Abstract:
This paper discusses Come Join the Circus, an urban-space performance workshop in which a group of children, working collaboratively with the authors, produced a performance walk. In making this site-specific choreographic work the group collectively investigated, imagined and enacted the social and spatial history of a suburban town centre. This event contributed to make believe: imagining a new park for New Lynn, a two-year long project with Auckland Council to generate and employ novel approaches for the publics’ engagement in the design of a new urban park. In this paper Come Join the Circus will be considered as opening a form of strategic practice, a term borrowed from the philosopher Freya Matthews. Matthews, concerned by the specular distance maintained through western practices of theory, in which we “look at the world and imagine it as spread out passively for our epistemic gaze,” instead proposes the use of “addressive modes” to generate “close attention and adaptiveness to shifting patterns in a localized field of agency”. Performance making, as central to the framework of Come Join the Circus opened the space for such agency. This paper will speculate that in Come Join the Circus knowledge of the urban realm was thus developed and shared through such a strategic practice.