The Performance and Politics of Place: Mexico City, New York, Montreal
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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 © Sunita Nigam, 2019 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. With 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