The World Is Your Stage

Architecture, Cinema and Live Performances

How do audiences understand, interpret and experience films? How does the sensory field relayed by cinema relate to, or impinge on, our everyday rhythms of being? Can cinema as an experience play itself out in an ‘everyday’ space, one that is not memorialized forever in the confines of a film, but open and vulnerable to the effects of time, place and situation? This character is embodied by live performances in the city.

In a space as diverse, fast-paced and unstable as a city, the boundaries of ‘existing’ and ‘possible’ are constantly blurred. Live performances have the ability to regenerate a space, maybe for just a few moments, liberating people from the bounds of daily life by providing an escape into a space that is not just sensed through imagination, but can be lived in, touched, smelled and experienced.

These two art forms (live performances and architecture) use their temporal and spatial associations to create, as well as mediate, comprehensive images of life as it was, is and as it could be. Performances have the power to create new dimensions of existential space and experience, breaking through the prevailing paradigm of ‘built’ architecture. The encountered, remembered and imagined are equal experiences in our consciousness; art can create images and emotions that move us as much as actual encounters do. Like films, these performances have the ability to direct people through space, engage their responsiveness and divert their attention; all in the same instance. Live performances exist in the boundary between cinema and reality.

As an apparatus that orchestrates sense perception and plays with perceptions of presence and absence, it has often been argued that cinema is involved in a fundamental transformation of the horizons of human experience. Cinema was created to provide people with an escape from the spaces that contained them, but this innate ability to transform and imagine has bled into the city, with the temporality of live performances contributing to the elasticity of urban experience. Places such as New York have adopted this temporality of experience into its urban fabric, with street performances and shows becoming synonymous with landmarks such as Times Square, as well as synonymous with the perception of the city.

Cinema can be maneuvered; its essence can find its way in unregulated spaces of everyday life. These dispositions of energy, attention, tactility and perception are organised to work with the relationship between the audience and their physical space. With the world as its stage, these live displays challenge viewing experience by rooting them in its location, and asks us to look at that context itself as a venue for cultural practice and meaning making.

-Raeka Tambawala

References:

1. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The New Film History’, Sight And Sound, Autumn 1986.

2. Koeck, Richard, Cine-scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.