of its residents, disco spaces used sensitive practices of sound design, hospitality, interior decoration, and musical selection, to create inviting environments for the populations left out of the invitation of the suburbs and the care of the nation. In a city that was increasingly out of sync with the needs of its population, discos worked to sync people and place.

54 The city fired 6 3,828 municipal employees (Shapiro xvii). 55 Ford later signed t he New York City Seasonal Financing Act of 1975, a Congressional bill that loaned $2.3 billion to the city for three years. The loan was repaid with interest.

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The last chapter focused on the actorly nature of certain kinds of urban performance by which spatial performances (what Elin Diamond calls the ‘doing’ of performance) produced desired representations of a modern ideal (what Diamond calls the ‘thing done’ of performance, or the completed event that is embedded in a discursive field). Specifically, I examined how the Mexico ’68 Olympics mobilized the city as a performing object for spectators in such a way that a gap was widened between what I have referred to, adopting anthropologist Michael Taussig’s terminology, as the “real” city and the “really made up” city, even as the really made up city stayed sutured to the urban real (86).

This chapter looks at the transformative force of certain performances of urban citizens, performances which actualize the city as a processual phenomenon that can be made more responsive to the needs and desires of its populace. Here the valence of performance that is most at issue is the ‘doing’ of performance as a reparative ritual practice. The focus of my analysis thus shifts from one on the city as a represented phenomenon to a focus on the city as a performative phenomenon; my analysis also shifts from a focus on the city as something that is produced from the top-down to the city as something that is produced from the bottom-up.

In this chapter I build on foundational scholarship in disco history to theorize disco as a placemaking phenomenon. Using performance studies theory and methods, I contextualize the disco scene within New York’s urban crisis of the 1970s. Specifically, I theorize New York’s disco scene through the figure of ‘urban rituals.’ In my usage of this term, I intend urban processes involving a social breach and resulting crisis that is

110 followed by one or several responses intended to redress the breach and to lead to a new social integration. I posit New York’s disco scene in the 1970s as an example of how urban rituals are key processes through which cities are produced. Core ideas in early performance studies scholarship on performance as social rituals from Victor Turner and

Richard Schechner assist me in my reading of the performance-city relation through processes of ritualizing.

The City in Crisis

Waves of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and state divestment radically reshaped the physical and social fabric of New York City in the 1970s. In 1961, when

Manhattan was rezoned into residential, commercial, and manufacturing areas, much of the city’s heavy industry migrated to the outer boroughs and surrounding regions. This shift left many New Yorkers, including a disproportionate number of African Americans,

56 unemployed. The exodus of heavy industry during this period was accompanied by another exodus of white, middle-class residents, and by a depletion of the tax base that this population had previously provided for the city. Throughout the 1970s, New York lost 80,000 residents as many white, middle-class New Yorkers relocated to new homes in the suburbs in a continuation of a movement of white flight begun in the 1950s

56 During the Great Migration (1910-1970), approximately 6 million African Americans migrated from the southern United States to mostly the northeast and west to evade poor economic conditions and the Jim Crow laws, greatly altering the geography of race in the United States. The Great Migration saw an urbanization of black life, with most African Americans, including those who remained in the south having moved to metropolitan areas (United States Census Bureau). In the 1970s, many African Americans w ho had moved to the city for industrial employment during the Great Migration lost their livelihood.

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57 (Furman Centre for Real Estate and Urban Policy 2). As the 1970s progressed, poor, racialized, and young populations, and non-family households became concentrated in

New York City (Division of Population Research of the City Planning Department, qtd. in Oreskes). By 1979, one in five city residents lived in poverty compared with about one in seven in 1969; and for the first time in the city’s history, racialized groups made up the

58 majority of the population (Levitan and Wieler 14). As a national economic recession characterized by staggering rates of unemployment and inflation (or stagflation) set in over the course of the 1970s, a shrinking, increasingly racialized and poor New York was thrown into a serious fiscal crisis.

A key facet of the fiscal crisis was New York’s deteriorating housing market. As a result of mounting maintenance costs and mortgages, decreasing real estate value, and a moratorium President Nixon put on the federal budget for public housing in 1973, New

York found itself in a housing catastrophe. Through the 1970s, landlords throughout the city, and especially in the Bronx, began abandoning their buildings, even setting fire to

59 them to collect insurance money. The East Village and the Lower East Side were particularly affected by redlining and, subsequently, squatting, as financial institutions

57 80 percent of the population of New York and the surrounding region was priced out of the suburban housing market and “During the 1970s, housing prices rose faster than income in the region, thus further reducing the proportion of families able to afford new housing. By 1977, the minimum cost of a new single-family home built within 50 miles of Manhattan was $55,000” (Danielson and Doig 100). 58 W hile according to the 1980 census “minority” (i.e. racialized) populations counted for 47.1 percent of the population, some experts say these groups were underco unted (Oreskes p n/a). At the same time as unemployment in New York was becoming increasingly racialized, and as the city was becoming smaller and less white due to subsidized suburbanization, New York became a magnet for new immigrants from Asia and Latin America who flowed into the country in increasing numbers from 1965 onward, when immigration quotas that had privileged white immigrants were lifted (Oreskes par. 3). 59 As Frank Braconi explains, “A s middle- and working-class whites sought more attractive housing options...black and Puerto Rican migrants replaced them in the city’s older, more densely built neighborhoods…These minorities tended to have lower incomes and far higher rates of joblessness, making it more difficult for owners of marginal rental buildings to collect rents commensurate with building maintenance and operating expenses” (9 4-95) .

112 stopped supplying mortgages to the area, and as landlords let their properties fall into

60 disrepair in an effort to drive out racialized and poor populations. By 1979, “New York

City had taken ownership through tax foreclosure of over 60,000 units in vacant buildings and another 40,000 units in occupied and semi-occupied buildings,” making the

Department of Housing Preservation (HDP) the largest housing authority in the country

(Furman Center). The city largely sat on its vacant buildings, which deteriorated further.

As the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) stratified housing according to

61 income, public housing became increasingly segregated. The actions of the state and of landlords (who in a significant number of cases were also the state or city) assisted in producing a degraded if not outright hostile habitat for New York City’s remaining residents.

The deterioration of New York’s housing infrastructures was matched by a general degradation of the public realm. In 1976, New York implemented a three-year plan in which tens of thousands of government employees were laid off, the wages of uniform forces and educational personnel were frozen, and salaries were slashed (Miller,

2). 1970s New York was thus shaped by a broad divestment from the physical and social infrastructures that sustain human welfare.

Crucially, the demographics of New York in the 1970s affected the national response to New York’s crisis in the 1970s. In her book Dr op Dead (2016), Hillary Miller

60 Redlining is the systematic denial of services and financial loans to certain areas and sectors of the population based on race. Squatting rose throughout the 1970s, peaking in 1980 (Petrus, qtd. in Begley). 61 D esperate to keep its moderate-income population from fleeing to the suburbs, in 1970, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) began selling apartments and townhouses in the 15,000 unit public housing project Co-op City in the Bronx, where a 2-bedroom went for $3,000. “ C apitalizing on the white fear of a black planet, the sales brochures even included a coded promise to prospective buyers: ‘No subsidized apartments’—AKA, no welfare people” (Price).

113 details how in the 1970s a historical politics of urban growth in New York was transformed to regimes of scarcity in large part because of the demographic makeup of the city. At a national level, “political battles pitted defenders of New York’s identity as a progressive social welfare state against those who depicted the city as a ‘fiscal junkie’ that needed to be tamed by austerity and shrinkage” (1-2). “Missing from the headlines,”

Miller writes: was the ideology that tied the fiscal crisis to certain populations, the same ones who

would also soon pay a steep price under resulting austerity frameworks.

Politicians and analysts blamed the “influx of impoverished blacks, Puerto

Ricans, and other immigrants” after World War II who demanded a greater range

of services than any other city provides. (2)

Politicians thus “inculpated a supposedly unruly populace that wasted municipal resources and brought disrepute to the formerly glittering metropolis” (2). Miller and historian Mike Wallace compare the strategic approach to New York in the 1970s to a

“proto-IMF strategy,” writing that policymakers “treated the city as a developing nation

62 that needed to be reprimanded for wasting funds on social services” (3). If Mexico City in 1968 was a rapidly modernizing city that sought to pass as whiter and ‘developed’ within a developing nation in contrast with Mexico’s racialized rural hinterlands, New

62 As Miller writes, “Particularly in times of crisis, those who impose programs of austerity tend to present them as technocratic solutions to merely financial problems, rather than as social processes shaped by struggle and contestation” (4). David Harvey and Miller argue that the urban crisis management strategies used during New York’s fiscal crisis provided an early model for more widespread neoliberal policies adopted nationally under the Reagan administration and internationally under the IMF, which prioritized financial institutions over citizen interests (Harvey 48; Miller 4).

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York in the 1970s figured as a racially marked urban hinterland of a suburbanizing nation.

Taking Care: Healing the Urban Crisis

In his study on the affective bond between people and place Space and Place

(1974), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan influentially argued that place, as opposed to more abstract space, is created and maintained through the “fields of care” resulting from people’s emotional attachment (De Backer and Pavoni 11). Place, in this view, expresses an affective bond between people and certain spaces. We might read the abandonment of

New York City in the 1970s as a faulty affective bond between a national majority and the habitats of racially and economically marginalized citizens.

By the 1970s, US cities, especially but not only in the northeast, had become associated with the vigorous social change being brought about by civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements, and the high concentrations of racialized, immigrant, queer, and poor populations that dwelled within their limits. Disco historian Peter Shapiro writes that during this period in US history, “America’s Silent Majority,” which had swept

Richard Nixon into power, “felt like they were being outnumbered and ignored,” and

“reacted with fear and resentment” (xiii). In 1969, T ime named the “Middle American” as the “Man and Woman of the Year,” a fact which points to the provincialism of the dominant national sentiment of the time.

Following Shapiro and Miller, I argue that a national affective divestment from urban populations created the conditions for state financial divestment from cities, and especially, from New York. Indeed, a racist, anti-urban, national sentiment took spatial

115 form in the deterioration of social and physical urban infrastructures of New York in the

1970s. As normative emotional attachments shifted to the suburbs, a disproportionately racialized urban population lived in conditions of a crisis of state responsibility. To use

Tuan’s terminology, the weakened bond between a national majority and New York’s populations in the 1970s prevented New York from becoming a field of care at a national level. In contrast, disco invested these urban places as meaningful fields of care.

New York’s emerging disco scene in the early 1970s used low-budget do-it-yourself (DIY) practices, sound design, interior decoration, and practices of hospitality to create ephemeral time-spaces in which disco-goers could experience social connection, physical emotional and release, and innovative cultural expression. Through its soft spatial transformations, disco created meaningful spaces of relief from, and response to, the inhospitality of the everyday urban environment. The disco scene created fields of care in response to a crisis of state care.6 3 More specifically, I propose that New

York’s disco scene can be usefully understood as a performance of place through the lens of urban ritual.

Understanding performance as a type of social ritual has provided performance studies scholars with a model for understanding performance not only as an aesthetic showing, but also as an embodied transformation—an actualization—for both the performers, and potentially spectators or participants. The work of Victor Turner and

Richard Schechner has laid a foundation for understanding performance as a process of

63 W e might connect the notion of “field of care” to what Shauna Janssen and Cynthia Hammond call “communities of concern”—communities held together not by a common identity, but instead by a shared concern—which “form around the cultural landscape of a postindustrial urban site in transition” (73).

116 transformation. Turner developed anthropologist Van Gennep’ s structure of ‘rites of passage’—a term used to describe transitions from one state to another, such as the passage from childhood to adulthood in puberty, or from life to death—to describe what

Turner called ‘social dramas.’ Social dramas, as Turner defines them, are secular processes of social change that mirror the structures of rites of passage. Central to rites of passage and to social dramas is the idea of liminality. Adapted from ‘limen,’ or

‘threshold,’ the liminal phase of the ritual process is an ‘in-between’ state, in which one has temporarily separated from one’s community so that some kind of transformation may occur before a new social reintegration is possible. For Turner, the ritual process has four phases: 1) a social breach; 2) a social crisis; 3) a redressive action that is created to

‘heal’ the social breach; and 4) either social reintegration or social schism if the breach

64 cannot be healed. Turner writes that the breach phase of social drama is signalled by the

“public, overt breach or deliberate non-fulfillment of some crucial norm regulating the intercourse of the parties” (38). Following the breach, “the next phase of crisis supervenes during which the breach often widens and extends the separation between the parties” (Son 40). The crisis phase, as Turner explains, “has liminal characteristics, since it is a threshold between more or less stable phases of the social process” (39).

President Ford’s ‘drop dead’ attitude towards New York was a breach of state responsibility towards the struggling metropolis, and the urban crisis that widened in

New York throughout the 1970s threw the city into a state of liminality. New York found

64 T urner used the word ‘liminoid’ to refer to experiences having the characteristics of liminal experiences, but which are optional and are not based on longstanding religious or social traditions. The hippie movement and woodstock in the 1960s, was for Turner an example of a liminoid phenomenon. I retain the language of the ‘liminal’ to discuss modern iterations of liminality, which Turner would refer to as ‘liminoid.’

117 itself betwixt and between: a strong industrial and a strong service economy; views of national belonging from before and after the resistive social movements of the 1960s; and a postwar politics of social welfare and growth and the neoliberal politics of austerity and privatization that would restructure New York in the late 1970s and 1980s. 65 I argue that disco created places that sought to redress New York’s urban crisis through an array of performative, ritual mechanisms.

A Portrait of the Early Scene

New York’s disco scene was generated by the musical, dancerly, and design labours of some of the city’s most marginalized populations: African Americans, Latinxs, gay men, poor people, and women.6 6 Early disco DJs mixed from Motown, Soul, Salsa,

Funk, Jazz, R&B, Rock and Roll, Gospel, and Latin and African tracks, creating musical progressions for dancers that spanned the course of a night. Considering the incredible eclecticism of the early disco sound that shaped disco as a marketable musical genre, it makes more sense to describe early disco music (especially in the early 1970s), as

Richard Dyer does, as “a sensibility in music” rather than strictly as a musical genre (20).

This sensibility favoured eclecticism, heavy percussion that appealed to the body, funkiness, musical journeys, loudness, high sound quality, extended tracks, and black musical influences. However, in 1974 and 1975, as record companies discovered the

65 T he liminal quality of 1970s New York can also be described, in terms borrowed from geography, as what Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens call loose space (Franck and Stevens 2007). Loose space is relatively unordered or unregulated space, which makes it susceptible to appropriation and transformation by users. 66 T he majority of disco’s DJs were gay, Italian American, African American, and Latinx, though women DJs found it much harder to break into the scene (Lawrence 92).

118 tastemaking power of disco DJs and dancers for broad listening audiences, disco did start to be produced as a distinct musical genre characterized by the use of an even-tempo four-on-the-floor beat on the bass drum (developed out of Motown), a dense orchestra of lush strings, texturizing woodwinds, elaborate percussion, hissing high hats, a not-so-prominent lead guitar, the sumptuous, clipped vocals of the disco diva, and eventually a pronounced syncopated electric bassline and other synthesized sounds.

Disco music’s dense orchestral aesthetic created a saturated effect that would play a role in creating the immersive aesthetic of disco, especially as this music was reabsorbed by the spaces that had inspired it and projected through powerful surround sound systems.

The disco scene was concentrated in Manhattan, with important outposts in the outer boroughs, especially on Fire Island with gay hotspots like the Sandpiper and Ice

Palace. Beginning downtown and in west Midtown, as well as in Hell’s Kitchen, the scene migrated above ground in central Midtown as the decade advanced, making the

67 scene an increasingly important presence in the urban fabric. While a contemporaneous hip-hop scene was flourishing in the Bronx in a number of exterior spaces in the form of events like block parties, which led to an aesthetic of spatial extroversion and broad local address, the early disco scene was incubated in a mix of different kinds of intimate interior spaces that required a degree of insider-knowledge to access. These spaces included private lofts, public and membership-based clubs, and gay bathhouses.

Propelled by the liberating effects of the Gay Rights movement catalyzed by the riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969, gay men formed a substantial portion of

67 A s Will Straw has noted, the success of New York’s discotheques was part of a “more general tendency towards the revitalization of sites of urban entertainment—such as supper clubs, night clubs and cabarets—whose popularity had declined in the late 1960s and early 1970s (dissertation 122).

119 disco dancers in the early 1970s, and disco became a profoundly important part of gay

68 male life in New York through the 1970s and 1980s.

Important New York discothèques that opened after the Loft and the Sanctuary included: the Gallery (SoHo), a club run by iconic DJ Nicky Siano; Flamingo (SoHo);

Paradise Garage (Hudson Square); Mother (the Meatpacking District); Tenth Floor

(Chelsea), an elite gay club famous for its chic, industrial aesthetic; 12 West (Greenwich

Village); Infinity (NoHo); the Anvil (the West Village); the bathhouse-cum-disco

Continental Baths (the Upper West Side); the Sandpiper and the Ice Palace on Fire Island; the Roxy (Chelsea), which began as a roller disco; the Saint (the East Village), a gay club famous for its dance floor; Le Jardin (Midtown); and of course, Studio 54 (Midtown), iconic for its selective door policy and decadent parties. Steve Rubell’s and Ian Shrager’s highly exclusive and image-focused Studio 54, which opened on April 26, 1977, acts as the cutoff between what I consider to be ‘early disco’ and ‘late disco.’ While early disco spaces were about atmosphere and were centred on darkened dance floors and dancers who enjoyed “untheatrical anonymity” (Emerson, par. 7), many later disco spaces tended to be more about image and spectacle, including the fashion and self-presentation of

69 disco-goers. The placemaking work performed by atmosphere-focused early disco spaces from the opening of the Loft in 1970 to the opening of Studio 54 in 1977 is the focus of this chapter.

68 For a portrait of New York’s disco scene in the early 1980s, see L awrence’s Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 ( 2016). 69 See Derek Nystrom’s chapter about the “new nightlife film” and S aturday Night Fever’ s aestheticization and feminization of its protagonist Tony Manero in H ard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men (2009).

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While public discothèques outnumbered semi-public disco parties, the latter are considered by disco scholars to have been more influential in creating the disco sound and experience. Most important was the Loft. The Loft created the blueprint for the disco experience, centred on gathering to listen to amazing pre-recorded music and dancing through the night, that proliferated in New York, and then around the world, throughout

70 the 1970s.

In its logic of spatial introversion that nevertheless drew in a diversity of New

Yorkers through its different, relatively broad addresses, disco straddled the boundary between the private and the public. This boundary was made especially porous because of the loudness of the disco sound, and the transmissive nature of noise. The music played in discos radiated out of them through different processes of transmission, absorbing disco-adjacent spaces in the disco sound. Disco’s transmissive force, created not only by its high volumes and powerful sound systems, but also by its design as dance music that appealed to the body, led to noise complaints from irritated neighbours on the one hand, and secured its urban, suburban, and global catchiness on the other. Throughout the

1970s, disco was transmitted so broadly and relentlessly through the radio, and through global music and dance club markets, that disco is today remembered as the ‘sound of the

71 1970s’.

70 Discos and disco music proved to be exceedingly catchy phenomena. T he city, and eventually, the nation and the globe, became swept up in a disco fever, as the music first popularized in discos climbed music charts, and as discos mushroomed across New York and beyond. By 1977, almost 40 percent of top 100 music charts in the United States were disco songs, and it was estimated that over 20,000 discos had cropped up around the country (Hae 62). A s Lawrence puts it, the Loft was “the absolute ground zero for dance culture as we know it today” (“Love Saves the Day: An Interview with the Legendary NYC Club Pioneer and DJ David Mancuso”). 71 See the introduction of Alice Echols’s H ot Stuff ( 2010) for her description of disco as the sound of the 1970s.

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Going Out, Going Home, and Everything in Between: Disco’s Ritual Process

In Love Saves the Day, Lawrence recreates a scene of partiers going out to the

Loft: A couple of hundred partiers make their way towards the Loft through the deserted city, which resembles “an abandoned film set” (1). The abandoned landscapes of the city serve as the dramatic setting for a procession of ‘going out.’ After traversing these landscapes to form a queue, and showing their invitations at the entrance of the venue, the partiers cross a threshold into a different place that juxtaposes with the striking exterior. The warm, darkened interior of the Loft is “both expansive and intimate” (1). It visually and atmospherically distinguishes itself from the desolate exterior landscape. It is decorated, festive, hospitable. The space creates a sense of otherworldliness; “Nobody lives like this. Not even New Yorkers. Or at least they didn’t until now” (1). The music drifting out of the sound system coaxes the revellers’ bodies, “beat by beat,” into “a dizzying display of movement,” creating an atmosphere of pleasurable bodily entrainment and release (1). The interior of the Loft appeals to the body in more inviting and more social ways than the cobbled streets and unlit buildings that surround it. The music is “gentle.” Feet flicker “unconsciously.” A “sumptuous buffet of juice, fruit, and nuts” is offered up. And the partiers are immersed in coaxing sounds and balloons, and eventually, in fellow dancing bodies (1). They seem to dissolve into movement.

And then what? In “DISSS-CO (A Fragment),” Douglas Crimp shares reflections he wrote in the mid-1970s about disco and the shift from modernism to postmodernism.

In one section, Crimp recalls leaving New York’s first exclusively gay discothèque,

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Flamingo, which was located in SoHo at Houston and Broadway, just a few blocks south of the Loft. While Mancuso’s excerpt describes the entry in a disco space from the everyday, Crimp’s vignette details the re-entry into everyday spaces (and into the more normatively inhabited temporal territory of daytime) that follows the immersive disco experience. Though disco was regularly accused (especially by rock and folk fans) of being ‘artificial,’ as Crimp describes his re-entry into the outside world after a full night of dancing at the Flamingo, it is the daytime world that seems “unnaturally bright” (2).

Crimp’s description suggests a kind of carnivalesque inversion of a natural order that occurs in disco. And yet, it also does not seem to advance a politics of the carnivalesque in which temporary social inversion is used to restore a dominant order.

Indeed, Crimp’s fragment would suggest that something different is at work here. Crimp gives us a sense of the staying power of the disco experience, as it is carried back into the everyday world in the bodies of dancers, which “still gyrat[e]” “as if the music had been absorbed by [their] muscles” (2). The feedback drone still lingers in their ears, “muting the sounds of the early Sunday morning” (2). The dancers’ experience of their bodies and of the city has been transformed by the disco experience. As the sounds of Sunday morning are muted by the lingering feedback drone, the everyday sounds of the city dissolve into the dancers’ perceptual background. Tying up the night out with a post-disco procession, the dancers resurface into daytime. Along with this re-entry into everyday spaces and the normative temporal territory of the day comes a new kind of sociability, which effervesces into the everyday. The two strangers, also resurfacing from a disco, “smil[e] knowingly” at him and his friend, an image that captures the shared

123 pleasures of affinity cultures and the sociability that supplements cultural expression in cultural scenes (2). The temporarily reclusive disco experience is thus bracketed by urban dramaturgies of procession: that of going out, and that of going home, which belong to the warm-up and cool-down phases of cultural rituals.

Crimp explains that his friend Steven’s conversation for “at least a whole day after Saturday night disco” is “a running analysis of the night before, the night that’s really morning, beginning about 1:00 a.m. and lasting until 7:00 or 8:00” (2). “Of course,” Crimp continues, “that’s not counting the preparation, which begins early

Saturday. Getting your disco act together. Finding a member to go with. Eating lots of protein, but early in the day. Resting up. Deciding what drugs to take and what clothes to wear” (2). Involving stages of getting ready, getting to the club, dancing and socializing, coming down, and aftermath, the disco process overlaps with the stages of the acting/performance process as described by Schechner and which Schechner himself models after the process of social rituals described by anthropologists Victor Turner and

Arnold van Gennep: “warm-ups, performance, cool-down and aftermath” (Between

Theatre and Anthropology 16).

Insofar as urban scenes transform the urban fabric through symbolic, aesthetic, and functional interventions in the city over time, it would seem that urban scenes belong to the realm of what De Certeau calls ‘tactics.’ Urban tactics, sometimes referred to as

“guerrilla urbanism,” are everyday spatial practices that intervene in strategic top-down attempts to produce and control space, such as those described in Chapter Two. De

Certeau theorizes tactics as enunciations (or speech acts) that use elements of an

124 established system to construct new utterances. Through the creative use of an established system, tactics rewrite the city in fragments (xiii). Tactics continuously re-actualize the city through the resistant everyday practices of urban users. As assemblages of objects and practices that shape the city from the bottom-up to suit the needs and desires of certain users, urban scenes can be described as tactical in De

Certeau’s sense. Yet, there is something about the ‘exceptional’ rather than ‘everyday’ spaces created by urban scenes that make De Certeau’s concept of tactics too limiting a framework for understanding how urban scenes produce place.

While scenes can (and often do) provide a sense of belonging for their regular participants, they are in many ways pointedly not about the everyday. Scenes, repeatedly, and in certain patterns, elevate the everyday experience of place out of its ongoing forward flow, out of what Laura Levin calls the “environmental unconscious” (or the way in which our everyday environments fall into the background zones of our perception)

(Performing Ground 96). In their special accentuation of the urban space through ritual activities that break with the everyday, scenes can be understood as a performance of the urban. The concept of ritual provides a useful supplement to an understanding of scenes in terms of their tactical labours. While tactics are immersed in the everyday, rituals

“erup[t] from the level surface of ongoing social life” (Turner, The Anthropology of

Performance 196).

The ritual, tribal, and trance qualities of the disco scene are often noted in popular parlance about this phenomenon. Journalist Nik Cohn flagged the ritual nature of the

New York disco scene in the title of his 1976 New York Magazine exposé of the scene,

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72 “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” Yet the scene has nowhere been fully theorized in terms of ritual in disco scholarship. Performance studies, which emerged as a discipline “between theatre and anthropology,” is well-positioned to develop theories of urban scenes as ritual because of its longstanding interest in the performance process as mirroring the dramaturgical structure of rites of passage. Performance studies has also used the lens of ‘social drama’ (which is understood as possessing a ritual structure) to interpret processes of social change. The hippie movement, for example, was one of

Turner’s examples of a social drama that sought to effect change through a ritual process of temporary separation from the normative social.

In an interview following Mancuso’s death in November 2016, Douglas Sherman, a close friend of Mancuso and original participant and DJ at the Loft, discussed the importance of transitions to disco, and especially to the Loft, in terms that reiterate almost exactly to Turner’s theory of ritual:

I think the idea of the Loft in terms of the musical side of things was this idea of

transitions. David would refer to it as “the Bardos,” which is kind of a loose

reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s about the transitions we go from in

our conscious state to a sleeping state, to different states and death and so on, in

terms of a musical approach. I guess there was his idea of transitions [at the Loft]

taking things from calm to circus and then re-entry, which then takes all at some

point.

72 Cohn’s exposé was later revealed to be fabricated. In the piece he claims to have followed a tight-knit group of Bay Ridge disco scenesters, which he portrayed as exemplifying the new Saturday night rites of disco. T he character of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever was based on Cohn’s account of Vincent, the best dancer in Bay Ridge.

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Fundamentally invested in processes of separation and re-entry, in transitions between different songs and different states, in the transition between the nighttime and the daytime, disco created the kinds of transitional spaces described by Turner, both within the space of the club, and in the movements back and forth between the everyday and the extraordinary night.7 3

Insofar as so many of the bodies that found pleasure, solace, creative expression, and release in New York’s discos were poor, racialized, or queer—bodies that were sites of long histories of “racial, cultural, and economic conflict”— discos promised “the reinscription of those bodies with alternate interpretations of that history” (Muñoz and

Delgado 10). Disco harnessed the power of ritualized extraordinary dancing for energetic accumulation, release, and transformation, and for the pleasurable reinscription of bodies that had been systematically produced as sites of conflict within a city in crisis. Professor of urbanism and architecture Sukanya Krishnamurthy writes that rituals sustain

“collective memory and attachment” and create urban images that make place by shaping urban form and imaginaries (2). Rituals, Krishnamurthy maintains, rekindle affiliations between body, memory, and space (3). They animate landscapes, leaving impressions upon them even after they are finished. The disco scene—an assemblage of spaces,

73 J osé Esteban Muñoz’s and Celeste Fraser Delgado’s concept of “everynight life,” which they use to describe the political function of nighttime dancing in Latin American and Latinx culture is helpful for understanding the broader potential of the activities of nightlife scenes. Explaining the relationship between dancing and traditional models of performing politics, the authors write: Tonight’s pasas (dance steps) glide across the same surfaces as tomorrow's political debate. In the overlapping space of dance and debate, a shifting sense of community is configured and reconfigured-day after day, and night after night. Dance sets politics in motion, bringing people together in rhythmic affinity where identification takes the form of histories written on the body through gesture [...] Magnificent against the monotonous repetition of everyday oppressions, dance incites rebellions of everynight life. (9-10)

127 routes, sounds, and ritual movements—created spaces in which conditions of everyday crisis could be ephemerally un-inhabited, reanimating the city in turn as a space of pleasure, healing, and sociality rather than one of hardship. Through their cyclical nature, disco’s nightlife rituals also created a sense of continuity where the urban crisis had thrown the city into a situation of discontinued services, spaces, and care. While perhaps intervening in spatial meanings in ways that can be described as tactical, this nightlife scene was neither completely disconnected from everyday life, nor was it immersed in it.

Redressing the Crisis

The redressive phase of the ritual process, which is also the most liminal phase, seeks to limit the intensification of the crisis through adjustive mechanisms brought about by “leading or structurally representative members of the disturbed social system”

(Turner, Dramas, Field, and Metaphors 39). The social crisis might be redressed through legal action, informal mediation, or through the performance of public rituals (39). Disco is an example of the redressive performance of public rituals. I am interested in the kinds of spaces ritual processes create, and in how disco’s ritual spaces were produced through specific spatial interventions. In what follows, I break down disco’s spatial interventions, which are not meant to be comprehensive, but are meant to be representative of the scene, into: 1) domesticating; and 2) affecting. Both of these mechanisms produced disco’s extraordinary interior environments as emotionally and politically resonant places.

By examining structuring functions of disco’s redressive mechanisms, I challenge the idea of liminality as an unstructured and disembodied zone of experience. Turner

128 understands the liminal time-spaces of ritual as relatively freeform, non-hierarchical, consensual, and curiously disembodied. For Turner, liminality is a space of radical communitas and anti-structure. But as anthropologist Graham St. John has written,

Turner’s essentialist understanding of liminality leaves little room for considering the power structures that reinscribe even spaces of social liminality and for considering the body (48). More skeptical than Turner of the possibility of the liminal phases of social drama to create spaces uninscribed by power, I am interested in the specific aesthetics

74 and politics of disco’s ritual spaces.

The disco scene used practices of domesticating and affecting to create new modes of experiencing the city. By designing spaces organized around intense interactions between bodies and environments, disco created the conditions of possibility for the formation of alternative place attachments.

1) Domesticating

During the postwar suburban boom, suburbia became the new setting for the

American dream. Businesses and politicians with a vested interest in selling suburban homes and the commodities that would fill them represented suburbia as “a warm, happy place filled with healthy families and friendly neighbors, living cozy lives in homes brimming with the latest products and appliances” (Nicolaides and Wiese). As Becky

Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese write, “Magazines, television commercials, and real-estate developers peddled this image tirelessly, depicting contented white families thriving in

74 Here I share with an thropologist Graham St. John, who specializes in Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC), a concern about the essentialist and apolitical nature of Turner’s concept of liminal time-spaces, which possesses an “implicit consensual dimension” (49). As St. John points out, this view leaves little room for considering the power structures that reinscribe spaces of liminality or the embodied dimensions of liminal experiences ( 48).

129 suburbia.” In her book The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed examines the connections between ideas about happiness and the conception of the good life. She writes about how, in particular places and moments in time, certain objects and ideas come to be associated with the promise of future happiness. In 1970s America, the suburbs were the place that most forcefully embodied the promise of the good life, associated with marriage and heterosexual intimacy, familial reproduction, mass consumerism, and home ownership.

This life was decidedly white, upwardly mobile, straight, and tightly attached to normative modes of familial domesticity, sustained predominantly by the labours of white suburban women.

As members of the white middle class pulled out of the city, insulating their everyday domestic dramas from the intrusions of city life in the suburbs, they abandoned and segregated poor and racialized populations in the city. The fantasy of suburban good living imagined the city as the locus of what we might call the ‘bad life,’ a place of

‘unhappy’ objects, practices, and populations. The geographic segregation of domestic goodlife fantasies in the suburbs gave spatial expression to national desires and attachments.

One of disco’s interventions into spatial meanings was its attachment to an alternative set of objects and domestic practices to those reified by suburban life. The props and practices that sustained the disco experience included sound systems, music, dancing, getting dressed up, going out on the town, stranger-sociability, intimate bodily sociality, reused urban industrial and cultural spaces, drugs, public sex, sweat, the night, bodily exhaustion, acts of interior designing and event planning, and cheap decorations

130 like balloons, strobe, glitter, and disco balls. Rather than being promises of a deferred fantasy of happiness (as were suburban objects and practices of mass consumption, familial reproduction, and private home ownership), disco’s sustaining props performatively delivered what they promised: a fun night out, energetic release, hospitality, sociability, and interesting cultural expression.

While it may seem counterintuitive to understand disco in terms of domesticity, much of disco’s politics actually lies in its domesticating practices which uncoupled domesticity and sexuality from the injunction of biological reproduction. In this regard, acts of interior designing, hosting, and sheltering helped to establish disco as a place of alternative domesticity.

Sound design was the most important, as well as a more masculinized, interior

75 design labour of disco. The history of disco is filled with stories of loft and club owners and DJs and aficionados trying to get the acoustic designs of their spaces, and the sound of their mixes ‘just right.’ David Mancuso was famously obsessive about his sound system, innovating numerous sound system designs throughout his career. Tom Moulton

(former model, music aficionado, and accidental inventor of the 12-inch single) devoted over eighty painstaking hours to creating a 45-minute mixtape which invented the disco break (which I will explain in detail below) that forever changed the history of the disco sound.

But even beyond sound design, the disco aesthetic was very much about decoration. In Mancuso’s selection of decor for the Loft, he memorably sought to recreate

75 On the underrepresentation of women in sound design, see O Keefe (2017) and Lanzendorfer (2017).

131 the aesthetics and feel of a kid’s birthday party, covering the ceiling of his loft with colourful balloons and streamers, and laying out a free buffet of snacks and drinks. He imported this aesthetic from Sister Alicia, a beloved nun who loved to throw parties at the orphanage where Mancuso grew up. Things like lighting also played a key role in disco culture. As Henrik Vejlgaard relates, the strobe light and disco ball were introduced to disco culture in the summer of 1970 at the Ice Palace of Fire Island when a man “took some old stereo systems, light bulbs, and Christmas lights and invented lighting that pulsed with the music” (93).

The prevalence of theme parties rendered the disco scene a phenomenon of constant re-decoration and world-remaking. One of disco’s most important and famous

DJs, Francis Grasso, attempted to ‘break’ Café Francis, a new club created for him, but the place, Francis relates, “was so depressing I couldn’t even play there” (qtd. in Love

Saves the Day 60). “For the first time in the short history of the discothèque,” Tim

Lawrence writes, “it had become clear that no DJ, however skilled, could overcome a badly designed space” (60). The link between interior design and disco was so strong that the former eventually became identifiable with the latter. In 1979, Andy Warhol, a regular frequenter of Studio 54 and a fixture of the disco scene referred to his “Shadows,” a room-sized installation piece made up of 102 silk-screen panels as “disco decor” (The

Menil Collection).

These stories about disco’s interiors indicate that the design of disco spaces was more than incidental to the scene—it was a driver of it. While in later disco spaces, decor shifted to prioritizing spectacle, in early disco, it was about creating whimsical and

132 inviting atmospheres. The humble balloons that filled The Loft were not much to look at on their own. In combination with the musical and culinary offerings of the Loft, they created a playful, inviting space that addressed guests with an aesthetic that would be familiar and familial across class, racial, gender, and sexual divides. As Mancuso said,

“Everybody loves balloons and they don’t cost a million dollars” (Love Saves the Day

24). And as Lawrence writes, “The decor [of the Loft] created a reassuringly familiar setting, drawing guests into the therapeutic and nostalgic domain of their childhood and the set-piece birthday party” (24-5).

The scene’s regular hosting of things like Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners also performed such a therapeutic function. These events made space for alternative family formations and domestic practices of cooking and hosting, resituating these formations and practices outside of the single-family home and thus broadening their address. Indeed, disco created spaces for people who had either been ‘orphaned’ by their biological families, or who simply desired to expand their familial relations beyond biological ties. Mancuso had actually grown up in an orphanage in Utica, New York, a fact which colours an appreciation of the kind of open, familial hospitality enacted in the

Loft. More than just performing a spectacular function, disco decor worked in combination with other elements like free buffets to create an atmosphere of hospitality

76 and enchantment.

76 C onsider the decor of Tamburlaine, a Chinese restaurant located at 148 East Forty-eight street in Midtown East that, beginning in 1970, morphed into a disco nightclub after ten o’clock. Tamburlaine created a beloved atmosphere through its quirky decor. As DJ Steve D’Acquisto, the main DJ there relates, “it was a fabulous space [...] The decor was mock Oriental. There was a bridge, a pool, and these two trees. At ten o’clock, they would serve this wonderful buffet of free Chinese food” (qtd. in Lawrence 60).

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Literature and architecture scholar Jessica Blaustein writes about the coincidence of the single-family home and notions of private personhood in the United States that

“substantially limited so-called ‘proper’ affective and sexual life to the insides of house-bound nuclear familial units, while it forcefully kept other kinds of connections and identifications out ” (40). In contrast with the happy (in Ahmed’s sense) private domesticity of the suburbs, disco shifted its aspirations towards another kind of more open domesticity that involved the sensual, communal pleasures of working it out on the dancefloor, which sometimes involved public sex, but also involved queered and

77 nostalgic scenes of familial life. Disco staged dramas of what we might call, ‘unhappy domesticity,’ or a mode of domesticity not guided by the promises of traditional happy objects. The fact that the scene did so by creating the conditions for its participants to have such a fun time snubbed a normative happiness model, from which many of disco’s participants had been excluded.

Unlike suburbanization, which compartmentalized domesticity in the suburbs, with breadwinners (overwhelmingly, husbands) commuting into the city for work, disco invited the city into its spaces of domesticity. Philosopher Hannah Arendt draws on the ancient Greek concepts of the polis (city) and the oikos (household) to distinguish the public realm of politics and the private realm of the home where one attends to the biological necessities of human existence (eating, sleeping, reproducing, etc.). Her distinction between the public/political and the private/biological has come under criticism for the gender implications of this division, but has also served as a useful

77 D isco’s association with public gay sex in disco spaces presented an alternative example of sexual culture to what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner write of as the “more tacit scenes of sexuality” foundational to a dominant reproductive national imaginary (547).

134 structure for scholars interested in the normative and resistant uses of domestic and urban spaces. Arendt’s distinction between the feminized home and the masculinized city discloses the gendering and segregation of different kinds of placemaking practices.

Cooking, cleaning, decorating, nurturing, and homemaking generally, became the placemaking practices most available to women, while designing, building, constructing, and planning belonged to men (a fact exemplified by my previous chapter and the all-male composition of the Mexico ’68 design team with the exception of Beatrice

Trueblood). Additionally, the places women and men respectively created through their labours determined the nature and extent of the labourers’ participation in the social and the political spheres. Though I do not share with Arendt the belief that the city is the privileged zone of the political, her views portray how the city has been construed as the site of the political within a dominant imaginary in which she participates.

Disco queered gender norms as men adopted placemaking practices traditionally associated with women, and as they urbanized domestic practices through forms of urban hospitality—that is, through acts of welcoming and caring for outsiders in a such a way that they might become familiar with the space into which they have been invited.

Disco’s invitation-only parties created a politics of hospitality rooted in both welcoming and exclusion. Indeed, part of the redressive function of invitation-only parties was the act of exclusively inviting a population that had been left out of the invitation of the suburbs and other urban ‘good life’ spaces, who had been excluded from a broad national hospitality. Being ‘on the list’ or being ‘in the know’ in the disco scene served as non-normative pathways of social mobility that were not necessarily upward-bound. For

135 discoers, the hospitality of disco provided a relief from the inhospitable, even hostile environments of daily life and created the conditions for new place attachments.

Hospitality is an act of welcoming that involves a crossing of thresholds by which a guest enters into the normally private or bounded space of a host, and the host extends herself and her space for the guest. In acts of hospitality, hosts expose themselves and their space to the penetration of outsiders into a realm of intimacy with no guarantee of a known outcome. In accepting hospitality, guests, in their own right, expose themselves to a relation of relative dependency (they are not the ‘master’ of the space into which they have been invited) and possible indebtedness. Hospitality as such implies a relation of mutual vulnerability, and its sine qua non, risk, for both host and guest. Both risk losing face in their exposure to the possibility of being a bad host or guest, and neither can count on a pre-known outcome of the relation into which each has entered.

In their introduction to Shakespear e and Hospitality, Julia Reinhard Lupton and

David Goldstein argue that “hospitality cultivates the threshold between the oikos or threshold and the polis or city, bidding a provisional politics to pitch its tent upon scenes of sojourning, supplication, and bodily care” (6). This cultivation of the threshold between the oikos (the home) and the polis (the city) makes hospitality a liminal and open-ended phenomenon, a zone of potentiality, or what Hannah Arendt calls “natality,”

78 or the capacity to create something new and unexpected (177). In straddling the dynamic threshold between the private and the public, intimate domesticity and public urbanity, disco created a space in which the feelings of home, belonging, family, and

78 L ike the African American tradition of the rent party, which opened the doors of private homes to host parties with a cover charge so that renters could pay rent, thereby sustaining the conditions of possibility of the o ikos, the disco parties like the Loft opened the o ikos to the wider p olis.

136 social responsibility on which the city depends could be renegotiated and created anew.

The liminal quality of disco was intensified by the fact that discos came alive at night.

The unusual hours of disco’s domestic rituals, which started after dark and ended in the morning, enacted a separation from the sleepy domesticity of the city’s so-called bedroom communities. To the bedrooms of the suburbs, disco retorted back with the dancefloor. Dancing the night away in 1970s-New York increasingly became a popular alternative to sleeping it away. The thrill of staying up past the bedtime of the normative daytime city was part of disco’s meaning as a transitional space.

Disco’s interiors did not offer some kind of total escape from the racist, sexist, and classist structures that shaped daily life in New York City. Indeed, especially as the decade went on and clubs became more image-focused, certain discos were denounced for using racist and sexist door policies to keep out women and black people, while other

79 discos charged prohibitive membership fees to create class exclusivity. Disco’s liminal spaces can thus not be understood in terms of the radical egalitarianism Turner tends to associate with liminality, and yet they remained significant as spaces of shelter.

Susan Fraiman’s notion of the ‘shelter’ offers an illuminating model for understanding the placemaking labours of design and decoration performed in disco. In

“Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye,” Fraiman takes up the topic of the activity of housekeeping in literature, where housekeeping and the

79 In December 1981, the National Association of Black and White Men Together (NABWMT/NY), created in 1980 to fight for racial equality within the LGBT community, wrote a letter to the lesbian and gay organizations of New York City informing them that they were launching a discrimination documentation project to monitor racial discrimination in bars and business in New York’s LGBT community. The letter documents racial discrimination in clubs like Circles on E. 54th street and Ice Palace, on Fire Island, and urging members of the lesbian and gay community to join them in a picket line in front of the Ice Palace. Other gay clubs were known to discriminate against women.

137 organization of interior spaces—rather than being associated with consumerism, propriety, and bourgeois subjectivity—serve as a healing and constructive activity for protagonists who are social outcasts or castaways. Fraiman’s piece offers a “poetics of housework” that views the “step-by-step creation, restoration, or transformation of one’s living space” as important scenes of self-discovery and the construction of interiority (33;

30). By privileging the “strongly gendered, frankly physical responsibilities of housekeeping,” Fraiman sketches out what she calls a “feminist poetics of interiors” (35).

Fraiman insists on the possibility that houses and shelters might stage, “not a complacent sense of class pride and entitlement, so much as gratitude, relief, pride in ingenuity, and other feelings born of a sense of physical and social precariousness” (37). While acknowledging that “the attraction to order and ornament” may “shade into a less defensible desire for goods, respectability, and status,” in the novels she selects,

“descriptions of towels and tea sets are frequently just pages away from homelessness, social unrest, personal and political violence” (37). It is in the spirit of Fraiman’s work on what she calls ‘shelter writing’ that I read disco’s interior spaces.

Despite their extraordinariness, disco’s interiors share with Fraiman’s everyday shelters an investment in a certain order and ornament, and in the protective nature of interior spaces as responses to insecurity. Also like the shelters described by Fraiman, disco’s interiors were just a stone’s throw away “from homelessness, social unrest, personal and political violence.” The interiorizing activities of disco, which created homely and familial refuges, are related to the solace and comfort provided from ‘coming in from the cold.’ This recurrent creation of spaces of shelter in disco within a city that

138 was hostile for many is illustrated by the name of the Sanctuary. The club indeed served

80 as a sanctuary for gay men in a largely homophobic city.

At the same time that “[p]opular magazines schooled suburban women in the ways of scientific housekeeping, pushing products and the latest techniques for cleaning, entertaining, and child rearing,” disco’s interior spaces moved away from the ordering routines that stabilized sites of domesticity (Nicolaides and Wiese). Instead, its domestic environments embraced the disorganizing energies of all-night dancing. Here, aspirations of class mobility were replaced with bodily mobility; the dream of ‘movin on up’ was, at least momentarily, replaced with simply, moving. Through related acts of interior designing, hosting, and sheltering, disco created spaces of alternative domesticity that shirked traditional goodlife models and created spaces of pleasure and care for some of the nation’s most disavowed populations. In the following section I consider the powerful affective appeals of disco’s environments, which strongly differentiated them from everyday and normative domestic spaces.

80 T his includes the homophobia that governed urban legislation regarding male-on-male dancing and gay sex in New York leading up to and throughout much of the 1970s.

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Image 12. The buffet of free snacks and drinks at JOY, the new iteration of the Loft, started by one of the original Loft participants/DJs and close friend of David Mancuso, Douglas Sherman. Joy, an invitation-only dance party in a loft in Bushwick, is modelled after the Loft in its ethos and atmosphere. Photograph by Sunita Nigam

Image 13. On the dancefloor at JOY. Photograph by Sunita Nigam

2) Affecting

Throughout New York in the 1970s dancers reached trance-like states in darkened discos, their heat and sweat creating “almost tropical” atmospheres as lights and bodies

140 pulsated to the beat of the music (Lawrence, “In Defence of Disco (Again)” 129). Crimp offers a description of the experience of dancing until about 5:30 in the morning at the disco in his fragment:

At that point the music is always good, there’s plenty of room on the dance floor,

and only the serious discoers are left. But best of all your body has quit resisting.

It has unstoppable momentum. That is the one thing about disco comparable to

any other experience. It’s like what happens in distance running or swimming.

You pass a point where you’re beyond tired, beyond pain, beyond even thinking

about stopping, thinking only that this could go on forever and you’d love it. It’s

pure ecstasy. Nothing matters but disco, and nothing—not sex, not food, not

sleep, nothing—is better. (3)

Crimp’s description is one example of ubiquitous accounts of the disco experience as opening up of a space of physical and emotional surrender. Importantly, the disco experience was site-specific. Disco music could only be fully experienced as disco music within the space of the discothèque, with its enveloping sound systems, its lighting and feeling, the moving bodies of other dancers, and most importantly, the live craft of the

DJ. Together, these elements created irreproducible immersive atmospheres, which have, throughout disco’s history, been described as “oceanic,” or “womb-like” ( Love Saves the

Day 25).

While the womb-like or oceanic feelings of oneness that recur so often in popular accounts of the disco experience may sound mystical to some, these descriptors can be understood as indexes of an intense experience of affective transmission that occurred

141 between bodies and environments in disco. In her writing on the role of affect in the construction of nation, Erin Hurley writes that “Affects are ways of paying attention to the world, relational modes by which subject and object are put into contact, a means of letting the world impress itself upon you and of putting yourself in the world” (147).

“Aligned with sensation and feeling,” affect registers—immediately, and at the skin-level

(for example through goosebumps or physical arousal)—the intensity of response to a stimulus even before our emotions about this stimulus and our affective response to it register cognitively (147). As the world impresses upon us in moments of intense affect, it literally gets under our skin before it passes into our cognition to animate out internal worlds. In this way, affect can be described as a corporeal internalization of the

81 environment and as an environmental externalization of the body. A city ‘on the edge,’

New York in the 1970s left many of those who dwelled within its limits ‘on edge’—that is, exhilarated, awake, excited, nervous, scared. The city’s deteriorating, stressful, and often dangerous landscapes had the potential to get under the skin.

Disco created spaces for taking the edge off. Between its creation of spaces for relatively inclusive sociality, for exhausting all-night dancing, for drug use, and public sex, disco’s interior spaces facilitated experiences of bodily and affective release. The catharsis afforded by disco dancing made space for a shared appreciation of a common context of urban struggle and created a sense of urban belonging through struggle and through dance. Disco dancing can be understood as an embodied response to what Paul

Gilroy calls “lived crisis,” or systemic crisis as it is phenomenologically experienced by

81 See Teresa Brennan on the affect as something that can be transmitted to us by our physical and social surroundings in her book T he Transmission of Affect (2004).

142 bodies (The Black Atlantic 40). While, to be sure, lived crisis needs to be redressed through systemic change, it also demands bodily responses for healing and transformation. Disco created spaces for such transformation through its affective appeals.

One way in which the disco made place through affect was via its musical coordinates, or the way it oriented listeners and dancers in an aural-tactile environment.

Popular music scholars have turned their attention to the role music plays in creating

82 place. Paul Roquet, writing about Brian Eno’s ambient music, interests himself in how

“sounds can negotiate a ‘sense of place’ with the environment around them—responding directly to new habitation patterns in cities around the globe” (364). Writing about recorded music, Roquet and Tia DeNora have argued:

recorded music provides a set of coordinates in real time that can serve as a map

for how listeners might move and feel, how a subject might “fit in” to an

environment. Music establishes patterns of tension and resolution, timbre,

harmony, melody and rhythm, all of which can serve as an “entrainment device”

allowing the body to latch onto the aural-tactile environment around it, both

consciously and unconsciously. In this way, music acts as an interface between

subject and landscape, establishing resonances between them in particular ways.

(Roquet 366)

82 See, for example: John Connell’s and Chris Gibson’s Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity, and Place (2003); Brett Lashua’s, Karl Spracklen’s, and Stephen Wagg’s S ounds and the City: Popular Music, Place and Globalization (2014); and Kirstie Dorr’s O n Site, In Sound: Performance Geographies in América Latina ( 2013).

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Taking music as an interface between listener and environment, and building on music’s capacity for allowing the body to latch onto its material surroundings, and for “the entrainment of moods,” gives us a framework for understanding the relationship between disco, affect, and place (Roquet 367). The site-specificity of the disco experience, or the association of disco as a musical genre with discotheques, sound systems that surrounded dancers, and collective listening and dancing, made disco music a highly place-based, affective phenomenon.

Through the material qualities of immersive music and the kinesthetic experience of dancing in a room full of freely dancing bodies, disco created a relational mode in which dancers and environment could come into contact in a way that was different from the modes made available for this relation in everyday spaces. As disco evolved into a distinct genre, disco music’s distinct sound became a crucial part of this experience. In his article on disco, “In the Empire of the Beat,” Walter Hughes writes of the music of the discotheque as music which, like other aspects of gay culture including bodybuilding, fashion, S&M, and safe sex, creates pleasure and a form of freedom through its disciplinary discourse. “The oft-noted vacuity of the lyrics,” Hughes argues was “itself part of the medium’s message” (149). Without narrative teleology, a clear sense of authorial origin, and rarely any other “identifiable progression, direction, or climax in disco music” all aspects of the music have been submitted to the beat (149). If the beat entrained dancers into the disciplining force of the music, the disco break in which most musical elements were stripped away to eventually be built back up again opened up a clearing in which dancers could really let loose.

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While it is true that disco’s lyrics were generally without narrative teleology or a strong sense of authorship, when disco is understood as site-specific music, it makes little sense to consider any single song on its own. Each song functioned like a single instrument in the DJ’s irreproducible durational composition. This composition took dancers on musical journeys that included progressions, arcs, and delayed and extended climaxes. Some of disco’s best DJs (who worked nonstop and solo from 10pm to anywhere from 6 to 11am) could ‘peak’ the room (keep the dancefloor filled and

83 ‘climaxing’) for hours on end. An “insistently rhythmic” music, disco was a bodily

84 rather than intellectual experience (Dyer 104). While Dyer has argued that disco was about “whole body eroticism,” Hughes compares disco’s “seemingly endless cycles and plateaus” to the female orgasm, to jouissance. Disco music is what Linda Williams has called, in her writing on film genres that affect the viewer’s body, a “body genre” (3). It made powerful affective appeals to the body.

Rhythm was perhaps the predominant way in which disco carried out its affective appeals, the way in which it made people ‘feel the beat.’ This idea of ‘feeling’ the beat so

83 D escribing the DJs role in creating an experience for discoers, former New York DJ John Ceglia recounts, “If you had a good plan, and depending on how big your crown was, you could literally peak the room from four to six, or eight, not ever really losing dancers off the floor, but taking them to different levels of excitement and energy.” 84 A s Dyer writes, “r hythm, in Western music, is traditionally felt as being more physical than other musical elements such as melody, harmony, and instrumentation” (104).

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85 prevalent in disco narratives suggests that sound itself might be considered an affect.

Sound studies scholar Michael Gallagher writes:

In acoustics, sound is understood as mechanical waves moving matter—a process

of bodies being moved, changed, affected. There is no sound that does not affect

bodies of some kind. Equally, bodies also affect sound. Their material

characteristics modulate its amplitude, frequency spectrum, timing and so on,

which in turn alters its capacities to affect other bodies. (43)

The relation between sound, affect, body, and environment explains why disco was such an important placemaking phenomenon. Its intense sonic environments have the power to transform the affective experience of place. Disco created affectively dense, or, to use

Ahmed’s term, sticky, places in its ability to stick bodies and objects together through affect. Disco’s oft-noted ‘catchiness’ as a musical genre also extended disco’s ‘stickiness’ beyond the site-specificity of disco.8 6

The disco break is particularly interesting for an appreciation of how disco music created a unique aural-tactile environment. The aesthetics of the disco break can be understood as a sudden or gradual loss of almost all musical coordinates except for the grounding disco beat, followed by a slow regaining of musical bearings. By establishing patterns with the disco break in which musical elements would be stripped down to

85 T his is the argument sound studies scholar Michael Gallagher makes in “Sound as Affect” (2016), where he argues that, as “an oscillating difference, an intensity that moves bodies, a vibration physically pushing and pulling their material fabric,” “sound itself is also a kind of affect” (43). Here, Gallagher belongs to a strain in affect theory that draws on the work of Baruch Spinoza and G illes Deleuze and Félix Guattari via Brian Massumi, “which defines affect as any process in which bodies affect, or are affected by, other bodies” and which “involves any kind of body impinging on another body in some way that augments or diminishes the affected body's capacities to act” (43). 86 T his extension transformed the experience of the music through any number of recontextualizations, for example, in disco dance classes, in car or home radios, in boomboxes used outside, in film, in suburban at-home “disco” parties thrown with rent-a-DJs, an so on.

146 percussion only to be built back up, disco tapped into the pleasure of loss and return, deconstruction and reconstruction. With the break, disco enacted a musical aesthetic of destruction and renewal that mirrored the structure of ritual, but which I also argue channelled the deconstructed state of the city, here in an optimistic, active mode. Disco music enacted small dramas of loss followed by the slow rebuilding of musical plenitude, thereby opening up an interstructural, or liminal, space for dancing. This loss was never too devastating because of the dependable security of the disco beat, and because this loss also created a clearing in which the dancing body could move most freely. The plenitude that was eventually rebuilt might be experienced as both reassuring, and restricting in its returning of specific musical orientations.

The disco break might be understood as a metaphor for New York in the 1970s, which had become a place of deconstruction, loss, and disorientation as well as a loose space that enabled flexible practices. The disco break’s formal introduction of the rebuilding that might follow loss rehearsed an optimistic response to crisis that seemed to reflect the disco scene response to New York’s urban crisis as a whole. As a genre, disco was formally, and often, thematically invested in loss, but found a way of transforming

87 loss into renewal or, as in Gloria Gaynor’s hit 1978 song “I Will Survive,” survival.

Whereas Eno has said that ambient music was intended to “induce a calm space to think,” disco music was intended to create an intense place to feel (Liner Notes, “On Land”1).

While the urban crisis had the effect of disempowering urban users in the loss of social

87 I n this sense, disco can be contrasted with the destructive and ironic aesthetics of punk. In his book I s Toronto Burning? (2016), Philip Monk makes the compelling claim, in his reading of the 1970s punk scene in Toronto (a city which was experiencing a crisis that mirrored that of New York) that punk’s aesthetic of demolition mirrored the widespread destruction of the building around it.

147 and urban infrastructure, disco spaces—themselves a ‘break’ from conditions of ordinary crisis—created a place in which people could actively create and feel musical dramas of transition and affective reconstruction.

The lyrics of disco songs also participated in producing disco’s intense affective spaces. While skimpy on story, disco’s lyrics were full with feeling. They washed over dancers with optimistic narratives and alternately silky and belting vocals, often those of the powerful disco diva. Combined with disco’s upbeat tempo, a quality generally linked with happy-sounding music, disco was a largely happy genre. Discos can be understood as the spaces of wasteful play and fête that Henri Lefebvre insisted were important for preserving a space in which people could feel themselves, momentarily, outside of their role as workers (147). As Lefebvre writes:

The human being has the need to accumulate energies and to spend them, even

waste them in play [...] Through these specified needs lives and survives a

fundamental desire of which play, sexuality, physical activities such as sport,

creative activity, art and knowledge are particular expressions and moments,

which can more or less overcome the fragmentary division of tasks. (147)

The possibility of working one’s body out on the dancefloor beyond the point of exhaustion—of dancing like there’s no tomorrow—offered a kind of ludic wastefulness not available to people in their workaday lives. In disco, working was replaced with

‘working it out.’ In creating affectively charged spaces for play, disco’s liminal interiors performed a redressive function vis-à-vis a crisis of care in New York in the 1970s. For participants in the scene, disco momentarily transformed the urban experience from one

148 of crisis, loss, and capitalist instrumentalization into forms of pleasurable loss and return, affective immersion, and self-exhausting dancerly labour. In this way, disco created places for active, ritualistic urban participation in New York in the 1970s. The urban movements carried out by partiers on their weekly escapades to discos cut grooves into the city as a practiced place, normalizing new urban itineraries and creating new spatial attachments, memories, and meanings. The generally centripetal movement of the disco scene towards downtown contrasted with the centrifugal motions of suburbanization and deindustrialization.

Historicizing Disco’s Spatial Orientations

How do we situate disco’s ritual mechanisms of domesticating and affecting within a broader historical context of political action? Disco’s introverted spatial politics embodied a reorientation of some of the extroverted social movements of the sixties, which occupied public spaces as part of their political praxis. Emerging on the heels of the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, anti-war and anti-capitalist protests, the hippie movement, workers’ movements, the student movements of 1968, and Stonewall, disco’s politics took a different form from the political movements of the sixties. These mobilized a politics of visibility and deployed what Baz Kershaw calls “protest dramaturgies” (“Fighting in the Streets” 257). Protest dramaturgies activate the street and other public spaces as stages for performing acts of resistance and making political

88 demands. While the sixties (especially but not only in North America and in Europe)

88 T hrough this period, sit-ins, in which African Americans occupied segregated public spaces like lunch counters and campuses constituted an important form of protest for the civil rights movement. Sit-ins were

149 were defined by protest dramaturgies of procession and occupation, “the central focus of protest dramaturgy shifted in the early 1970s away from the modernist notion of an attack on a known enemy in the name of revolutionary progress towards a more improvisatory and hyper-real style of scenario” ( The Radical in Performance 105). “Although protest, of course, was still directed against authority,” Kershaw maintains that “increasingly it aimed to produce for both participants and spectators an image or an experience that gave a glimpse of the future as pure freedom from the constraints of the real, a hint of Utopia at the very moment in which it engaged the messy business of street marches and peace camps” (105-6).

As a ritual space of social deconstruction and reconstruction, disco was aligned with the utopian ‘as if’ described by Kershaw. Less invested in articulating a clear, future-oriented politics, disco’s politics resided in the placemaking powers of its rituals.

Rather than imagining a better potential city, disco created real places that could be physically inhabited. These spaces offered different affective, cultural, and social experiences of the city, which gave a hint, if not exactly of what a better city might look like, then at least of what a better kind of city might feel like. The extraordinary spaces opened up by disco can be described in terms of Jill Dolan’s concept of the utopian performative, which contrasts with a future-oriented or teleological utopian model.

Utopian performatives are those fleeting moments in performance in which one grasps,

89 what a better world might feel like. This idea of the utopian performative is, I think,

also adopted by the feminist movement in the late 1960s. Marching was a nother protest tactic broadly employed throughout the 1960s. 89 W hile this affective utopian experience is valuable in itself, I defer to Dyer, here: If this sounds over the top, let one thing be clear – disco can’t change the world or make the revolution. No art can do that, and it is pointless to expect it to. But partly by opening up

150 especially productive for considering the importance of affect in interpretations of the ritual liminality of performance. If liminal spaces/phases find themselves between a past social structure and a still unknown future social structure, the representation of utopian structures fails within liminality. As spaces of the structurally unknown, undecidable, and processual futures, the most important political value of liminality may be less in its ability to represent future utopian structures than in its ability to offer shocks of lived feeling. In the context of urban production, ritual experiences have the potential to transform present, and potentially future, experiences of place by activating such shocks in which the environment can be differently felt, in which an affective otherwise can momentarily be grasped at and embodied. These momentary embodiments might also not be so momentary. Sensing urban otherwises can leave lasting traces in the body and mind. As Diana Taylor argues, the engagement of political and social otherwises, what

Taylor calls “as ifs,” “create[s] a desire and demand for change; they leave traces that reanimate future scenarios” (“The Politics of Passion”).

Re-entry?

If disco’s practices of domestication and affecting structured the liminal space of the disco, what followed this phase of disco’s ritual process? The cool-down and aftermath are rites belonging to the incorporation or re-entry phase of the ritual process.

In the cool-down phase of performance, performers “eat, drink, talk, and celebrate” as a way of either restoring themselves from the performance, which has emptied them out, or

experience, partly by changing definitions, art and disco can be used. To which one might risk adding the refrain, if it feels good, use it. (108)

151 instead, of burning off the surplus of energy created by the performance (Schechner,

Between Theatre and Anthropology 19). The cool-down or come-down process was integral to the disco experience. As Jonathan Bollen asserts, “the dilemmas of getting home are never far from the pleasures of the dancefloor” (286). Rather than being hermetically sealed off from the everyday, disco’s interiors motivated sometimes exhausting journeys throughout the city, to and from the disco. Disco was as much about re-entry into everyday life as it was about separating from it. At the end of a night out, disco-goers flowed out of the club, into the city, performing their post-party process.

Writing about this ‘come down’ process, Bollen writes: “it may be eased by the delights of good company, the odd vodka and lime, and the promise of sex, or it may be deferred by a quick shower, a fresh change of clothes, and then out for more partying, but there is something inevitably resolute about getting home—in the end” (286).

The aftermath of the performance process consists of the longer-term consequences of a performance, which “includes the changes in status or being” resulting from a performance, the fallout of a performance (reviews, social reactions, theorizing)

(Schechner 19). Here, the political effects of disco become less clear. What is clear is that disco did transform New York City into a different kind of physical and imagined place beyond participation in the scene. And yet, in response to the question of whether disco’s ritual process culminated in social reintegration and transformation, a reincorporation that did not alter the normative social (as a failed ritual), or in social schism, the answer would have to be: all three. The culmination of disco’s ritual process can be understood in terms of scapegoating, urban development, and affective transformation.

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1) Scapegoating

By the late 1970s the music market experienced an inundation of a lot of mediocre, monotonous, and heavily synthesized disco music. Disco’s biggest critics—many of them rock ‘n’ roll fans—denigrated it for being artificial, repetitive, effeminate, mass-produced, and just plain bad. While disco music continued to be played in New York City clubs through the 1980s and beyond, disco’s mainstream moment came to a climactic end on July 12 th, 1979 when, at the encouragement of an anti-disco rock radio DJ Steve Dahl over 50,000 people flocked to Comiskey Park in Chicago to explode over 40,000 disco records. More than just about a glut of mediocre music, the disco backlash was the outcome of the frustrations of a predominantly white, straight, male public, in the context of a deep economic recession and in the wake of the civil rights and gay and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Within this context, disco served as an easy scapegoat for the mounting social frustrations of this population

(See Lawrence, “Disco” 184). Notably, the scapegoating of disco mirrored the scapegoating of New York in the 1970s. Both were associated with racialized, queer, or otherwise non-normative populations and were disavowed because of these associations.

While the Comiskey Park explosion is said to have announced the ‘death of disco,’ it, in fact, marked the moment after which record companies rebranded disco as

‘dance music’ in a move designed to weaken its association with populations disavowed by certain listeners. The whitening and straightening of disco had already begun as disco moved into the mainstream in the late 1970s, a process most memorably embodied by

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Saturday Night Fever. The continued prevalence of dance music today, which is based on the essential structure of disco, signals the lasting cultural incorporation of disco into popular music.

As a nightlife scene, disco was ravaged by the spread of the AIDS virus in the

1980s, which intensified the mainstream stigmatization of disco music and culture, and tragically literalized the popular notion of disco as ‘catchy.’ As Lawrence notes, “So rampant was AIDS within [New York’s] gay clubbing population that the virus was initially dubbed ‘Saint’s disease,’ after the Saint, the biggest and most renowned white gay venue of the 1980s, where dancers were disappearing in disproportionate numbers

(Lawrence, “In Defence of Disco (Again)” 136). The revanchist scapegoating of disco was a redressive mechanism used to respond to a crisis of social orientation and power amongst the white, straight, male, and middle-class populations following the social shifts of the 1960s and 1970s. As former privileges were no longer so automatically guaranteed to these populations, and as disenfranchised populations were perceived to be encroaching into their privileged domain, fear and resentment manifested itself in all sorts of aggressive responses. The disco backlash was one of these.

The disco backlash sought to put marginalized populations back in their perceived

‘place.’ Disco as a site-specific experience driven toward sensual pleasure and connection

(it worked to connect bodies to other bodies and to the environment through its affective and placemaking operations) that was also created by disenfranchised populations was very much about these populations appropriating and taking up space in terms dictated by themselves. In this sense, disco was a potent symbol and expression of the sociopolitical

154 change that left a certain segment of the population feeling threatened. To be sure, disco’s catchy appeals to bodies also functioned as a kind of encroachment into sensual territory in ways that might not always have been desirable by all. Disco was not only symbolically threatening to a population feeling disoriented by the changes it represented; it was also sensually threatening in its ability to get under the skin.

2) Urban Development

Regarding disco’s physical transformations of New York’s urban fabric, the scene re-animated sites, predominantly in Manhattan, that had been abandoned in the processes of suburbanization and deindustrialization. Disco quite literally embodied the shift from

New York’s industrial economy to a cultural and service economy in the dance-club industry; the self-exhausting labours of dancing bodies were ghosted by the industrially productive bodies of factory workers. While early disco dancing functioned as the kind of wasteful play championed by Lefebvre, which seemed counter to a logic of capital accumulation, as the decade wore on, dancing also functioned as a mode of economic and urban development as it gentrified neighbourhoods and generated income within an emergent service sector.

And yet, New York’s disco scene was ambivalently aligned with the official urban development strategies adopted by the state and by big business in the 1980s.

Sharon Zukin and David Harvey have argued that New York’s cultural workers colluded with the gentrification of Manhattan, and especially of SoHo in the 1980s. However, Tim

Lawrence has refuted this idea, showing that if disco culture was ravaged by the AIDS

155 epidemic in the 1980s, an even more important factor in the disco scene’s erosion (though not disappearance) in the late 1980s was its gentrification by big business, specifically property developers and boutique merchants, which represented a broader urban shift towards a neoliberal agenda (2011). As Lawrence explains, “The shift to a neoliberal agenda can be traced back to the moment when the banking sector began to exert an explicit grip on New York in the mid-1970s” as a response to the city’s fiscal crisis—the state’s own mechanism for addressing the imminent crisis of New York’s bankruptcy

(“Big Business, Real Estate Determinism, and Dance Culture in New York, 1980-88”

291). The city’s neoliberal agenda put the generation of “a good business climate” before

“the needs and well-being of the population at large” (291). New York’s shift towards this economic ethos established the neoliberal principles that have been applied wholesale by nations and international monetary institutions since the 1980s. The disco scene, while it initially played a role in re-animating and redeveloping abandoned urban sites through music and dance, was ultimately a casualty of this neoliberal urban shift. Because the shift did little to resolve the breach of state responsibility for the city’s most vulnerable populations, and because it reinvigorated a normative social order, disco’s redressive mechanisms can be said to have failed to heal New York’s systemic crisis, even as it addressed the experience of the lived crisis at the level of the body and feeling.

3) Affective Transformation

If we measure the success of disco’s redressive rituals by whether or not they, in the end, dismantled New York’s capitalist structure of uneven social and economic

156 development, they failed. But a performative analysis can helpfully supplement a cultural materialist one by enabling us to grasp the power of urban performativity for resistance and transformation, even if this transformation is ephemeral or incomplete.9 0

In his reading of the joyful feeling of oceanic oneness created in disco as described by Lawrence in Love Saves the Day alongside Freud’s description of an oceanic feeling of oneness in, Civilization and its Discontents, Tavia Nyong’o makes a magnificent observation: “The oceanic feeling forms an unlikely bridge between the concerns of Love Saves the Day and Civilization and Its Discontents. Indeed, the former title seems almost to answer the latter: in a discontented civilization, love (the oceanic feeling) will save the day” (105). This sense of “love” (which here stands in for connectedness, care, oneness, comfort, physical and emotional release) as a compensatory, indeed, a salvational answer to “the day” (here, the every day) was built into the name of the very first disco party, Love Saves the Day. While disco’s temporarily salvational interiors could not compensate for the lack of durable infrastructures of state care, nor could it save the city from shifting towards a socially damaging neoliberal agenda, it provided a politically meaningful space in which the different and better feelings deriving from the body-environment relation could be experienced for some of the nation’s most delegitimized populations. Disco proposed modes of experiencing place not guided by the promises of traditional happy objects. As if in a response to the national judgement of New York as an excessive space—too queer, too wasteful, too dangerous,

90 In T heatre & the City, Jen Harvie calls for a hybridization of cultural materialist analysis and performative analysis in approaches to interpreting the politics of the theatre as a way of redistributing “some of cultural materialism’s caution and performativity’s hope,” thereby creating an analytical strategy capacious enough to understand “the complex cultural effects of contemporary urban life” and “the sense of profound ambivalence it creates” (70; 69; 70).

157 too noisy, too dirty, too black, too brown—disco turned all that excess into powerful nighttime experiences that New York City residents sought out again and again. If this was not ‘the good life,’ for those who found a place within the scene, it was an experience of something better than their everyday lives, an experience of a cared for and often caring environment. The diverse culminations of disco’s ritual process, some of which involved affective and transformation, and some of which led to social schism and a deepening of structural urban inequality, suggests that phenomena as multifaceted as urban scenes involve a range of sometimes conflicting processes and aspirations.

Conclusion

The shift I am articulating between this chapter and the last, from the representational urban identity (the thing done of performance) that characterized the

Mexican state’s production of Mexico City in 1968 to a more performative model of urban identity enacted in 1970s New York (the doing of performance) reflects what might be thought of as a shift from a modernist to a postmodernist model of the urban. In his article “Modernity and Order: Architecture and the Welfare State,” architect Jeremy Till describes the complicity between architectural modernism and the welfare state in Europe and North America, which embraced functionalism as a utopian strategy for bringing about the greater good. 91 The functionalism of the welfare state and architectural modernism possessed a paternalistic impulse that saw potential in the clean spatial reorderings of modernism to enact social and moral reorderings. The purified forms,

91 T he vast majority of social housing created by post-WWII welfare states was built in the style of architectural modernism because of its low-cost and adaptability to large scales.

158 white walls, and airy rooms of modernist buildings promised to redeem cities and their disorderly spaces and populations, cleansing them of waste, dirt, poverty, and behaviours that were deemed improper (Till 3). 9 2 To be sure, it was only through cleansing cities of the signs of poverty that modernity could be announced.

Till points to the theatrical nature of this spatial and social cleansing:

“Importantly, it needs to be seen that the poor have been reordered, and it is here that architectural modernism comes in as a signifier of order, cleanliness and progress” (3).

Thus, modernist principles of urban development possessed a highly representational formal apparatus. The modernist architectures of the welfare state were theatrical urban displays that announced the advent of a new modern order.

But if good life modernity in the postwar period in the US moved to the suburbs, distinguishable by their aesthetics of tidy uniformity and mass-production, how did the relation between the urban form and the theatrical representation of modernity change during this period? Did US cities become ‘postmodern’ in this move? Whereas the industrializing Mexican state centralized its performance of modernity in the city in the

1960s using strategies of urban backgrounding to hide the poor and Indigenous populations out of sight, and of urban camouflage to hide them in plain sight, the white middle class in New York and many other major metropolises abandoned the urban poor and racialized population in the city as they built new modern environments in the suburbs.

92 A s Till writes, “The functionalism of the welfare state is a [paternalistic] mechanism for reordering behaviour: in the white, light-filled, spaces of ‘humane’ modernism you will behave properly” (4).

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While postmodern cities are generally thought of in terms of a shift towards the active production of architectural designs codified as postmodern (which included a playful use of ornamentation and pastiche), might we instead understand the postmodern city as a waning of modernist investments in the urban form for the performance of modernity? Might we contrast modernist expr ession with postmodern impr ession?

Modernist representation with postmodern performativity?

In Postmodernism (1991), Fredric Jameson explains the shift from modernism to postmodernism as a collapsing of signifier and signified (ix). “Postmodernism,” Jameson writes, “knows all too well that the contents are just more images” (ix). This flattening of signifier and signified in postmodernism, which Jameson connects to a new depthlessness and weakening of historicity (6), is usually discussed in terms of ‘simulacrum,’ which

Jean Baudrillard theorizes as a copy of a copy that “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever” (170). But, in relation to the urban, we might think of the shift from modernism to postmodernism as a shift from an investment in a representational model of urban identity (which, to be sure, had performative dimensions) to a more strongly performative model of urban identity, which isn’t trying to represent anything outside of itself, but instead enacts what it ‘is,’ which amounts to what it ‘does.’

If we find this understanding of a postmodern model of the urban as, at least in part, a divestment from a representational model of the urban compelling, then the state divestment from New York City in the 1970s can already be understood as ‘postmodern,’ even before the urban landscape was actively filled with architectural designs codified as such. Here, I think we find a shift from the diachronic and teleological logic that

160 represents a deep local past (pre-modernity) against which a totalized modern present can be performed, to a synchronic logic of more temporally shallow and heterogeneous global simultaneities.

The shift from the representation of a deep urban pre-modernity in modernist performances of the urban to the shallower temporalities of postmodern performativity might be understood as having laid the groundwork for a shift towards a neoliberal model of the urban, which subordinates local and national time to transurban and transnational space. Less aspirational and managerial than a modernist logic of the urban, which belonged to the public realm, postmodern urbanism is oriented away from utopian futurity and collective welfare and identity towards an entrepreneurial use of resources.

Entrepreneurial performances of place are designed to attract capital and are oriented towards the market provision of services to citizens—now recast as

‘citizen-consumers’—through public-private partnerships. It is this phenomenon that I address in my following chapter.

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Chapter Three: Teasing the Creative City: Urban Dramaturgy and

Montreal’s Burlesque Revival Scene

Each object I consider in this dissertation can be understood as a response to what

I call a ‘crisis of place’—or a crisis in which one or several people find themselves disoriented in time and place, searching for their bearings in the world. In 1968, the

Mexican elite mobilized the Mexico ’68 Olympic campaign as a response to a crisis of place within a global landscape of modernity, seeking to create a sense of modern place by performing from spatial scripts borrowed from the First World. The disco scene that flourished in New York in the 1970s was one response to the degradation of the public infrastructures of a city in the throes of a dramatic socio-economic crisis brought about by suburbanization, deindustrialization, and the national disavowal of poor, racialized, and non-heteronormative urban populations.

In this chapter, I examine Montreal’s contemporary burlesque revival scene as a response to a crisis of place experienced by community and underground arts practices in the era of the ‘creative city,’ an urban planning model that instrumentalizes select forms of culture and creativity to grow urban economies. Asking what the burlesque scene looks and feels like as a dramaturgical object within an increasingly spectacular creative cityscape, I develop ‘dramatizing’ as a figure through which we can understand the performance-city relation. Having already begun to tease out some of the dramaturgical dimensions of urban space in Chapter One, here I develop the concept of ‘urban dramaturgy’ as a conceptual lens for examining the theatrical production of the cityscape, with a specific focus on the urban dramaturgy of cultural scenes. After theorizing

162 dramaturgy as the ‘architecture’ of performance, this chapter focuses on tensions between official urban dramaturgies and the tactical (in De Certeau’s sense) dramaturgical principles of Montreal’s burlesque revival scene. Specifically, I read what I refer to as

Montreal burlesque’s ‘scene dramaturgy,’ which negotiates forms of visibility and invisibility within the cityscape, as a tactical intervention into what I call Montreal’s official creative city dramaturgy of ‘spectacularization.’ The low visibility of the burlesque scene as an urban ecology resists municipal efforts to brand Montreal through the promotions of dazzling cultural displays. And yet, Montreal’s burlesque scene also stakes its claim to urban visibility through the historical and activist labours of its performers. I contend that, in a dance between high and low cultural visibility, the burlesque scene enacts on the urban stage the structuring dramaturgical principle of burlesque as a theatrical form: the tease. Through its stretched-out temporality, the ‘urban tease’ counters a creative city drive towards accelerated, flattened, spectacular space.

The previous chapter moved away from considering the city as a visual and dramatic object to attend to how the disco scene created ritual embodied atmospheres that transformed the affective experience of the city for participants in the scene. Here, I consider Montreal’s burlesque scene through its tactical dramaturgical interventions into the cityscape, maintaining that these interventions enact a critical urban temporality through which the city is performed as a slow, diffuse, and teasing space.

Dramatizing the City in the New Burlesque

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Every summer, decked out in lace, sequins, and feather boas, burlesque performer and producer Velma Candyass and her fellow performer Lili Lollipop guide tourists and locals through Montreal’s historic downtown Red Light District, visiting sites formerly animated by brothels, gambling dens, burlesque halls, and theatres. Candyass offers these burlesque walking tours as part of the company Secret Montreal, which she founded in

2012 with burlesque host Donovan King. Today, Montreal’s Red Light District has largely been eclipsed by the Quartier des Spectacles, a square-kilometre entertainment district created in 2006, located downtown, south of the Plateau Mont-Royal (the

Montreal neighbourhood with the youngest residents) and north of Chinatown. The still-evolving district began as an initiative led by the nonprofit organization the Quartier des Spectacles Partnership in 2001, which brought together over 60 community stakeholders to foster the city’s creative communities in a mixed-use cultural district intended to restore the historic cultural core of the city. However, the initiative quickly became a real-estate development project run by Quartier International Montreal, which prioritized increasing tax revenues by reversing the flow from the city to the suburbs and increasing tourism through the promotion of a ‘happening’ cultural district.

Formerly home to a colourful burlesque revival and nightlife scene, and to many artists, art collectives, and studios, the area that has become the Quartier des Spectacles now boasts a landscape of high-end condos, museum galleries, artistic venues, and public

93 squares dedicated to hosting high-profile shows and international festivals. Indeed, by

2015, the Quartier des Spectacles, which is delineated by Sherbrooke Street West and

93 T hese include the Montreal Jazz Festival, Les FrancoFolies de Montréal, and the Festival International Nuits d’Afrique.

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René-Levesque Boulevard to the north and south, and Saint-Alexandre Street and

Saint-Hubert Street to the east and west, was “home to some 80 cultural venues—including 30 concert venues—450 cultural enterprises, 45,000 jobs, 7,000 of them related to culture—over 12,000 residents and 50,000 students” (The City of

Montreal, “Summary of the Study on the Real Estate” 6). The surfaces of this new district conceal the site’s deep creative histories while diffusing a crisp image of variety, liveliness, and cultural innovation.

Indeed, the district’s emphasis on cultural diffusion has displaced many practices of cultural creation (Poirier 2016). Importantly, the Quartier des Spectacles is just one piece of a larger ‘creative city’ planning model officially adopted by Montreal in 2005, which aims to strengthen Montreal’s brand as a cultural metropolis. Creative city policies are designed to sharpen a city’s brand image by using forms of spectacular cultural display and by leveraging marketable forms of creativity to stimulate urban economies by increasing innovation, cultural capital, tourism, tax bases, investment, and real estate value (Coletta; The Creative Cities Leadership Team, University of Toronto;

Goldberg-Miller). A common creative city strategy is to ‘revitalize’ post-industrial urban cores through the creation of new residential and commercial developments.

By using the site-specific performances and narratives of burlesque guides, Secret

Montreal has made it its mission to excavate the local histories of nightlife, female performance, and sex work that enlivened Montreal from the 1920s through the 1950s, when these activities were outlawed by conservative mayor Jean Drapeau. Masters in the art of revelation, the tour guides of Secret Montreal invite participants to imaginatively

165 peel back the visible surfaces of today’s ‘revitalized’ entertainment district to reveal deep urban histories of nightlife and the (often feminized) labour these surfaces conceal. More than just a historical exercise, the walking tour connects these histories to a living underground revival of burlesque in Montreal that began in the 1990s.9 4

Montreal’s burlesque revival scene has created a relatively inclusive creative space for mostly women performers and diverse audiences. In keeping with the international burlesque revival scene, the Montreal scene is activated as an alternative space to those dominated by commoditized media images of female sexuality produced

95 for the male gaze. In bringing to light the placemaking power of Montreal’s underground nightlife scenes and women’s work (including sex work) in the city’s history, Secret Montreal performs transgenerational solidarity between the city’s historical and contemporary burlesque performers and publics and activates discussions around the relationship between creative practices and urban development.

But what is the relationship between urban development and urban dramaturgy?

And what does Montreal’s burlesque scene have to tell us about the politics of how a city is dramatized? In Chapter One I showed how Erving Goffman has provided a conceptual

94 U nderground culture, here, refers to culture that is not immediately linked to institutions of power, and which “lies outside the corporate logic of standardization” (Cohendet et al. 92). A bricolage of punk, drag performance, 1980s feminist body art, rockabilly, and early and mid-twentieth-century burlesque practice and aesthetics, the contemporary burlesque revival scene began in the 1990s with independent artists like Billie Madley and Michelle Carr and her Velvet Hammer burlesque troupe in New York and Los Angeles, as well as in smaller cities, like Montreal. 95 J ezebel Express, New York based burlesque performer and teacher at the New York School of Burlesque, is vocal in interviews and on social media about her use of burlesque as a tool for performing a body positive and fat positive politics of beauty and sexuality. In Montreal, the scene is represented by many performers who do not fit dominant beauty conventions. When I took a four week course at the New York School of Burlesque in the summer of 2014, its founder, Jo Weldon educated the class about burlesque’s history of cultural appropriation, and advised students to be aware of the reception with which performances of cultural appropriation would likely meet as performers developed their acts.

166 framework for interpreting social performances in everyday life. I also argued that

Goffman’s theory of social dramaturgy can be scaled up to consider the city as a fundamentally dramaturgical space invested in the calculated presentation of a theatrical

‘front.’ In this chapter, I further develop the concept of urban dramaturgy, drawing on its meanings as it is used within the theatre. In Dramaturgy and Performance (2007), Cathy

Turner and Synne Behrndt highlight the slipperiness of the term ‘dramaturgy,’ which can imply “the composition of a work,” “the internal structure of production,” “the collaborative process of putting the work together,” or even “dramaturgical analysis”

(18-19). Here, I adopt Adam Versényi’s definition of dramaturgy as “the architecture of the theatrical event, involved in the confluence of components in a work and how they are constructed to generate meaning for an audience” (389, my italics). The dramaturgical components of a performance consist of the aesthetic components (formal, structural, temporal, and symbolic) that are structured into a performance and set up its overall effect. Dramaturgy, as I employ it, is the active principle of arrangement that organizes such aesthetic components to specific aesthetic, experiential, and/or rhetorical ends. In theatre, dramaturgical components include narrative and script, costumes, props, acting techniques, movement vocabularies, blocking, tone, address, set and sound design, casting, all directorial decisions, the space of performance, audience demographics, and so on. In a city, dramaturgy might include narratives of place, spatial and social scripts, demographic compositions of neighbourhoods, architectural styles, dress and fashions, density and dispersion, the sounds, smells, tastes, and affects of certain neighbourhoods, the gestures, practices, and comportments of urban users, all manner of representations of

167 the city, cultural displays, displays of commodities and consumption, natural and built landscapes, brandscapes, and any number of sensual cues that address certain users and not others.

The view of the city as space of latent elements that can be arranged into a performance (or something that is heightened or newly defined) does not understand these urban elements as passive, but rather views them as active agents in the performance of the city. One need only to think of how romantic a dramatic sunset can be, or how existentially overwhelming standing before a natural wonder can feel, to understand the dramaturgical power of the environment, independent of a conscious

96 agent behind them. The dramaturgy of New York in the 1970s arose not from a single or centralized guiding principle, but instead from an assemblage of urban components that included signs of spatial abandonment, decay, and disuse, the concentrated presence of racialized bodies, and the appropriation of space by an array of urban users. Here, the city is viewed neither as dumb matter exclusively shaped by the projections of human actors, nor as somehow unmediated by discourse. Instead, the city emerges as a dialectic between matter and meaning. What is more, cities are not defined by a single dramaturgy.

Depending on where (and when) you’re looking, and depending on who is looking, a city emerges as a different kind of theatrical object. Like a stage animated by simultaneous stagings of different scenes, a city is actualized by a multitude of dramaturgies at once.

96 Peter Dickinson, for example, explores the interactions of outdoor site-specific dance performance in Vancouver with dramaturgically powerful natural environments in “Dancing the Vancouver Sublime from Dusk to Dawn,” an article which opens with an image of sound and dancers manifesting “A gainst the painterly, late evening backdrop of the north shore mountains, and with the last of the sun’s rays glistening off the water of Burrard Inlet” (90).

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As I will examine more fully further on, creative city planning models use a central dramaturgical principle of what I refer to, following other scholars like Hélène

Bélanger and Sara Cameron, as ‘spectacularization.’ Spectacularization privileges aesthetically striking interjections into the cityscape that transform the city into an object to be consumed. These interjections are designed to increase the cultural capital of urban zones and work to depopulate and repopulate often working-class neighbourhoods through processes of gentrification referred to as ‘revitalization.’ Through dramaturgical strategies of spectacularization, creative city planning often ruptures spatial continuities and can lead to dramatic schisms between past and present spatial meanings. When the dramaturgical interjections of creative city initiatives like the Quartier des Spectacles appropriate spaces from feminized sex work and community arts practices like burlesque, they also enact what Heather McLean describes as “the gendered power dynamics that emerge as city builders [...] co-opt feminist community arts practices in efforts to groom neighbourhoods and attract capital” (178). In the Quartier des Spectacles today, a logo of a red dot with blurred edges—a trope associated with red light districts—now sells a sex-work-free development where wealthy urbanites can gaze down upon cultural spectacles from their condo windows. Importantly the privileged spectators of the creative city are the tourist and the high-income resident.

However, other performances of the city interact with official urban dramaturgies in more or less resistant ways, prompting different forms of civic engagement. While policy-makers perform the city as a certain kind of place, either using dramaturgical components to project an urban image, or instead, neglecting the image of the city in

169 ways that produce a different kind of theatrical space, other urban users rearrange the city in ways that do not always align with the urban dramaturgies of the state. De Certeau discusses these kinds of spatial rearrangements in terms of performative urban tactics.

Tactical interventions into urban space reshape the city not only by transforming the uses of urban elements, but also as acts that have visual and dramaturgical qualities as they are being carried out, or which rearrange the dramaturgy of the city after the instance of performance. The interventions into the city can be understood in terms of what Juliet

Rufford calls “space acts” (46). Space acts re-perform and re-actualize the city through their spatial interventions.

Cultural scenes gather the cityscape into certain dramaturgical arrangements, actualizing the city anew. Buttressed by their own dramaturgical components, urban scenes intervene in the urban theatre; they are ecologies of space acts, which reshape

97 urban character through their theatrical and performative qualities. While I focused in the last chapter on New York’s disco scene in the 1970s as an assemblage of objects and practices in terms of their ritual transformations of the city as an embodied affective experience and atmosphere for participants in the scene, I might also have focused on how this assemblage is fundamentally dramaturgical; it produced the city as a meaningful aesthetic and affective object for spectators beyond immediate participation in the scene.

So, New York’s disco scene was an assemblage of sound systems, record shops, reused

97 As an example of how urban character inheres in the expressive and affective aspects of the city without being strictly codified, thus allowing for subtle variations in interpretation, one might consider how, for instance, the concentrated presence of hipster coffee shops, bicycle stores and repair shops, beer gardens, speakeasy bars, tattoo parlours, young people who are on-trend in their self-presentations can express a neighbourhood character as ‘hip’ or ‘happening’ to some, while also expressing it as ‘lame,’ ‘white,’ ‘co-opted,’ ‘generic,’ or ‘inauthentic’ to others.

170 post-industrial sites, DJs, dancers, white, and especially black and brown bodies, straight, and especially queer bodies, club owners, whimsical decorations, record producers, music markets, dancing, hosting, domesticating, affecting, interior designing, getting ready, dressing up, getting into it, cooling down, getting home. All of these were the theatrical architecture of the scene; they coalesced into arrangements that transformed the look, feel, and sound of the city for an urban public. In this view, participants in urban scenes emerge as alternative architects, planners, and dramaturges of the city.

In Chapters One and Two I analyzed the dramaturgy of the Mexico ’68 design program, which followed global scripts of modernity that were actualized in the urban landscape, and the dramaturgy of the disco scene, whose ends were ritualistic and reparative. Here, I focus on the dramaturgy of the burlesque scene as a spatial and temporal tactical practice. Thus, the dramaturgies of this dissertation’s objects can be understood respectively as: a representational dramaturgy, a reparative dramaturgy, and an interventionist (or tactical) dramaturgy.

In considering the dramaturgy of Montreal’s burlesque scene, I am thus interested not only in the dramaturgical elements it employs within the frame of the performance stage (though I am interested in this, too), but also in the urban performance the burlesque scene—understood as a total assemblage—produces in the cityscape. I am particularly concerned with how burlesque’s stage dramaturgy can be used as a heuristic for its dramaturgy as an urban scene, and for those of other urban scenes. In other words, how might the dramaturgy of burlesque scale up, from the costume fabric to the urban fabric?

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In what follows, I view the Montreal burlesque scene’s interplay between cultural revelation and cultural concealment, which I read as an urban ‘tease,’ as an intervention into the spectacular dramaturgy of Montreal’s official creative city policy. As I will show, spectacularization is the organizing dramaturgical principle for an array of components used to produce the creative city. The creative city’s drive towards cultural spectacle is a drive towards a photogenic model of the urban—that is, a model of the urban possessing a shallow temporality and concentrated spatiality that can be easily captured in a brand image, a quick tourist visit, or a selfie. I propose the ‘urban tease’ as a contrasting and less straightforwardly commodifiable dramaturgical principle to spectacularization for producing urban experiences.

Created through more durational and spatially dispersed experiences of the city, and less immediate or complete deliverances of cultural satisfaction, the urban tease, as I theorize it, denotes a dramaturgical model of urban cultural revelation that contrasts with spectacularization without, nevertheless, sinking completely out of the view of urban spectators. The urban tease withholds what the spectacle so easily delivers. Offering an experience of the city in fragments and increments, the urban tease requires waiting, patience, movement, and labour, and contains the risk of disappointment, frustration, boredom, and dissatisfaction. But it also holds out the promise of revealing the city to be a place of mystery, discovery, magic, and ghosts. The tease possesses a logic of seduction which differs from the logic of exhibition and of the spectacle. In its tendency towards longer and incremental temporal experiences of the city, towards spatial dispersion, and

172 towards forms of visual withholding, the urban tease offers a less photogenic model of the city.

The burlesque scene’s activation of an urban tease points to the double bind in which cultural visibility finds itself within the creative city today, namely a choice between: 1) high cultural visibility, which can easily becomes complicit with the creative city’s instrumentalization of culture as attractive consumable products (and the threat this presents to community arts practice and to vulnerable populations which are displaced by the urban spectacle); and 2) low cultural visibility, which can easily lead to self-exploitation and increase the precarity of cultural workers in a way that is also complicit with neoliberalism. In the following sections, I describe Montreal’s evolution into a contemporary creative city and its contemporary official dramaturgy of spectacularization. I then turn to the city’s contemporary burlesque revival scene as a counter-dramaturgy of the creative city.

There is a recurrent focus on the theatricality of scenes in cultural studies, where scenes are understood as stages for spectatorship and bodily self-display—that is, for seeing and being seen (Alan Blum; Daniel Silver and Terry Nichols Clark). Yet there is a dearth of writing on the theatricality of scenes as they exist as a total assemblage that might be understood in terms of movement vocabularies, props, costumes, design, narratives, aesthetics, staging, scripts, rehearsing and repetition, motifs. Performance studies and theatre studies can provide illuminating methods and concepts for interpreting the role that urban scenes play in producing the city as a physical and imagined place. My intervention into scene theory is to insist on scenes as urban phenomena that have the

173 capacity to interject into dominant or official urban dramaturgies. Before turning in greater detail to the creative city’s dramaturgy of spectacularization, let me join the burlesque revival in excavating some of the deeper histories of Montreal as a site of diverse creativity.

From Open City to Creative City

Montreal is an island and port-city located in the south of the francophone province of Quebec, just a six-hour drive from New York City. While Montreal is officially a francophone city, English and French commingle in the spaces of everyday life, with certain neighbourhoods and spaces being animated more by one language than the other. Neither the centre of Canadian government (which is Ottawa) and no longer the country’s primary centre of finance (which shifted to Toronto following the Quebec nationalist movement in the 1960s), Montreal remains one of Canada’s most important

98 cultural capitals. Throughout the twentieth century alone, Montreal has been a vibrant hub of jazz, burlesque, theatre, and nightlife, which has attracted large American audiences, especially during prohibition. It has also been a major player in the circus industry and on the comedy scene, and more recently, an important centre for alternative music and a global food scene. 1967 and 1976 were flashpoint moments for establishing

Montreal as a festive city. In its hosting of the World’s Fair in 1967, and of the Summer

Olympics in 1976, Montreal made a name for itself as an important centre of culture and

98 Montreal was Canada’s major economic center since the beginning of Canada’s settler colonial period when it was the centre of the fur trade. Before this it was an important meeting ground for different First Nations, including the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and A nishinaabe nations.

174 modernity on the world stage.9 9 Home to numerous international festivals, the city of

Montreal is a place of heavy cultural traffic.

Known today for its strip clubs and porn industry, Montreal also possesses a global reputation as a capital of sex which it retains from its status as a burlesque capital in the early twentieth century. When municipalities in the United States and Canada were cracking down on gambling and burlesque in the name of public morality in the 1930s,

Montreal continued to flourish as a capital of pleasure. It was the last major city in North

America to outlaw burlesque, which overlapped with the city’s roaring jazz scene, through which the top musicians from New York and Chicago regularly flowed, from the

100 1920s through the 1950s.

Originally a comedic and popular form of female entertainment, modern burlesque originated in England, arriving in New York City with Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes in 1868. The history of burlesque is the history of undomesticated women appearing on stages in front of mixed-gender audiences (which, after 1870, became mostly male and working class), shocking and delighting with corporeal displays, exaggerated codes of femininity, cross-dressing, and, in some instances, performances of

101 racial stereotypes (Allen 132). The reviews of early burlesque performances in the

99 Josianne Poirier argues that the Quartier des Spectacles is continuous with these large-scale cultural events, which positioned Montreal as a “city of culture” (79). 100 L ike Montreal jazz, Montreal burlesque featured many black performers and audiences, with the cabarets on the Plateau being patronized by white audiences and featuring white performers and the downtown clubs being primarily black, but with increasingly mixed audiences (Mansbridge “In Search of a Different History” 7). “By the 1940s,” Joanna Mansbridge explains, “the clubs were racially integrated, with [the downtown club] Café St. Michel leading the way with a fully integrated jazz band directed by Louis Metcalf” (12). 101 W illiam Dean Howells, writer for the A tlantic Monthly, captures the scandal that burlesque created for many members of the American public through its gender ambiguity in his review of Boston’s theatre season from 1868-9. Describing the horror of the popular burlesque performers of the season, Howells writes, “though they were not like men, [they] were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures

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United States show that the most scandalous aspect of burlesque was often not its use of risqué bodily displays, but rather its displays of female knowingness. Early burlesquers troubled some members of the public because they did more than offer their bodies up as passive objects of enjoyment for the male gaze—they were active subjects who took

102 pleasure in commanding their craft. In addition to securing opportunities for politicized appearance in the city, early burlesque offered viable, relatively independent careers to many women burlesque artists. Legendary figures like Lydia Thompson, Gypsy Rose

Lee, Ann Corio, Sally Rand, Josephine Baker, Tempest Storm, Mae West, and Lili St.

Cyr, the last of whom was named the ‘most famous woman in Montreal’ in the 1940s and

1950s, used burlesque to build glittering careers. Many burlesque performers harnessed acts of exhibition (of bodies, intellect, and creativity) to gain measures of artistic, financial, political, and social independence.

Because Montreal burlesque audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enjoyed the same shows as other audiences on an Eastern touring circuit that included New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Toronto, the shape burlesque took in Quebec was not so drastically different from the shape it took elsewhere. Nevertheless, there were some important differences which arose partly from the fact that Montreal remained a thriving nightlife hub through American prohibition and partly from the city’s location in the linguistically and culturally distinct province of

Quebec.

of a kind of alien sex, parodying both. It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness” (qtd. in Allen 135). 102 I n his essay on burlesque, Howells communicates his discomfort with the pleasure burlesque performers seemed to take in the art of male impersonations: “A strange and compassionable satisfaction beamed from her face; it was evident that this sad business was the poor thing’s f orte” (qtd. in Allen 134).

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In her groundbreaking books on burlesque in Quebec, Chantal Hébert distinguishes between an early period of burlesque (1914–1930), which was largely influenced by American companies and their repertoires and was generally performed in

English, and a later “golden age” (1930–1950), during which numbers were increasingly

103 performed in French and adapted to reflect Quebec society. The city’s historic burlesque scene was concentrated in the Red Light district and along Saint-Laurent

Boulevard, which runs north-south through the city. Saint Laurent is also known as “The

Main,” as it has been the main street for nightlife and scenes of sociability through

Montreal’s history, and is the street that divides the city’s east and west ends. One of the most interesting revelations of Hébert’s studies is the especially active role women played in Quebec’s burlesque scene. Compared to its American counterpart, Quebec burlesque attracted proportionally large female audiences and involved women as even more central, active characters in its scripts. In Quebec burlesque, women, far from being domesticated “guardians of tradition,” as Quebec Theatre studies scholar Jean-Marc

Larrue has put it, “turned towards the city, modern values, and material and economic betterment” (267–8). Burlesque in Montreal’s history served as much as a method for actualizing an urban womanhood and a feminine urbanity (serving as a platform for woman performers to enter into a political public sphere) as it served as a stage for representing the same to a broad Montreal audience. In these ways, burlesque used woman-centred performance to shape Montreal as a place for local users beyond its role in branding Montreal as a pleasure capital for tourist audiences.

103 See Chantal Hébert, L e burlesque au Québec: un divertissement populaire (1981); Chantal Hébert, L e burlesque québécois et américain: textes inédits (1989).

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It wasn’t until the 1950s, during the first tenure of conservative mayor Jean

Drapeau, who ran his election on a promise to ‘clean up’ the city, that Montreal banned burlesque along with gambling, prostitution, and late nights on the town, the last curtailed

104 through the imposition of a harsh curfew. Drapeau’s sanitization mission sought to replace an urban dramaturgy of openness with one of cleanliness and renewal.1 05 His campaign especially affected the site on which today’s Quartier des Spectacles now sits, formerly known as the Faubourg Saint-Laurent. The Faubourg Saint-Laurent, a neighbourhood developed in the late eighteenth century, was one of the oldest districts in

Montreal, famous for its bustling streetlife, cultural variety, popular entertainments, and its Red Light District. In the 1950s and 1960s, the neighbourhood’s animated streetlife was damaged by the erection of isolated high-rise buildings separated by empty lots—the

106 props of a dramaturgy of mid-century renewal. While these renewal efforts were intended to make the Faubourg Saint-Laurent ‘safer’ and ‘cleaner,’ they ultimately failed to curb escalating homelessness, drug use, and poverty in the area while also destroying

107 the neighbourhood’s social fabric (Loison 40-1).

104 D uring his second tenure as mayor from 1960 to 1986, Drapeau, paradoxically, did nothing to quash the strip clubs that had replaced Montreal’s burlesque halls—seduced, perhaps, as Mansbridge has speculated, by the revenue to be gained from tourists visiting Montreal for Expo ’67 and the 1976 Olympics (“In Search of a Different History” 10). With less theatre, and without the humour and political commentary of its predecessors, stripping superseded burlesque as the main form of female performance in Montreal’s deteriorated downtown. 105 S ee Adam Kuplowsy’s “A Captivating ‘Open City’: The Production of Montreal as a ‘Wide-Open Town’ and “Ville Ouverte” in the 1940s and ‘50s” (2015) on the production of Montreal as an ‘open city.’ 106 T his was part of Drapeau’s numerous large scale (cultural, commercial, residential, and transportational) urban renewal projects, which included the large cultural complex the Place-des-Arts, which today forms the centrepiece of the Quartier des Spectacles. 107 D rapeau’s attempt to clean up the Red Light District in 1957 was Montreal’s first attempt at slum-clearance, a process that had been occurring throughout North America and Europe from the 1930s through the 1950s, and especially after WWII. Like other urban renewal projects instituted in the post-WWII period, Drapeau’s attempt to renew the Faubourg Saint Laurent through paternalistic planning and large-scale development projects failed. Mid-century renewal projects generally damaged the place

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Prior to the development of the Quartier des Spectacles, the Faubourg

Saint-Laurent neighbourhood had still not recovered from the damages of the failed urban renewal efforts of the 1950s and 1960s. As Laurie Loison explains, by this point, though the neighbourhood served as an affordable area for artists and lower-income residents to live in, and an important zone for cultural production and for sex workers, “The lack of liveliness of the area, the degradation of the postindustrial built environment and the perceived insecurity all contributed to maintaining the neighbourhood’s overall poor reputation” (41). Post-renewal dramaturgies of weak social effervescence and unattractive concrete not only created a drab atmosphere for those who conducted their daily life within them but also created an aesthetic that made the neighbourhood unappealing to tourists and higher-income residents. The concentration of sex workers, homeless people, and working-class urban users were also part of the dramaturgical components of the neighbourhood and contributed to a characterization of the neighbourhood as undesirable on the part of certain outside urban users. While major festivals like the Montreal Jazz Festival and the Just for Laughs Festival began using the empty lots around the Place-des-Arts in the 1980s, bringing back audiences for fleeting moments, as a whole, the neighbourhood remained largely unspectacular.

Still, before the development of the Quartier des Spectacles, the availability and affordability of disused lots and former manufacturing spaces and the generally low real-estate value in the area had incubated a cultural ecology that, while not necessarily visually attractive to outside viewers, included numerous local arts communities and

attachments and spatial practices of local users, and created depressing, even dangerous atmospheres of isolation, segregation, and communal loss.

179 scenes. As Josiane Poirier explains, between 1980 and the 1990s, many artists, art collectives, and art galleries took advantage of the inexpensive real estate in the area (83).

By 1990, Poirier notes, “hundreds of artists and cultural organizations had addresses” within the territory that would become the Quartier des spectacles (83). In particular, the

Blumenthal building (home of Véhicule art, the first artist-run arts centre in the city), the

Ontario building (residences), the Wilder building (residences), the Belgo building (home to several galleries), and 1592 Clark street (home of le Centre d’artistes Clark) were key sites in the neighborhood arts network (83). The area was also home to an underground burlesque revival scene (which began in the 1990s) and served as a relatively well-lit but under-surveilled environment in which sex workers could conduct their business.

The recent gentrification in the Faubourg Saint-Laurent area began in 2000 after the Société immobilière du Québec acquired the southern part of the Îlot Balmoral building at the centre of the neighbourhood to create an administrative and cultural complex. This acquisition resulted in the eviction of the residents of the Wilder, and

Blumenthal buildings, many of whom were artists. The Ontario building and 1591 Clark were also bought by a private entrepreneur that desired to transform these buildings into high-end residential complexes. The development of the new Quartier des Spectacles entertainment district has also resulted in the demolition of active downtown performance and burlesque venues like The Spectrum, Le Medley, and Saints, and relocated or changed the vocation of other underground performance venues (which have also, at various points, served as burlesque and drag spaces) like Katacombes (a key co-op space for the city’s punk scene and other underground music scenes) and the now renovated

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Midway. The development project pushed out a number of dance studios, rehearsal

108 spaces, and other spaces of artistic creation. As new urban renewal projects, now branded as urban ‘revitalization,’ destroy the homes and place attachments of vulnerable populations, they become a modern-day incarnation of Drapeau’s cleanup program.

Secret Montreal tours of this former Red Light district stage a tension between

‘revival’ and ‘revitalization’ as two competing dramaturgies of the urban. The contemporary burlesque scene as a whole enacts a similar tension. Through acts of historical excavation, revelation, narration, and dynamic preservation, Montreal’s burlesque scene revives local histories and spatial meanings that have contributed to the city’s unique character. Such an approach to urban identity prioritizes the continuity and longevity of spaces. The valuation of the maintenance of a certain ‘sense of place’ through the continuity and longevity of spaces might be viewed as a troublingly reactionary, arbitrary, colonialist, and potentially xenophobic approach to urban identity.

This is an especially important concern in a settler-colonial context like Montreal, which is haunted by a dramatic rupture with Indigenous spatial meanings. As Shauna Janssen explores in her article “Le Dalhousie Griffintown: Reimagining anOther Public Space”

(2013), discourses of historical preservation constitute only one potential mode of resisting development. Janssen shines the spotlight on practices and discourses that

108 F or sex workers, who have been geographically and socially connected to burlesque throughout Montreal’s history of feminized and stigmatized sex work, the development project has meant being displaced to the more isolated borough of H ochelaga-Maisonneuve. According to a report released by the Montreal sex-worker, activist group Stella, this displacement has also made sex workers, whose new neighbourhood is underlit and less effervescent with protective streetlife, more vulnerable to violent crime. (16)

181 re-conceptualize the meanings of public spaces by re-animating them through

109 performance as a tactic for resisting top-down development initiatives (11).

Certainly, narratives about what a place means through time involve any number of arbitrary inclusions and exclusions, and, to be sure, the privileging of specific spatial meanings since the settler rupture is colonialist. While the trope of historical preservation is only one tool in an and arsenal of potential tactics for resisting top-down development initiatives that rupture the urban fabric, the notion that a certain longevity of place is necessarily reactionary has been influentially critiqued by geographer Doreen Massey. In

“A Global Sense of Place” (1991), Massey argued that a sense of place that acknowledges its dynamic linkages beyond its borders and meanings through time can be mobilized to progressive ends.

Urban revitalization projects seek to breathe new life into old spaces that are seen as being somehow ‘expired.’ A destructive approach to urban space, revitalization uses acts of razing, depopulating, repopulating, and reallocating to renew apparently defunct sites. While revival seeks to disclose and intensify existing urban character from the inside-out, revitalization uses an outside-in approach to urban culture to imbue spaces with fresh meanings for the present.

Contemporary models of revitalization tend to intervene in existing spaces to perform and rebrand them as desirable and often spectacular ‘products’ to be consumed by tourists, audiences, residents, and investors. As Laura Levin and Kim Solga note in

109 Janssen writes about the community initiative L e Corridor culturel de Griffintown, Jannsen’s own curatorial platform U rban Occupations Urbaines, and the performance of the site-specific theatre company Théâtre Nulle Part, which engaged creative responses to animating the Dalhousie cul-de-sac—a small historic dead-end located in Montreal’s historically working-class neighbourhood of Griffintown.

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“Building Utopia,” while the cultural displays favoured by the creative city often draw on the experiences and labour of the city’s more vulnerable populations, they often do not address these groups, addressing instead the tourist as their privileged spectator (37).

Meanwhile, these cultural displays often transform the working class neighbourhoods into hip, so-called ‘creative’ neighbourhoods through theatrical acts of placemaking, causing real estate prices to rise and displacing local residents over time. Revival, by contrast, reactivates old spatial meanings, synthesizing them with new ones for mostly local community actors, including audiences and performers, and possibly also for tourists and external publics.

The dramaturgical props that sustain burlesque’s urban performance revival include boas, glitter, corsets, the live performing bodies and narratives of women in urban spaces, small production budgets, small venues, live (usually) working-class audiences, and volunteer or self-exploited labour. Revival in the Quartier des Spectacles tends to operate on small scales in spatial dispersion, through durational and incremental experiences, and with structures of intimate engagement and participation. Revitalization in the same area tends to operate on large scales in spatial concentration, in quickly and wholly consumable photogenic flashes, and with structures of distanced, passive observation. Indeed, the dramaturgical props of contemporary revitalization include public-private partnerships, large strips of urban space and amounts of money, tourists, eye-catching aesthetic displays, and high-income residents. In “Building Utopia,” Levin and Solga ask, “When we set out to ‘stage’ a city, whose version of the city do we rehearse as ‘real’ or ‘true’? Who benefits from that staging? And who pays the hidden

183 costs” (37). More specifically, they ask, “Who benefits and who suffers in the name of aggressive, developer-driven urban regeneration Projects?” (37). In the Quartier des

Spectacles as it has been mobilized so far, it seems that the interests of tourists, high-income residents, investors, landlords, and the municipal coffers have been prioritized over those of low-income renters, sex workers, homeless people, and the majority of the city’s artists and audiences.

The fact that the important histories of working-class women’s labour and performance are being erased by Montreal’s application of a revitalization dramaturgy in the Quartier des Spectacles also reflects the gender and class dynamics of acts of spatial rupture performed by institutions of power, as the new spatial meanings ushered in by these institutions reflect the interest of those already in power. The stakes of different dramaturgies of the urban in contemporary Montreal can be explained with reference to the municipality’s adoption of a creative city planning model since 2005, which uses a dramaturgical logic of spectacularization to create new spatial meanings/ruptures.

Spectacular City

Montreal’s official ‘creative city’ development model began in 2005 with its publication of a cultural development plan titled “Montreal, Cultural Metropolis.” In addition, Montreal joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network as a city of design in

2006. In its emphasis on the production of a vivid urban image, the creative city model is specifically invested in the production of the city as an aesthetic and, as I will show, theatrical object. This paradigm for urban development emerged in the late-1980s and

184 early-1990s in Australia and Europe and has been touted by so-called urban planning

“gurus” like Charles Landry and Richard Florida as a solution to resurrecting post-industrial and post-suburban urban economies (and stimulating mixed ones) around the world, especially in North America and Europe.

For some cities, including Montreal, creative city planning marks a return back to the city through (amongst other things) the ‘revitalization’ of downtowns after long periods of urban divestment and subsidized suburbanization as described in Chapter Two.

A forerunner of this ‘back to the city’ model of development was the redevelopment of

New York’s Times Square under the stewardship of Mayor Rudy Giuliani beginning in the 1990s. Giuliani ‘revitalized’ Times Square by bringing back theatre, restaurants, and other businesses to the area. The sanitization, homogenization, and theatricalization of culture that occurred in this process is often referred to as “Disneyfication,” a moniker that also signals The Walt Disney Company’s large investment in and control over Times

Square, which involved a contract that pushed out the area’s pornographic theatres.1 10 The re-investment in cities through public-private partnerships, and displacements of populations deemed to be unsavory through zoning regulations and gentrification was exemplary of a neoliberal restructuring of the city through an embrace of free market relations. Cities under neoliberalism have seen the privatization of formerly public spaces, a reduction in state spending that supported the most marginalized classes, and the rise of new patchwork forms of class and race segregation throughout the city

(Atkinson 2004; 2010; Mele 2013; Florida 2017). The development of the neoliberal

110 See Maurya Wickstrom’s “Commodities, Mimesis, and the Lion King” (1999).

185 creative city is enacted through a specific dramaturgy of the urban that includes globally

111 recognized scripts for performing the city.

In a recitation of globally performed creative city scripts, the City of Montreal’s official publications speak about creativity as part of Montreal’s brand, and refer to creativity as a cultural “product.”:

In cultural terms, the “Montréal brand” consists of a number of ‘products.’ A few

examples of these are the overall success of our creative work; the quality,

quantity and diversity of festivals; development of the Quartier international

(international district); and our built heritage, particularly in Old Montréal. How

do we ensure that these ‘products’ keep their high degree of quality, their

attractive nature, their charm? (The City of Montreal “Action Plan: 2007-2017”

16)

The so-called “products” of the Montreal brand comprise the dramaturgical components of Montreal’s urban performance. Montreal’s answer to the question of how to ensure its cultural “products” (and by extension, Montreal itself) retain their high “quality,” their

“attractive nature,” their “charm,” is, like that of other creative cities around the world, to activate the urban space as a performing entity through a dramaturgical principle of spectacularization.

111 “Creative city script” is now a common term in scholarship about the creative city (See, for example Levin and Solga 2009; Ortegel 2017; McLean 2010; Catungal et al. 2009). We might also think of the creative city in terms of what Susan Bennett calls “cultural topography,” a methodological lens for interpreting how cities “stage their urban ambitions in a global economy” (29). There is an aspirational drive to creative city scripts, which do not necessarily express something like the ‘truth’ or ‘essence’ of what a city ‘is,’ but which reflect a vision about what certain policy makers and stakeholders want a city to become. We might connect the aspirational drive of creative city scripts to that of mega-event performances of place, such as hat carried out for the Mexico ’68 Olympics.

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Aristotle defined spectacle as the aspects of tragedy that engage the senses.

Elements of spectacle included “costumes, scenery, the gestures of the actors, the sound of the music and the resonance of the actors’ voices” (“Aristotle Poetics”). Creative cities like Montreal stage themselves by heavily engaging user senses (and especially the visual apparatus) to present itself as a desirable product. Beyond staging themselves as attractive images to be contemplated from a distance within the city, or admired in the pages of a glossy magazine, creative cities attempt to create their value by becoming live experiences that make affective appeals to the body through gripping sensual engagement. To this end, the creative city uses spectacular displays of culture (light projections, striking architecture, commissioned graffiti, the solicitation of high profile artists and exhibits), the ‘eventification’ of urban life (through investment in festivals, pop-ups, and interactive urban installations), and the expansion of cultural institutions

112 like museums and performing arts centers. Spectacularization shapes the city by foregrounding sensory urban elements.

Beyond Aristotle’s definition of the spectacle as appeals to the senses, creative city ‘spectacularization’ has meanings associated with a Marxist understanding of ‘the spectacle.’ In his 1967 Société du spectacle ( Society of the Spectacle), French Marxist theorist Guy Debord used the word “spectacle” to describe capitalism’s instrumentalization of the visual image (in the form of advertising, film, architecture, celebrity) to drive consumption, distract and pacify the masses, and mediate relationships between people. In capitalist societies, lived reality is replaced by the contemplation of

112 See Doreen Jakob’s “The Eventification of Place” (2012) for an overview of how urban planning models increasingly transform experiences of urban and cultural consumption and production into “theatre,” or “staged experiences of event consumption” (abstract).

187 the spectacle, so that being is replaced by having, and having is replaced by appearing.

As I showed in Chapter One, at the Mexico ’68 Olympics, capitalist motives were intertwined with the ideological motives of the state. The Mexican state transformed the national capital into a spectacle that would represent the nation-state as a stable and attractive place for investment on a world stage and redeem Mexico from a long history of demeaning cultural stereotypes. In its dissimilation of local realities and alienation of the local population from more communal forms of public participation, this national appearance was a Debordian spectacle. By contrast, while early burlesque’s dramaturgies of exotic exhibition were spectacular in Aristotle’s sense, in their active troubling of normative gender identities, their dramaturgies were less clearly spectacular in Debord’s sense. Not generally affording distracting, easily consumable images that required passive contemplation and alienated people from one another, burlesque reworks damaging social relationships by renegotiating the place of women in the public sphere.

Since 1967, the forms that the Society of the Spectacle takes have multiplied, and have come to include objects that appear more broadly to all the senses. Today’s Society of the Spectacle includes a landscape of screens that minimize or mediate live social interactions, a social mediascape that incentivizes self-commodification, and a brandscape that everywhere sells dynamic performative experiences (not just camping, but ‘glamping,’ not just coffee, but a coffee expertly ground, brewed, and poured into an aesthetically pleasing presentation by knowledgeable baristas in hip new coffee shops).

Within our current economy, which seeks to position the commodifiable experience at the centre of social life, we might say that having has been replaced by experiencing and

188 appearing has been replaced by performing . In this new era of the spectacle, the ‘image’ has given way to the ‘experience.’ With the hopes of attracting tourists and creative workers, in what Joseph Pine and James Gilmore have called the “experience economy,” creative cities sell unique, memorable, immersive, and affectively engaging experiences

113 not only in the city but also of the city (2-3). In the experience economy, heading to a happening art district, checking out a food truck festival, visiting a hyped new building, or a hip, off-the-beaten-path city, become collectable, Instagram-worthy experiences for staging our own lives as ‘unique’ and ‘memorable.’ The selfie is the meme of the experience economy, and perhaps, also, of the creative city. In selfies, striking images of experiences of places serve as backgrounds for codified performances of “creative self-actualization,” to borrow the phrasing of Levin and Solga (39). Creative cities are designed to offer the dramaturgical infrastructures for such representable performances of the self.

People and their practices are part of the fundamental elements available for dramaturging the city into performance in the creative city, where embodied live

114 performances are instrumentalized to create photogenic images of social effervescence.

113 In T he Experience Economy (1999), Joseph Pine and James Gilmore argue that countries of the global north have transitioned from an agrarian economy, to a industrial economy, to a service economy, and finally, to an experience economy, in which the memory of unique and memorable experiences is the privileged product being sold and consumed. 114 T hrough the theatrical placemaking practices of Florida’s creative ‘types,’ from hanging out in hip cafés, sporting new fashion trends, or offering up images of diversity, youth, and innovation, neighbourhoods and cities themselves, the argument went, would come to be perceived as creative ‘types’—or creative ‘characters.’ The logic, here, is that the cultural capital produced by certain bodies and practices rub off onto places in a kind of theatrical contagion. What Florida had proposed was a kind of strategic theatrical ‘casting’ of the city. S askia Sassen and Frank Roost have argued that “Modern tourism is no longer centered on the historic monument, concert hall, or museum, but on the urban scene, or, more precisely, some version of the urban scene fit for tourism,” which is to say, a version of the urban scene with an extensive front region, in Goffman’s terms (143).

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In The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Richard Florida insisted that young, bohemian, queer, racialized ‘types’ had powerful branding potential for cities. We can read creative city strategies of spectacularization, in the terms laid out by Laura Levin in Performing

Ground, as a drive to convert the city into a total cultural ‘foreground,’ which, rather than relegating women and marginalized others to the urban background, moves them to the front of the urban stage to perform the urban spectacle. Interviews with long-time residents of the Faubourg Saint-Laurent neighbourhood, conducted by Hélène Bélanger and Sara Cameron after the Quartier des Spectacles was created, demonstrate longtime residents’ awareness of the city’s desire to leverage them as spectacle. As one resident objected “I am not a spectacle, I am not the V itrine” (the Vitrine is a cultural information booth that serves the Quartier des Spectacles) (133). The project has alienated and dispersed residents, many of whom are lower-income, and earned the resentment of local artists who feel they were used to brand the district as “cool” and “bohemian” at the same time as they were priced out of it (Loison 78–79). As Loison shows, real estate value in

Ville-Marie (the borough to which the Quartier des Spectacles belongs) rose a staggering

20 percent in the short period between 2007 and 2011 (75). The ‘revitalization’ of downtown with the Quartier des Spectacles, not unlike other forms of revitalization carried out elsewhere, has also been accompanied by a shift in the use of space from creative production to creative consumption, creating what urban planner Laurie Loison describes as a landscape of homogenized cultural products, concentrated in the same place for easy consumption, like a “cultural shopping mall” (81). As Sylvain Lefebvre and Josiane Poirier have pointed out, in the Quartier des Spectacles, cultural display

190 exists in tension with the act of cultural creation (Lefebvre 204; Poirier 77). As one artist puts it, “It is pointless to have a workshop in the Quartier des Spectacles [...] You can’t walk around with sheets of plywood in the middle of the Jazz Festival” (qtd. in Poirier

85). Here we see an alienation of the creative object from the creative action, of the ‘thing done’ of performance from the ‘doing’ of performance.

In Montreal, strategies of urban eventification and cultural display designed to showcase the city as a unique and memorable experience were everywhere present in the programming for Montreal’s 375th anniversary in 2017 (though to be sure, Montreal is much older than this), which included over 200 events that cost upward of 100 million dollars combined. The transformation of downtown Montreal into a giant open theatre in honour of the city’s anniversary was a particularly impressive enactment of the urban spectacle. As part of the festivities, a Montreal-based multimedia studio was commissioned to illuminate the Jacques Cartier bridge for forty million dollars for a period of ten years. They are also employed in the winter festival Montréal en lumière sponsored by the hydroelectric company Bell, which features nearly a thousand cultural events, outdoor activities, installations, light projections, and so on, and the well-loved

“nuit blanche,” when cultural institutions stay open to the public all night. These striking cultural displays and immersive cultural events, which participate in general aestheticization of the city, promote the city as an affecting live experience and a source of cultural capital and can be understood as part of an overarching urban dramaturgy of

115 creative city spectacularization.

115 H élène Bélanger and Sara Cameron have written that the Quartier des Spectacles i s an example of the “spectacularization of space” continuous with Montreal’s successful efforts over the past fifteen years to brand itself as a “city of festivals” (126–147).

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To be fair, phenomena like Montréal en lumière, the programming for Montreal’s

375th anniversary, and the Quartier des Spectacles include(d) socially valuable moments that democratized the access to culture in public space and create(d) occasions for meaningful social and environmental interaction. At the same time, as inequality rises in creative cities, this suggests that stakeholders employ moments of cultural democratization as a spectacle that ultimately fuels neoliberal agendas that exacerbate inequality (Leslie and Catungal 2012; Gerhard, Hoelscher and Wilson 2017; Florida

2017). Cultural displays instrumentalized by the public and private sectors generate profit without necessarily ensuring its equitable redistribution. A 2017 study conducted by the

Chartered Professional Accountants Canada (CPAC) shows that not only are Canadian cities, including Montreal, most responsible for the growth of income inequality in the country since the 1990s, but that growth in inequality in Canada is almost exclusive to cities, with Montreal seeing the second highest growth in inequality since 1982 (after

Toronto) (CPAC 2-11). The fact that Canada is one of the most urbanized countries in the

Global North, with over 80 percent of its population living in cities (predominantly in

Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary) means that rising urban inequality affects most of the population (2). This situation is not unique to Canada. The creative city has come under criticism for worsening gentrification, displacement, and the equitable redistribution of wealth and access to urban rights, and for creating especially unstable conditions for an increasingly precarious service class (McLean 2014; Bélanger and

Cameron 2016; Dongan and Lowe 2008; Leslie and Catungal 2012; Gerhard, Hoelscher

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116 and Wilson 2017; Florida 2017). Even Florida has now admitted that creative city development has largely displaced problems that had formerly plagued cities to the suburbs, in a reversal of the city-suburb relation in the 1970s (Wainwright, para 4).

Spectacular moments of cultural democratization thus contrast with, and even potentially exacerbate, rising inequality in the city.

While spectacularization is the main dramaturgical move and placemaking technique of the creative city, mirroring is another. By using dramaturgical strategies that universally market their uniqueness and memorability, and through the transurban circulation of visual art and theatre as part of international art and festival circuits, creative cities across the globe seem ironically “more and more one mirror of the other”

(d’Ovidio 33). In this way, the creative city today creates similar effects to those of architectural modernism in the postwar period through to the Mexico ’68 Olympics. Like architectural modernism, the creative city is a global idiom for cities that has the effect of diminishing local difference. Together, creative cities around the world mass-produce images of diversity and uniqueness as the creative city has become the new universal blueprint modernism once was. Yet, while the reiteration of the modernist script,

116 In 2 002 Richard Florida gave urban policy makers a marketable formula (a ‘bohemian index’) for boosting economies by creating planning strategies that favour young, creative types in his book T he Rise of the Creative Class. But now even Florida has admitted that creative city planning has “p roven to benefit the already rich, mostly white middle class; fuel rampant property speculation; displace the bohemians he so fetishised; and see the problems that once plagued the inner cities simply move out to the suburbs” (Wainwright para. 4). This is the nature of the creative city crisis Florida describes in his latest book T he New Urban Crisis (2017). A s Florida stated in an interview with Oliver Wainwright from the Guardian: I realised that we need to develop a new narrative, which isn’t just about creative and innovative growth and clusters, but about i nclusion b eing a part of prosperity. It was the service class – the class I had forgotten – that was taking it on the chin. Florida d raws on an extensive arsenal of data to show how the most creative cities are also the most unequal, and how the geography of class and racial segregation has changed from being drawn along the lines of a poor, racialized inner city to upwardly mobile whiter suburbs to taking on a more patchwork form through urban and suburban spaces.

193 especially in the Global South, seemed to betray a desire to imitate ‘original’ architectural repertoires created in the Global North, in creative city dramaturgies, notions of originality and authenticity have given way to something else. Like simulacra, creative cities seem to copy other copies in a kind of urban vertigo in which it is not clear whether there is an original at all. While Montreal has a distinct urban history and makeup, and a long track record as a cultural capital, in its application of creative city strategies, it serves less as an exceptional case city than as an exemplary one.

Dramaturgies of Resistance?: The Burlesque Scene’s Fragmentation and

Incrementalism

A facile critique of creative city policy would characterize the arts and culture as the spatial enemy of a low-income service class, and urban scenes as straightforward agents of gentrification. Yet scholars are seeking to complicate this narrative by attending to the complex and plural relationships artists and cultural workers have with processes of urban displacement (Grodach et al. 2016; Lawrence 2013). Many cultural workers also belong to a precarious and easily displaced service class. While young creative ‘types’ did turn out, as Florida had predicted, to have incredible branding potential for cities, only the most wealthy of these ‘types,’ many of whom also belong to a lower-income service class, can afford to stay in the gentrifying neighbourhoods their bodily presence has been instrumentalized to brand. But questions remain regarding alternative forms of cultural visibility in and of the city that do not so easily slip into a damaging creative city logic of spectacle. If official dramaturgies of revitalization through spectacularization

194 create ruptures with old spatial meanings, and damage the ecologies of underground and community arts practices, how do endangered forms of creativity stake a claim to the city without becoming part of the spectacle? If Montreal’s dominant official dramaturgy, like that of other creative cities, is spectacularization, what defines the dramaturgy of

Montreal’s contemporary burlesque scene? And how does it situate itself vis-à-vis spectacularization?

These questions revive an argument from the 1980s and 1990s about the efficacy of cultural visibility. Will Straw outlines in his 2016 chapter “Above and Below Ground,” on the dual visibility and invisibility of contemporary underground music scenes

(specifically on the unphotogenic alternative music scene in Montreal), that writings on underground subcultures within cultural studies has been generally divided into two main camps, differing in their celebration or condemnation of cultural visibility. One camp is represented by Dick Hebdige’s reading of spectacular subcultures as waging their political wars at the level of the image and the look of power. The other is represented by

Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ), or spaces that temporarily escape the gaze of power and Society of the Spectacle, dissolving the moment they enter the field of view of power (Straw 406-7). These camps can be understood in terms of resistant subcultural dramaturgies. One dramaturgical model involves spectacular forms of self-showing within a dominant public sphere to convert “the fact of being under surveillance into the pleasure of being watched” (Hebdige 8). The other dramaturgical model is one of hiding from a dominant public sphere. Both resistant-spectacular and resistant-invisible subcultures are counter-dramaturgies to the easily consumable and

195 surveilling spectacle. Straw hypothesizes that, while a scene is a combination of both interesting cultural expression and supplementary social effervescence, in contemporary cities, the latter is displacing the former as the most valued and commodifiable aspect of urban scenes. Sharing Straw’s interest in the “dual character” of contemporary underground scenes as both visible and invisible, I propose the urban tease as an alternative counter-dramaturgy to spectacularization (Straw 2015: 403). The urban tease is a kind of dialectical resolution between these the two models of cultural showing and hiding represented by Hebdige and Bey.

Importantly, the urban tease centralizes the importance of temporality in questions about cultural visibility in ways that prove particularly intriguing for the consideration of resistant dramaturgies to the contemporary creative city spectacle. Indeed, there is something important to be said about the temporality of the spectacle as what philosopher and urbanist Paulo Virilio calls ‘speed-space.’ In his writing, Virilio theorizes speed as an

‘environment’ or ‘milieu.’ He understands social and political space as “shaped by vectors of movement and the speed of transmission with which these vectors of movement are accomplished” and argues that societies have developed according to a

“logic of ever-increasing transportation and communication” (James 29; 30). Speed-space is a phenomenological space, which is to say, space as it is experienced by the body.

Within this view of space, its only two dimensions, Virilio argues are acceleration or deceleration (Virilio The Aesthetics of Disappearance 102). What I want to highlight, here, is that Virilio’s arguments about the velocity of space positions speed as a

“constitutive [force] in the structuration of the visual field” (33). The creative city

196 spectacle should, I argue, be understood as an accelerated speed-space, that delivers the city as if instantaneously and in totality—“all at once.” The all-at-once-ness of the creative city spectacle can be observed in the cultivation of the creative city’s photogenic qualities, which allow parts of the city to be experienced instantaneously, and visually captured in a selfie. The contemporary city, Virilio argues, is an amnesiac speed-space

(Virilio Virilio live: Selected interviews 69). The temporality of performative interventions into the contemporary spectacle thus seems of prime importance. Can the

117 fast amnesia of the creative city be countered by dramaturgies of ‘slower’ urbanism?

While my insights about what I am calling the urban tease arise from observations of burlesque as a theatrical form and as an urban scene in Montreal, the urban tease might be viewed as a heuristic for existing and potential resistant dramaturgies of cultural presentation in the cityscape, and I suggest these might be particularly efficacious within the creative city today. In what follows, I reveal how burlesque’s stage dramaturgy of the tease offers a model for a potentially resistant dramaturgy of the urban. First, a few words on Montreal’s burlesque revival scene today, and a description of the logic of the burlesque tease.

Montreal’s burlesque revival scene, like the historical scene, is generally concentrated along Saint Laurent Boulevard across downtown in today’s Quartier des

117 City Planner Lawrence Herzog notes that “fast urbanism” is influenced by late-twentieth century high technology and “the increasing power of giant corporations to homogenize and control the experience of city dwellers by managing the design of physical space, transportation, housing, offices, and commerce.” Herzog argues that “corporations have had a huge impact on how people think about urban life and urban space.” Fast urbanism, he maintains, “feeds the ultimate corporate fantasy: cities filled with willing, spatially separated, electronically connected consumers.” H ow would a slower urbanism, characterized by spatially connected, more mindful consumers and technology users change how people think about urban life and space?

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Spectacles area and the Plateau and Mile End to the north. These burlesque zones are triangulated with important burlesque spaces in a neighbourhood east of the Quartier des

Spectacles called Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. The Wiggle Room, the only Montreal venue dedicated exclusively to burlesque, opened in 2013, is a shiny new space located on Saint

Laurent street in the demographically young Plateau neighbourhood. It features lavish interior textiles including bold floral wallpaper and plush red curtains, and a glittery bar, where one can order 11-dollar Prohibition-era-themed cocktails. Patrons of the Wiggle

Room can catch one of four to five mostly bilingual shows (usually leaning more towards

English) a week for 20-25$ a ticket, or $8-$10 on Wednesday nights. The space attracts some local regulars and members of the burlesque community, as well as tourists and burlesque “virgin” audiences of all ages, some there to celebrate birthdays or bachelorette parties. The clean, aesthetically curated design of the space, which the Wiggle Room shares with the revived 1930s cabaret space Cabaret le Lion d’Or located in the south-eastern neighbourhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (where burlesque events, which lean more towards French, can run between $25 and $40 for general admission and

$40-$60 for VIP seating), makes The Wiggle Room a relatively smooth space to transition into for more mainstream middle-class virgin audiences.

The pricing of shows and drinks in spaces like the Wiggle Room and Cabaret le

Lion d’Or make them more prohibitive to lower-income audiences then most of the city’s other burlesque spaces such as Café Cleopatra (home to The Candyass Cabaret), an older and more run-down burlesque venue located on a visually drab block of Saint Laurent further south in the former Red Light District. Café Cleopatra is a historic working-class

198 show-bar and active burlesque venue built in 1895, which has run as the bar and performance venue it now is since 1976. It is located above the strip club by the same name which is also owned by the bar and performance venue. The stairway leading up to the venue is pasted with pornographic pictures, and the interior space is a well-worn down, dark, carpeted space with red lighting and audiences that are, from my observations as a spectator, more mixed in terms of age (with more slightly younger, university-looking crowds), race, and class background, with (at least) weekly burlesque shows that can be seen for $15-$20, usually with beer or drink specials for about $4 on show nights. Other important spaces include: Café Campus, a francophone co-op and show bar on Prince Arthur street on the Plateau, an important space for the burlesque revue Bluelight Burlesque, which started in 2004, which can be seen there for between

$22-$26,50; Sala Rossa, a Mile End show bar that has been home to Kiss my Cabaret; and Bain Mathieu, a reused bathhouse in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve which regularly features impressive circus-burlesque shows by Cirquantique at $20-$25 a ticket.

Beyond these venues and revues, the burlesque scene is animated by visiting burlesque performers, and by spaces that are not always dedicated to burlesque performance proper, including hair and nail salons, dance schools, trade show venues, and restaurants. Fixtures of the scene include Mme Oui Oui Encore, who started Blue

Light Burlesque in 2004; Damiana Dolce, who co-founded Diary of a Lost Circus

Burlesque Cabaret around the same time; Velma Candyass, who founded her Candyass

Cabaret in 2010 (prior to this, Candyass produced a revue called Dead Dolls); and The

199

Lady Josephine, an award-winning performer who co-founded the burlesque school

Académie Arabesque Burlesque, which she now directs.

Assembling a broad mix of performers and audience members, Montreal’s contemporary burlesque revival scene has an inclusive urban address. It is represented by many performers who do not fit dominant conventions of young, thin, straight, bourgeois beauty. The scene regularly features performers from their early twenties through their fifties in the same shows, and audiences also reflect an important intergenerational mixing. The scene enacts a working-class politics that recalls that of early burlesque as well as punk. Montreal’s scene, like contemporary burlesque scenes elsewhere, shows a punk influence through DIY practices, including set, costume, and publicity design, repurposing spaces, and soliciting favours from friends and other members of the burlesque community for different aspects of the performance. The low production budgets and ticket prices of most burlesque shows, along with the location of many burlesque spaces in working-class neighbourhoods (also demonstrations of a punk ethos), help to enact a politics of inclusivity and accessibility valued by many participants in the scene.

While burlesque shouldn’t be conflated with other kinds of sex work, burlesque performers on their own are forming alliances with sex workers, whether they identify as such or not: for example, the Montreal-based performance collective Glam Gam

Productions (founded in 2009) has presented burlesque show fundraisers at Café

Cleopatra for the sex-worker advocacy group Stella. While the scene features a number of queer performers, it is less reflective of the city’s racialized and visibly disabled

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118 populations (Altuntur). New shows are beginning to reflect Montreal’s racial diversity, including a Latin-themed burlesque show “Cabaret Latin Seduction” produced by performer Jen Dance with Montreal Dance School DG Entertainment presented at Café

Cleopatra in July 2018, which suggests diversity in the scene. Montreal burlesque also

“benefits from a unique brand of weirdness,” Selin Altuntur writes. Lulu Les Belles

Mirettes, Montreal burlesque performer and founder of Montreal’s first burlesque geek revue, BurlesGeek, extends this thought: “While much burlesque is focused on glitter and glamour, the Montreal scene, a lot of [burlesque performers] in Montreal don't do beautiful shows—a lot of people do a lot of weird, comedy things” focused on gore and geek culture. BurlesGeek features numbers thematically inspired by everything from aliens to cadavers, cartoons, to video games, the cosmos, cyborgs, and Dan Aykroyd. The high representation of weird, gory, geeky, funny, and gender-bending routines in the

Montreal scene seem to invoke the ‘horrible prettiness’ that William Dean Howells observed in early burlesque. Like its historical form, the burlesque revival also uses the powerful presence of the live, self-exhibited bodies and voices of women in public spaces to perform a fleshly intellect and express a queer politics.

The form of burlesque shows is generally quite formulaic. Burlesque performers generally mount one or two solo numbers that last the duration of a song (usually about

3-4 minutes) within the context of a larger burlesque show organized by a producer

(normally a fellow performer). Burlesque productions have a host and take the form of

118 Montreal-based burlesque performer and producer of the geek-themed burlesque show Burlesgeek, Lulu les Mirettes recently commented on her experience performing in Seattle, which she found more outspokenly feminist than the scene in Montreal. Mirettes also noted the low representation of people of colour and of visibly disabled performers on the Montreal scene. “Obviously,” Mirettes stated, “that’s something I’d like to see change if we’re advocating for inclusivity and feminism [in the industry].”

201 variety shows of different kinds of burlesque numbers, sometimes interspersed with interactive games or contests with the audience and other acts, such as magicians, stand-up comedians, contortionists, and jugglers. Each burlesque performer has a gimmick for which they can be distinguished in a form of entertainment that is otherwise relatively formulaic. This usually involves a particular talent, whether it be singing, dancing, hula hooping, juggling, performing contortionism, the ability to make, design, or curate fabulous costumes, to make clever references or jokes, or simply to exude exceptional charisma onstage.

While burlesque numbers differ in their use of dance, humour, political satire, and glamorous costumes and props, the structuring dramaturgical principle of all burlesque is the tease. The burlesque tease uses a logic of seduction, which differs from the logic of exhibition and of the spectacle. A burlesque number enacts a drama of slow revelation and suspense in which the costume is not just a costume, but also a story (a series of events that build toward a climax), a choreography (a sequence of aesthetically interesting movements) and a script (that which gives structure to performance). The numbers from The Lady Josephine and Damiana Dolce, true to burlesque dramaturgy, are, in the words of Jo Weldon, founder of the New York School of Burlesque,

“choreographies of events,” most of which are “reveals”—or unveilings and displays of a part of the performer’s body as she “peels” or removes an article of clothing (The

Burlesque Handbook 116). While moving through a sequence of theatrical events, performers build to the climactic reveal of the number, which usually involves removing the final item of clothing to reveal pasty-covered nipples or a barely covered pubic area.

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The final reveal, which is often followed by a tassel-twirl (in which the performer twirls the tassels attached to her pasties by bouncing or shimmying her breasts), leaves the

119 performer almost naked, but not quite.

Through incremental and incomplete revelation, the dramaturgy of an individual burlesque number works to seductively reveal a joke, a body, a talent, or an idea while balancing spectacle with concealment and suspense. This is the art of the tease. The tease seduces through its play between what is shown and what is hidden, and by the performer’s command over what, how much, and how to reveal. By making decisions about what, how much, and how to reveal through the stretched out temporality of the tease (decisions which are as much about concealment and withholding as they are about exhibition) into their own hands, contemporary burlesque performers work against prevalent exhibitions of women’s bodies that are out of their hands.

Burlesque is very much about spectacle in Aristotle’s sense. It indulges our delight in the glamourous, the exaggerated, and the make-believe. It revels in the pleasure of shiny and silly objects that the performers animate, and which also at times seem to animate the performers. Costumes and other eye-catching thematic props (the performance “architecture” of burlesque)—boas, corsets, glitter, sequences, hula hoops, fans, chairs, gloves, pasties, tassels, hairdos, makeup—which can be any combination of glamourous, humourous, faux-glamorous, and DIY, are essential to the burlesque dramaturgy. These props build character, create narrative, prompt movement, and establish fantasy. While visual exhibition suggests an offering forth of visual information

119 The performer’s nipples and pubic area remain covered (except sometimes in the rare case in which she is performing in a venue with a nudity license) by a pair of pasties (nipple coverings) and a thong or some other pubic covering.

203 which one can enjoy, learn, grasp, and potentially master, and while the spectacle, in

Debord’s sense, invites often distanced contemplation and easy consumption, seduction rouses desire for that which it fails to offer forth; it impels a leaning towards, even a transfixed enchantment on the part of the spectator. At the best moments in a good burlesque number, if you look around at the audience, you will find them silent, still, focused, captivated by the performer, and then, vocally appreciative in accordance with good burletiquette.

I argue that Montreal’s burlesque scene is best understood in terms of a dramaturgy of the tease. Rather than being understood as akin to the creative city’s dramaturgy of spectacularization—or as either something like Bey’s Temporary

Autonomous Zones, which seek to completely resist the look of power, or Hebdige’s resistant spectacular subcultures—the dramaturgical components of Montreal’s burlesque revival scene work to enact a drama of slow revelation and suspense within the city. It does this through an interplay between several dramaturgical components, including: 1) an anti-photogenic, backgrounded architecture of dispersion; 2) an urban temporality of repetition and incrementality; 3) urban drag; and 4) economic (in)visibility. Together, these components work to create a dramaturgy of an urban tease.

1) Dispersion

As a spatial ecology, the burlesque scene, which is spaced out across venues in three main neighbourhoods, creates an urban image of dispersion that cannot be easily captured in a photograph; this contributes to the scene’s dual character as visible and

204 invisible. Not necessarily hidden in the cityscape, they easily sink into the urban background. As Altuntur notes in her article about the scene: “Attending burlesque shows may seem like a niche interest for the uninitiated—yet they are very easy to find when one knows where to look.” The exteriors of individual venues themselves are also, for the most part, less than photogenic. Café Campus and Le Bain Mathieu, for example, are not primarily burlesque spaces, and so do not announce themselves as such in their signage or built form. Café Cleopatra is one venue with a visually striking old and (in my view, delightfully) garish sign featuring naked cartoon women and a flashing light-bulb-frame that reads “Café Cleopâtre” surrounded by “spectacles continuels,” “danseuses à gogo,”

“disco” and “strip-teaseuses.” But the datedness of the sign combined with the fact that the venue has a somewhat drab grey stone exterior and is located on a dark strip of Saint

Laurent surrounded by other run-down-looking exteriors makes the built form of Café

Cleopatra incompatible with foregrounded urban dramaturgies of shiny, in-your-face spectacularization that surround in the rest of the Quartier des Spectacles. As in other cities, some of Montreal’s burlesque spaces, including the Wiggle Room and le 4e Mur, perform calculated images of visual withdrawal from the cityscape in the resurrection of a speakeasy aesthetic. From the street, even the Wiggle Room—the most mainstream of the city’s burlesque houses—is identified only by a small sign featuring an outline of a martini glass above an unmarked door.

The cathection of underground urban experiences staged, more or less theatrically by Montreal’s contemporary burlesque revival scene, not unlike those staged in other cities, seems to express a nostalgia for an expiring kind of city that existed before the

205 institution of a homogenizing drive towards total cultural spectacularization. It makes sense that the era of the creative city, which seeks to transform downtowns and other neighbourhoods into a total cultural foreground, would give rise to a nostalgia for the underground cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, when downtowns were ‘looser’ (or more

120 easily and heterogeneously appropriable) spaces. In current urban contexts, we are seeing the other side of the coin of the state divestment from cities in the 1970s. Today a tighter control is being exerted over cities through developer-driven appropriations of the urban space that underground scenes and community arts practice require to survive. The uses of urban space are becoming more homogenized and geared towards cultural consumption rather than production. The thrills of urban discovery afforded by the more heterogeneous and freely usable cities of the 1970s are disappearing in the flattening and acceleration of urban space into increasingly homogenous experiences. The revival of burlesque and speakeasies in North American cities might be understood as one expression of this nostalgia for an underground urban world that is becoming extinct due to creative city drives to total spectacularization, yet which does not always escape spectacularization in a context in which appearances are increasingly giving way to

120 I n the post-WWII period, Montreal, like other cities in North America and in Europe, was affected by high rates of deindustrialization and middle class suburbanization. As Magda Barrera writes, “During the 1960s the collapse of Montreal’s inner city industrial base and the move of residents and employment to suburban areas led to an increase in urban deprivation and a decline in population on the Island of Montreal” (24). As Barrera reports: Between 1959 and 1988, 21 000 jobs disappeared and over a 25-year period, the population of the district fell by over 50 000 (Ley, 1996) [....] Between 1972 and 1996, the population of the Island of Montreal fell by 260 000 while the off-Island suburbs grew by 700 000.” The out-migration was largely undertaken by young families and middle-class professionals, largely Francophone, drawn by greater employment opportunities, lower taxes, and more attractive housing (Langlois 2001). (24) During this period, the urban space of cities like Montreal incubated lively cultural scenes like those of disco, punk, and rock. In fact, during the 1970s, Will Straw has written that Montreal became disco’s “second city” (2014).

206 experiences. Whether images of withdrawal from the cityscape always escape the logic of the spectacle, an urban aesthetic of dispersion and low or withdrawn architectural visibility are important dramaturgical components of burlesque as an urban scene. As a built environment, Montreal’s burlesque scene blends into the background of the cityscape in a way that intervenes into official dramaturgies of cultural spectacularization that seeks to make everything a cultural foreground. Notably, the visual dispersal and withdrawal of urban scenes makes the activities that animate them moving, dispersed, and sometimes invisible targets for regimes of surveillance.

2) Repetition and Incrementality

Connected to the dispersed ecology of Montreal’s burlesque scene is its nature as an incremental temporal experience, which is also common to all scenes. If scenes cannot be experienced as a whole because of their spatial dispersion, they also cannot be experienced all at once. Fuelled by the pleasure of repetition, scenes are produced through acts of returning. Scenesters become ‘regulars.’ They have ‘haunts’ and ‘usuals.’

They are unfazed by what might appear as shocking to outsiders. They have seen it all before. Being ‘in-the-know’ coolly diminishes their capacity for surprise while increasing their appreciation for subtle differences. This is what makes them ‘cool.’ As Straw notes, repeated experiences of chance encounters in scenes “are like the sedimentation of artefacts or architectural forms within cities; through them, the city becomes a repository of [embodied] memory” (“Scenes and Sensibilities” 12). In this sense, the spectacle’s desire to create sensually engaging yet inoffensive and thus normatively appealing,

207 immersive, over-the-top, urban experiences seek to inhibit the cool, unfazedness, and sometimes even boredom, nurtured by urban scenes.

In their appeals for repetitive engagement across dispersed urban sites, scenes also make participants work harder than does the spectacle, and this urban work discloses the city as a different kind of ‘slower’ but more demanding place. Seeking out burlesque shows, again and again, opens up the city in ways that it might not otherwise be, creating trajectories through a distinct assemblage of neighbourhoods, people, public transit, and histories, which are not readily accessible through well-trodden tourist cartographies. In its stretched-out temporality, the burlesque scene is a tactic in De Certeau’s terms.

Whereas De Certeau’s urban strategies seek to limit the effects of time by founding places that resist the live unpredictabilities of the city, tactics manipulate temporality to unsettle urban strategies (36). De Certeau writes “strategies pin their hopes on the resistance that the establishment of a place offers to the erosion of time; tactics on a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and also of the play it introduces into the foundations of power” (38-9). Scenes intervene in spatial meanings through their utilization of urban time. Participation in local scenes creates a sense of place for urban users beyond the addresses, the immediacy, and the immersion of the urban spectacle.

The pleasure, and sometimes monotony, of repetition is also a key feature of burlesque as a performance form. Indeed, over the past few years of writing about burlesque, I have heard many friends and acquaintances comment that they do not like burlesque. It is ‘boring’ or very ‘hit and miss,’ I have often heard. I would say that, for the most part, Montreal burlesque shows offer a mixed bag in terms of production quality

208 and preparedness. Many numbers are meant to be fun, light, experimental, or instead standard. For those who enjoy burlesque, the mixity and imperfections of burlesque are part of its fun and, I would insist, are part of the burlesque aesthetic rather than aesthetic failures. Part of its punk aesthetic, the flexibility of the burlesque form that makes each number more or less of a knockout is also what allows for exploration, discovery, invention, and resistance. At the same time, burlesque has a formula. The format of shows themselves is almost always the same, and throughout each show, the public will see variations of the same burlesque formula iterated again and again, which for some may make it boring. In creating space for the boring, the imperfect, and even the bad, burlesque stage dramaturgy, not unlike its dramaturgy as an urban scene, resists the crisp, clean, and ostensibly ever-stimulating spectacle. The incremental and repetitive nature of urban scenes offers not only a dispersed counter-dramaturgy to the concentrated, photogenic spectacle, but also what Virilio might call a decelerated counter-dramaturgy to the accelerated city.

3) Urban Drag

Along with the experience of the burlesque scene being incremental and recurrent, the scenes also drags past urban practices and spatial meanings into the present. Because

Montreal’s contemporary burlesque scene is reviving an older twentieth-century performance form, contemporary burlesque performs a temporal ‘drag’ that was not central to the old burlesque and which contrasts with the spatial ruptures of creative city revitalization. Joanna Mansbridge has used Rebecca Schneider’s idea about how

209 performance “remains” through forms of historical reenactment to read the contemporary burlesque scene in Montreal as an “eruptive reappearance” of the city’s historical burlesque scene, which she views as being “recursively constituted from recycled historical remains” (7). Burlesque’s spatial-temporal drag produces the city as an eruptive place, in which temporally staggered spatial meanings emerge into the cityscape and into urban imaginations. Reenactment, which emphasizes spatial, cultural, and communal continuity or revival through the activation of the performing body as a living historical archive, contrasts with revitalization as a generally anti-archivalist and disembodied approach to urban placemaking. By dragging old spatial meanings into new ones, the burlesque revival performs the city as a durational and a restored, or twice-behaved place.

It opens up the city as a deep temporal experience haunted by its layered histories. Secret

Montreal is an example of how urban drag establishes topographical continuity and establishes women’s bodies as intelligent, transmissive archives. Through the narratives and site-specific performances of Secret Montreal’s burlesque guides, the bodies, practices, and venues of the Red Light District’s former burlesque scene ghost those of the present. Here, the contemporary city and contemporary women’s bodies are revealed to be reiterative phenomena with long histories, which is to say, phenomena not fully belonging to the present.

This view of the city as a palimpsestic space has also motivated other burlesque urban interventions. In addition to giving rise to Secret Montreal’s walking tours, the spatially disruptive effects of the Quartier des Spectacles development spurred the mobilization of Save the Main, a coalition for urban activism, which fought to preserve

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Café Cleopatra. Led by a group of community stakeholders including the club’s owner, burlesque performer Velma Candyass, and other heritage activists, Save the Main insisted that Café Cleopatra be recognized as a historic landmark and, in 2012, successfully prevented it from being destroyed. The burlesque scene uses visible performative interventions into the city as a strategy for conservationist placemaking, where conservationist placemaking is used as a safeguard for working class and women’s histories and spaces in the face of the nowness of a bourgeois spectacle. Through visible performative interventions, burlesque activist stage their right to the city.

Other strategies of urban visibility have also been used in the burlesque revival, namely the strategy of seeking to join the spectacle. In May 2010, Donovan King and

Velma Candyass presented a plan to the City of Montreal, using the rhetoric of the creative city to pitch the preservation of burlesque’s history and ongoing activities as part of Montreal’s branding directed at tourist revenue. King and Candyass’s proposal to integrate Montreal burlesque history into the creative city spectacle on the one hand, and their pleas to preserve Café Cleopatra on the other, suggests a complex negotiation of an underground community arts scene with forms of high and low urban visibility. While

King and Candyass see the potential to instrumentalize the visibility of the creative city spectacle to preserve the burlesque scene, their attachment to working-class spaces like

Café Cleopatra, which does not meet the sanitized, high-profile aesthetics of the creative city spectacle, also advocates for spaces of unspectacular culture. Two years later, when it was clear that their pleas to the city had fallen on deaf ears, Donovan, Candyass, and other urban heritage activists staged a performative intervention in the form of a

211 site-specific burlesque ‘funeral’ for the Main. Confronted with an amnesiac creative city, the burlesque scene uses performative interventions into the cityscape, urban narratives, and urban policy forums, activating women’s bodies, creativity, and voices (and those of their allies) as living places for remembrance.

4) Economic (In)visibility

In the temporal gap separating this chapter from the previous one, the politics of cultural visibility have changed. In 1970s New York, which found itself in a crisis of state care and responsibility as it was economically and affectively abandoned by the nation, urban undergrounds shaped place as relatively unsurveilled and unregulated embodied affective experiences by creating ritual atmospheres of interesting cultural expression and sociality. In the 1980s, the disco scene was largely displaced by developers as New York of the 1980s ‘revitalized’ the city by investing in finance and real estate. Today, the politics of underground scenes have changed. Montreal has harnessed the cultural sectors as sound investments for urban revitalization, and in this more regulated context, underground urban scenes are either commodifiable or endangered forms of culture. Less straightforward than simple cultural displacement and erasure, the creative city’s threat to the urban underground can be summarized as ‘spectacularize or else,’ a threat which echoes Jon Mckenzie’s claim that the twenty-first century’s replacement of repressive

Foucauldian discipline with the imperative to ‘perform or else.’ In Perform or Else: From

Discipline to Performance (2001), Mckenzie argues that the world is entering an “age of global performance,” and that compulsory expr essive and excessive performance is to the

212 twentieth and twenty-first centuries what repressive discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth (137; 18). A certain refusal of high cultural visibility within this context would seem to be a necessary tactic for a resistant urbanism.

But King and Candyass’s appeals to the city to include Montreal burlesque history as part of the city’s official brand also points to the connection between cultural invisibility and the cultural and economic precarity of cultural workers. Contemporary burlesque makes performers precarious and vulnerable to self-exploitation even as they are instrumentalized as part of the city’s cultural capital. Nicole S. Cohen writes in her article on contemporary cultural work (especially freelance work) as a site of struggle,

“Cultural workers are experiencing declining material conditions and intensifying precarity, defined as “intermittent employment and radical uncertainty about the future”

121 or ‘financial and existential insecurity’” (142). This historical phenomenon is supported by a capitalist rhetoric of ‘doing what you love’ as a kind of pay in the absence of actual financial remuneration, as something ‘you can’t put a price on.’ In the numerous interviews available online with burlesque performers in Montreal and in other cities that ask whether it is possible to make a living in burlesque, the answer is resoundingly: No

(Glitterbomb; KatieP; Dr. Lucky; Carpenter). The new burlesquers agree that, for many, the majority of their earnings goes back into costumes and production costs. Performing burlesque is a hobby practiced on the side of a day-job or in combination with other burlesque-related activities like burlesque teaching, pasty-making, or sewing. Burlesque

121 C ultural workers occupy a contradictory class location because they are integrated into capitalism yet differentiated from the working class by “cultural privileges, relative workplace independence and (usually) by remuneration levels,” but they are not capitalists: their “status as labour reasserts itself whenever [these workers] are subject to similar processes of exploitation and proletarianization as the working class below them” (Wayne 23).

213 performer and teacher Legs Malone says: “I don't know a single person who does burlesque because they have to make a living” (Vultaggio). Burlesque is, and is expected to be, a labour of love. To quote Mlle Oui Oui Encore, Montreal burlesque fixture and pioneer as an example of this phenomenon, she says “Life is so hard today. My tickets are the same price as they were 10 years ago, the economy is not good, but life is not only

122 about money, it’s about something else, and that’s why we do burlesque” (Carpenter).

New York’s disco scenes of the 1970s recuperated the city as a liberating space of ritual and play outside of structures of work. While burlesque, to be sure, functions in a similar way, within the creative city, cultural “play” is on the one hand increasingly appropriated by cities for their branding or tourist potential, or, on the other hand, endangered and exploited when this play is not directly co-opted as a kind of informal cultural economy. The fact that burlesque work is feminized work makes it continuous with the societal devaluation of women’s work and what we might call the structural informalization of women’s cultural work. Indeed, as I have written, and asked, elsewhere, regarding the limitations of high-culture contemporary art institutions:

In [a] context that privileges the work of white and male artists, and

higher-income consumers, community arts practices and non-institutional

underground scenes are especially important for women, low-income, and

racialized artists and audiences. How can we pressure our cities to preserve and

multiply the spaces in which these scenes might thrive? (Nigam 2018)

122 F or an insider’s reflections on the precarious conditions of burlesque performance, see Dr. Lucky’s “A Phenomenological Analysis of the State of Burlesque” (2014)

214

A measure of cultural visibility can create a platform for labour organization, or for securing subsidized or safeguarded (but not necessarily institutional) cultural spaces of production and consumption for community arts practice. Visibility might thus serve as a potential avenue out of the precaritization of community and women’s arts practices that have value for local communities, and for sustaining the diversity of city life in a context

123 of increasing cultural homogenization. Such incentives for community arts practice like burlesque to become visible (and legible) as valuable to the state is thus in tension with resistive potential in refusing cultural visibility that exposes itself to spectacularization.

Both cultural visibility and invisibility put underground and community arts practices at risk of co-optation and complicity in neoliberal urban development in their attempts to avoid the precarious situation induced by such revitalization. Both strategies (tactics?) of showing and concealing in the urban fabric of the creative city have the potential to be conservative or repressive. Thus, an interpretive approach that emphasizes the temporal negotiations of cultural visibility and invisibility in the cityscape as ‘launched’ in this chapter must replace an emphasis on the solely photogenic models of urban visibility.

Within the experience economy, in which having is being replaced by experiencing and appearing is being replaced by performing , a temporal view of the city is increasingly necessary to account for both the ways in which urban identity is strategically produced

123 I n her study, Louise Loison concludes that the Quartier des Spectacles highlights the need for planning interventions to preserve affordable spaces for diverse cultural producers in creative districts. These interventions, she maintains, will work to maintain these spaces as incubators for creation in the long term (94-100). Reserving urban zones as incubators for creation would help to protect feminist arts practice and women’s labour from their extinction due to top-down development approaches which invest in culture solely to instrumentalize it for profit.

215 from the top-down and for the ways in which tactical productions of the city might be visually arranged and temporally sequenced.

Conclusion

Reluctant or unable to flaunt itself on the surfaces of the city, while also working against top-down forces that would disappear local histories and practices of women’s cultural and placemaking labours, Montreal’s burlesque scene dances between cultural visibility and invisibility. It appears selectively, emerging fleetingly into the urban foreground while also creating spaces of spectacle (in Aristotle’s sense) in the urban background. Less structured than a burlesque number into a narrative, the burlesque scene enacts a choreography of ‘reveals’ within the urban fabric, without giving itself up for the total ocular scrutiny that creative city spectacularization scripts would require.

Instead, in its tactical response of what I have called the ‘urban tease,’ burlesque plays with time—stretching it out and separating it into increments. Its patient, partial displays are meant to inflame impatience or suspense in its public. Its temporality is at least double, and possibly multiple, as teasing opens up a temporal and spatial gap between what is promised and what is given, between what is hinted at, and what is shown. The point of the tease is that it does not fully or immediately deliver. It delivers partially, slowly, and in small increments. It withholds satisfaction in a way that might frustrate or please. ‘Teasing,’ when it comes to urban cultural visibility, and to burlesque stripteasing, contrasts with the all-at-onceness of the spectacle, of total exposure or immersion. The urban tease preserves urban mystery, variety, and possibilities for enchantment. It makes magic, leaving things to the imagination.

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We can read the Montreal burlesque scene’s dramaturgy of visual withdrawal from the cityscape, interspersed with more visible self-displays on the surface of the city, as urban tactic that enacts a feminist and cultural politics of women’s community arts practice. In Chapter One, I examined how the Mexican state sought to make the Mexico

’68 Olympic hostesses continuous with the spectacular total design environment created for the Olympics. Here, women were made to perform the modern, attractive ‘ground’ of the city and nation as part of dominant spatial strategy. The burlesque revival within the creative city—a context in which women and marginalized others act as brand-enhancers for a spectacular cultural foreground—highlights some of the resistive uses women and marginalized others might make of acts of alternately performing ground by blending into the unspectacular background and emerging into the visible urban foreground as figure.

With the urban tease, I introduce a temporal frame for understanding the dynamic relations between the urban foreground and background that contrasts with a more photogenic, or at least more accelerated (to use Virilio’s term) model of performing ground. I thus supplement Laura Levin’s concern with the “pictorial relation between figure and ground” with an attention to the temporal relation between figure and ground

(9, italics in original). Montreal’s burlesque scene tactically leverages the temporality of the urban tease to negotiate urban visibility. Through the tactic of teasing, the burlesque scene resists the injunction for culture to become either total cultural foreground or background, dynamically negotiating the two.

Will Straw argues that the way in which culture is being instrumentalized by cities today assumes that “what is scarce is sociability, not interesting cultural expression”

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(410). While in urban scenes, sociability once supplemented interesting cultural expression, within the creative city, cultural expression seems to supplement sociability.

The latter is spectacularized while the former blends into the background of urban life.

By blending into the background of the cityscape most of the time, the burlesque scene ensures that cultural expression rather than urban images of sociability remain the priority of the scene.

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Coda: Crafting the City?

Today in Mexico City, popular places for tourists to buy traditional Mexican crafts are the state-run FONART (Fondo nacional para el fomento de las artesanías or the

National Fund for the Promotion of Handicrafts) stores—clean, quiet, orderly shops which sell select, quality-assured crafts from every corner of Mexico at fixed and relatively inexpensive prices.1 24 In the interiors of the FONART shops, crafts are abstracted from the bodies and contexts of the craftspeople who produce them and arranged into careful displays. These state displays of craft are reminiscent of post-revolutionary indigenismo , which celebrated Indigenous heritage as foundational to

Mexican identity. While in post-Revolutionary indigenismo Indigenous culture was mobilized by the state as an instrument for integrating a culturally fragmented country,

Indigenous populations were still perceived to be in need of a kind of aesthetic rehabilitation into modernity. As Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio wrote in one of

Mexico’s first truly national texts, Forjando patria (Forging the Fatherland) “only when

“the middle class and the indígena have the same artistic taste” could Mexico achieve true unity (cited in López 16). As they appropriated Indigenous culture for national performance, the Mexican middle classes remained the gatekeepers and tastemakers of the nation. Though the FONART shops perform a similar gatekeeping function to post-Revolutionary indigenismo , the subject of this concluding section is how the nation-state has largely been displaced by the marketplace as the chief regulator of

124 P ost-revolutionary i ndigenismo, w hich gets described varyingly in terms of an “Indianization” (Saénz) a “browning” (Mary Kay Vaughan) or an “ethnicization” of the nation (López) was part of the assimilationist post-Revolutionary m estizaje p roject that sought to integrate a culturally fragmented country within a national “we” that was rural, Indigenous, and poor (López 7-8).

219 cultural performance today. Within this context, craft has been instrumentalized as a branding strategy for places and products, and as a commodity geared towards a market of individual consumers rather than functioning as the creative practice of a community of makers, or even as an instrument for performing national ideology. In this coda I reflect on how craft might be reimagined and reclaimed as practice for actualizing more democratic, equitable, and sustainable cities.

Beyond the ongoing state appropriation and regulation of Mexican crafts today, the young middle classes in Mexico City are also claiming Mexican craft traditions to make their livings as designers and businesspeople. In the hip middle class restaurant- and boutique-centric Mexico City neighbourhood (and hipster tourist destination) of

Roma Norte, one today finds weekend arts and crafts bazaars in which mostly young middle-class designers sell small batch, handmade, artisanal, and local products in clever packaging (many of them inspired by Indigenous craft methods, products, and aesthetics) alongside stalls selling artisanal ice cream, newfangled mezcal cocktails, and snacks. The bazaars buzz with young middle-class locals and hipster tourists on their way to and from adjacent cafés, restaurants, bars, and cultural events. Whereas design in Mexico City in the 1960s identified itself against craft—a strategy through which the middle classes distanced themselves from the country’s Indigenous populations, which which were associated with pre-modernity—in Mexico City today, crafting and designing have merged in the hands and minds of largely young, bourgeois (though increasingly precarious) producers.1 25 The old racial shame associated with Indigenous bodies seems

125 W hile in Mexico, contrary to in Canada or the United States, more young people join the middle class each year, precarity within the middle class (as in Canada and the US) is growing, as incomes for many middle class Mexicans are dropping (Parrish Flannery). Young, childless middle class residents of Mexico

220 today to have, if only partially and amongst some, receded (or at least transformed). This change is likely owing to the fact that the Mexican middle class is more confident in their disidentification from Indigenous populations than they once were. Today in middle-class

Mexico, Indigenous bodies, their practices, and their labours, can now be observed, avowed, celebrated, sympathized with, even loved from a more comfortable distance than they could be in the nation’s past, when elite Mexicans struggled harder to distinguish themselves from Indigenous populations.1 26

In the national capital today, the city’s privileged tastemakers bear a new name:

‘influencers.’ The role of these tastemakers is not ideological; rather than setting out to determine national taste and identity, they market themselves by influencing and predicting market trends through their appealing niche lifestyles, tastes, and social media

(and live) personas that attract ‘followers.’ These influencers are, on the one hand,

City spend much of their disposable income on non-essential items and experiences like restaurants, travel, and retail (Parrish Flannery; Alper and Comlay)—objects which are strictly out of reach for the majority of Mexico’s population. And yet, for these young middle-class consumers, relatively low salaries, extremely long work hours, a lack of job security (with many of them being hired in very short-term contracts), a lack of enforcement of labour laws, and a lack of unemployment insurance, combined with an economy that is less stable than that of Canada or the United States, pushes the possibility of long-term security out of reach for many within this class. While the Mexican government and a certain segment of the Mexican intelligentsia has been insistent in their characterization of Mexico as “Middle class society,” others are more critical of this view. Economist Rodrigo Aguilera writes that “a country like Mexico cannot be considered a predominately middle class society when the majority of its people still remain at a real risk of plunging into poverty through events such as sickness or accidents to household members, death of the main income earner, as well as macroeconomic shocks” (par. 6). “The cause of these vulnerabilities are varied,” Aguilera notes, “but include precarious labor conditions (6 out of 10 jobs in Mexico, after all, are informal), the lack of social benefits like unemployment insurance and universal healthcare, and—most obviously—low incomes.”

126Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film R oma, which is a love letter of sorts to his family’s nanny and servant when he was growing up, is a good example of this avowal of Indigeneity from a comfortable distance. The protagonist of the film, Cleo, an Indigenous nanny and housekeeper, is beloved by the middle-class family that she serves. But this love is directly dependent on her role as their affective and domestic labourer, in which she supplies the conditions of possibility of the family’s well-being through the great sacrifice of her own personal and familial flourishing. It is precisely because of the clear distance between Cleo’s reality and the family’s own that Cleo can be loved by them.

221 displacing the old nation-state as the privileged cultural gatekeeper and tastemaker, and on the other, becoming aligned with Mexico City’s official creative city program, which has successfully branded the city as a hotspot of design and creativity. This is an appropriation of craft for a new neoliberal age, in which the influence of markets and of cities is surpassing that of nations.

Some agents of this return to craft have included as part of their mission principles of fair trade, and of increasing the visibility of Indigenous artisans. Certainly, participants in the new craft bazaars understand themselves as part of a ‘woke’ generation that is interested in rediscovering and embracing its Mexican ‘roots’ through a revaluation of Mexico’s traditional practices.1 27 It would seem, too, that the return of craft is also partially aspirationally inspired by the return of craft in the rest of North America, where craft beer, artisanal soaps, and hand-printed tote bags have been multiplying in new consumer landscapes for the past decade.1 28

However, the return of craft in Mexico City does not so clearly and wholly destigmatize traditional craft producers, who remain part of a generally untrendy (though depended upon) informal economy. There is an Indigenous woman who sets up on the street outside of one particular bazaar on Colima street in Roma Norte who sells crafts

127 O ne of the most visible example of this return to craft is the city’s booming mezcal revival (a revival of the Mexican spirit made from agave—of which tequila is only one kind—traditionally associated with poorer, rural classes). Today thousands of different kinds of mezcal, many of them from small craft batches, are sipped from small shot glasses alongside beers and fresh a guas ( fruit waters) in bars and homes throughout Mexico City. 128 T he return of craft in Mexico is in some instances quite clearly inspired by those in the rest of North America, as in the case with the new craft beer movement in Mexico, the rise of hipster coffee shops and speakeasy bars serving craft cocktails, and the very recent popularization of pop-up thrift shops and clothing-swaps, which often occur in cafés or craft-adjacent contexts. The aspirational aspect of the new, young middle-class avowal of craft is reminiscent of the rediscovery of h uaraches (Mexican handmade leather sandals worn and made by Indigenous peoples since the pre-Columbian period) by Mexican hippies in the 1960s only once they had been embraced by US hippies travelling in Mexico.

222 from Indigenous communities—scarves, bags, table-runners, knit hats and gloves, hacky-sacks, at significantly smaller prices than the items found inside the doors of the bazaar. She is one of the many Indigenous street vendors and market vendors belonging to the informal economy who sell Indigenous crafts to tourists and locals. And yet, in the return of craft, it is not to such vendors, or even to state-run shops selling quality-assured traditional crafts, that Mexico City’s young middle-class consumers are flocking in such great numbers.

The ‘new craft’ in Mexico City is not viewed as traditional, poor, rural, and backward, but rather as edgy, middle-class, urban, and avant-garde. The practices and products of Indigenous producers are still being aesthetically and narratively

‘redeemed’—here, by middle-class influencers, artists, and designers in a new, neoliberal version of indigenismo . The hands of these new influencers and designers may or may not be connected to the products that they sell (some make their own products while some have them made), but they are certainly connected to their phones and screens, which they use to network, and to visually package and market their wares using savvy marketing strategies and aspirational aesthetics. The neoliberal return of Indigenous craft in Mexico City suggests that the attribution of creative authorship and value remain embattled, racialized issues in Mexico, and that craft endures as one of its important battlegrounds.1 29

129 W hile the cultural politics of craft have specific contours in Mexico, a similarly politically fraught return of craft can be observed elsewhere in North America, and beyond. In April 2018, Canadian craft historian Sandra Alfoldy gave a TED Talk titled “The Connected Hand” about the contemporary return of craft, which she has elsewhere ca lled “neocraft” (2007). He re, she presented this return as a largely Post-fordist and neoliberal cooptation of craft. This neoliberal cooptation of craft, Alfoldy argues, is, however, choosy about the ‘hand’ behind the handmade. Privileging the hands of virile white, bearded male craftsman, the neoliberal cooptation of craft, Alfoldy argues, is less interested in women’s hands and in hands of colour.

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The landscape of craft-vending in Mexico City is also bound up with the spatial politics of the city. Boutiques and indoor bazaars in middle-class neighbourhoods house middle-class renderings of traditional crafts from people who usually live in these same neighbourhoods. The young, urban, middle-class agents of these craft productions claim a right to the city that is physically concentrated, spatially central, physically protected by the architecture of boutiques and other buildings, reinforced by cultural capital and middle-class markets. This enactment of the right to the city conserves, class, racial, and generational neighbourhood dynamics by reperforming Roma Norte as a neighbourhood where the young middle-classes live, work, play, and create. By contrast, mobile

Indigenous producers travel to these neighbourhoods from the margins of city (where they can afford to live) from up to two hours each way to set up shop on blankets laid down on the street or on mobile carts for the day. Their right to the city is transient, marginal, mobile, spatially dispersed, unprotected from the elements, and physically and economically precarious. Whereas the middle-class craft shops and bazaars are given choice positions in the city, transient vendors poach leftover urban spaces.

I reflect on this return to craft in Mexico, as it belongs to a broader return to craft in North America and beyond, in these concluding pages for several reasons. First, the shift from the cooptation of creativity by nation-states for ideological and economic

What is more, this neoliberal cooptation of craft, which uses the labels ‘artisanal,’ ‘small-batch,’ and ‘handcrafted’ to move product, has alienated the objects of craft from the sensual contexts and processes of their making, thus producing what can at best be called pseudocrafts. Bruce Metcalfe uses the term “craft artists” to refer to those new makers who have internalized modernist principles like “making art for art’s sake; privileging the visual experience; and the separation of art from daily life” in their practices which in fact alienates craft from its location in and relevance to real life—indeed, from its use value. For women especially, much of their craft labour (cooking, knitting, sewing, child-rearing, and various other kinds of making) are located inside the home, or perhaps, in a humble Etsy shop, and persist as unpaid or underpaid work.

224 purposes towards the cooptation of creativity by individuals and businesses for financial profit observable in the contemporary return of craft reflects the shift mapped out by the three chapters of this dissertation more broadly. If the Mexican state instrumentalized culture for urban national performance during its industrializing phase in the 1960s, in cities in the aftermath of deindustrialization and suburbanization, urban culture is increasingly mobilized for more purely economic ends. George Yúdice describes this shift as one in which:

ideology and much of what Foucault called disciplinary society (i.e. the

inculcation of norms in such institutions as education, medicine, and psychiatry)

are absorbed into an economic or ecological rationality, such that management,

conservation, access, distribution, and investment—in “culture” at the outcomes

thereof—take priority. (1)

Second, if craft has been a frequent battleground of creative authority and property rights, so, too, has the city.

Lefebvre defined the right to the city as not only the right to use public urban spaces, but also the right to cr eate them. David Harvey defines the right to the city as “the right to change ourselves by changing the city” (23). Enacting one’s right to the city is a form of cultural performance that conserves or transforms the city through social reflection via dramatization or embodiment of symbolic forms, or instead through the presentation of alternative arrangements. However, “Currently, in almost every city in the world, the property rights of owners outweigh the use rights of inhabitants, and the exchange value of property determines how it is used much more so than its use value”

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(Purcell 142). For Lefebvre, property rights alienate the urban space from its everyday users, abstracting it from “its role in the web of urban social connections” (142). As Mark

Purcell explains, it follows that, “in almost all its forms the right to the city is understood to be a struggle to augment the rights of urban inhabitants against the property rights of owners” so that the city ceases to be primarily an engine of capital accumulation

(142;149). When cultural objects, whether they be crafts or cities, are appropriated by capitalist actors for their exchange value, the use value of these objects as practices belonging to the realm of social relations is minimized, and the creators of these cultural objects lose their power and authority to a class of cultural ‘owners.’

Another way of explaining the abstraction of cities from their use value, which had been intensified in a neoliberal moment, is to explain the capitalist city as the failure to practice the city itself as a craft. In his book, The Craftsman, Richard Sennett defines craftsmanship as “the skill of making things well” for their own sake (8). He describes the practice of craft as a state of absorption and engagement in which one loses oneself in the task of making—a state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow.’ Related to ritual, craft is an embodied and intellectual activity that “negotiates the liminal zone between problem-solving and problem-finding” (48). Incompatible with production processes that separate technical labours from intellectual ones, the practice of craft requires the collaboration of the hand and the head.

This definition of craft recalls the thoughtfully created disco spaces of 1970s New

York as well as the practice of burlesque, both of which are physical and intellectual labours. They also recall the informal housing that shaped Mexico City in the 1960s, and

226 which still do today. Notably, Sennett’s definition of craft recalls definitions of performance that emphasize performance as an embodied process that passes through a liminal phase.

It is my contention that urbanism has something valuable to learn from long traditions of craft-making. What if the city could be reclaimed and re-performed as a public craft, created by the people and for the people as a processual open system of knowledge embedded in the web of embodied social relations? Whereas designers in the

1960s, especially throughout the Third World, sought to distance themselves from craftspeople in their performances of modernity, perhaps a return to craft, one different from the neoliberal return to craft outlined above, holds promise for creating better cities.

We might rethink urban design as a craft in the sense in which Sennett defines it, and in the way in which craft has been practiced, not as a sexy neoliberal branding strategy, but rather as an embodied way of knowing, caring, creating, and transmitting knowledge by diverse populations around the world throughout human history. Crafting, in this sense, might offer those of us in postindustrial sites searching for better strategies for bringing about a collective good a productive framework for rejoining the hand and the head, the act of creation and the fact of ownership, in the process of city-making—connections which (as we saw in Chapter One) were so often ruptured in the process of industrialization.

At the opening of The Craftsmen, Sennett offers small portraits of craftspeople at work. A carpenter “bends over his bench to make a fine incision for marquetry” (19). A lab technician is “frowning at a table on which six dead rabbits are splayed on their

227 backs, their bellies slit open” (19). A conductor “works obsessively with the orchestra’s string section, going over and over a passage to make the musicians draw their bows at exactly the same speed across the strings” (19). These descriptions portray the practice of craft as a state of physical and intellectual engagement. The bodies and minds of craftspeople bend, puzzle, and obsess over their crafts. Craft is a form of being in the world in which bodies and brains become absorbed in the act of creation; it is a leaning toward a creative problem or process. Craft is an end in itself rather than a means to an end.

In the era of the neoliberal city, it has become routine for both the public and private sectors to exploit the labour of craftspeople. The practice of craft as an end in itself has been manipulated to justify the market devaluation of craft labour and the poor remuneration of craftspeople. As we saw in Chapter Three, a shaming discourse about

‘doing what you love’ is routinely used to justify low remunerations in the arts and culture sector, as if cultural workers should be embarrassed not to accept the love of one’s work as an acceptable replacement for compensation. The value of cultural work has also been driven down by industrial production and the offshoring of jobs to countries where corporations can drive down wages even further. The separation of manual and intellectual labour in the current economy, and the devaluation of the former in relation to the latter, has contributed to an economic landscape that hinders the flourishing of craft practices.

However, a return to old practices and concepts of crafting, which must necessarily include a social and economic revaluation of craft, might offer paths for

228 re-embedding urban value in the realm of social relations, for reconnecting urban beauty with urban usability (and urban exchange value with use value), and for democratizing the right to the city in an era in which the majority of us are being systematically deprived of this right. Taking crafting seriously as a process for placemaking might also create critical contexts for learning from Indigenous knowledge and practices in participatory creations of place and for challenging settler spatial uses and meaning.

Finally, crafting might offer a model for thinking of urban performance outside of the advent of what Jon Mckenzie has called the “age of global performance,” which demands continuous expressive and excessive performance (137; 18). More focused on process than on audience, on the doing of performance rather than on the thing done of performance, the craft of performance is not bound to expressive spectacle. Rather than being focused on a market of individual consumers, crafting is focused on the collective creations of a community of makers. The democratic nature of crafting is highlighted by

Sennett and Cardoroso. As Cardoroso notes, “Craft is not primarily an individual experience but a collective one [...] At heart, craft aims for a type of creativity that is universal and pervasive ” (331). Everyone is capable of becoming a good craftsperson, both writers insists.

As a practice that shapes experience through the interaction between makers and the city, urban design can be reclaimed as a form of craft, which would mark a return to pre-nineteenth-century understandings of craft and design, when the two were viewed as synonymous (322-3). And indeed, as Cardoso notes: Over the past twenty years or so, with increasing specialization and systemic complexity, designers have begun to revive

229 the old lessons of creative authorship and creative commons, sharing with colleagues, intermediaries and users the responsibilities of making things work” (331).

So, what might practices of crafting the city look like, in practice? Forms of urban crafting are already being mobilized in urban centers around the world. The global urban farming movement is an example of the craft-based placemaking. Urban farming engages city-dwellers from diverse backgrounds and income groups in converting rooftops, warehouses, and plots of land into gardens. In this movement, the craft of gardening is activated as a pedagogical practice for educating urban children and adults about the environment, healthy eating, food security, cooking, and the benefits of eating locally.

Community gardens bring together local residents to invest in their neighbourhood and work towards a common goal. Not only do community gardens embellish neighbourhoods, but they also create contexts for skill-sharing and the formation of new social networks. Through collective gardening, cities are practiced as open systems that can be readapted to changing local needs.

At the same time (and as explored in Chapter Three), these kinds of movements that improve the image of neighbourhoods are at risk of being co-opted and absorbed by capitalist processes of gentrification. The vulnerability of craft practices to the absorption by capitalism is a reality that will have to be constantly negotiated in a neoliberal era defined by what Yúdice calls the ‘expediency of culture,’ or the instrumentalization of

“culture-as-resource” (1). One potential strategy for keeping gentrification in check is the subsidization of housing and collective spaces of cultural production to ensure that neighbourhoods remain mixed-income and mixed-use rather than exclusive to the

230 wealthiest urbanites. Government subsidization could help to offset the troubling tendency of trendy cultural practices to exacerbate urban inequality.

Some examples of urban crafting are less susceptible to cooptation. Squatting, for example, is a form of craft. Squatters in Mexico City, rendered homeless and spatially marginal due to poor city planning, use resourceful creative practices to poach spaces and craft homes over long periods of time. While their spatial practices are deemed unlawful, urban planners would do well to learn from their creativity and resourcefulness, and to listen to their needs to improve their planning strategies. Other examples of urban crafting, albeit more institutionalized ones, are the architectural practices initiated by

Indigenous Placemaking councils. Indigenous Placemaking Councils, such as the

Councils in Calgary and Toronto, engage Indigenous populations in processes of participatory design aimed towards giving space to Indigenous creativity, knowledge, and spatial practice in the urban form. Part of a larger project of what, in Canada, has been called “Truth and Reconciliation,” the constructions of Indigenous Placemaking Councils are meditations on Indigenous spatial presence and absence through time.1 30 What might an Indigenous ‘truth’ look and feel like, as a building? Might spatial practices of building function as one set of actions for addressing—if not healing—the ongoing North

American crisis of Indigenous dispossession? Is reconciliation and answer or a question?

And what space is given to ongoing histories of violence, dispossession, and mourning, in the places that people move through in everyday and extraordinary contexts?

130 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was active between 2008-2015. The purpose of the Commission, which was carried out through public and private gatherings across the country, was to name and document the living legacies of the Canadian Indian Residential School System in its survivors.

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To consider another issue, it is increasingly imperative that we consider the role that technology is playing and will continue to play in the craft of the city. Sennett notes, for example, the potential usefulness of Linux smart city systems, or open-source (as opposed to prescriptive) systems of computation that can draw on the knowledge, opinions, and expertise of all citizens with access to the technology. As Sennett explains,

Linux uses big data “to give people a sense of choices that they can make,” and has practical applications, such as “collective budget-making in Brazil, in which you can collect a lot of data from voters to present them with ways of making decisions about how they want to spend municipal budgets” (Doherty). And indeed, key features of urban craft include its open-source nature, its relatively extended temporality (its slowness), and its adaptability over time.

Approaching the city as an open craft process challenges creative city approaches that ‘revitalize’ neighbourhoods as spectacular places for privileged cultural consumption over and above more democratic collective practices of cultural and spatial production. In its potential to elevate the city’s use value above its exchange value, a craft approach to the city is companionable with a project that seeks to reclaim an urban reality for its users rather than speculators. Note that a view of the city as craft is less invested in a photogenic model of the urban than is the creative city. Instead, an urban craft approach favours processual, adaptable, unfinished, embodied, and temporally extended collective practices. The lens of performance, which brings the embodied and temporal dimensions of experience into focus, serves as a useful tool for understanding the city as craft.

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This dissertation has reflected on the use of culture for urban formation in different cities throughout North America from the sixties to the present, attending to how culture has been mobilized in different moments of economic transformation.

Industrialization in Mexico led to the alienation and disavowal of the body (and craft practices) in official forms of urban placemaking, which were presented as intellectually produced by designers and industrially produced by machines. Rather than being unique to Mexico City, the alienation of the body in industrializing urban life, and the mobilization of industrial architecture and design as a spectacle of modernity, cuts across urban contexts in North America and beyond. Deindustrialization and suburbanization in

New York in the 1970s, not unlike elsewhere, created space (both physical and creative) for socially marginalized bodies to experiment with unofficial forms of embodied placemaking in the city’s downtown. While it is easy to romanticize the deindustrial urban contexts of the 1970s and the resilient embodied responses of its diverse city-dwellers, it is vital that we remember that the newfound urban freedom of this era was the result of a crisis of state responsibility that disproportionately affected bodies marked as ‘other.’ While embodied redressive actions can and have meaningfully, and sometimes very powerfully respond(ed) to crises of state responsibility, they are no replacement for sufficient public infrastructure necessary to democratically support collective life.

In neoliberal postindustrial contexts where culture is instrumentalized as a resource to replace the lost industrial base, the resilient bodies that crafted urban spaces anew in the 1970s (and later moments of deindustrialization) have replaced industrial

233 designscapes as the privileged spectacle of the urban. In the neoliberal city, the body—previously displaced by design and industrial mass production—has returned, not as a crafter of urban life, but as a spectacle of the urban form—as a brand, an image, a strip of space. In this context, it is vital that we reflect on how our bodies and practices, and the bodies and practices of others who are different from us, are routinely aestheticized and co-opted even when our practices feel radical . Because neoliberalism excels at co-opting actions as appearances, our very visibility in space makes us vulnerable (and differently vulnerable, depending on who we are). For this reason, it is essential that we be mindful of the dramaturgical dimensions of our political actions—of how are actions ‘look.’ In our present context, the lens of performance promises to be a vital resource for carrying out a thoughtful and efficacious politics of the city.

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