The Invisible City

Travel, Attention, and Performance

Kyle Gillette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429649288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveller, writer, and creator of theatre to illuminate how cities offer travellers and residents theatrical visions while also remaining mostly invisible, beyond the limits of attention.

The book explores the city as both stage and content in three parts. Firstly, it follows in pattern Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, to produce a constellation of vignettes recalling individual cities through travel writing and engagement with artworks. Secondly, Gillette traces the Teatro Potlach group and its ongoing immersive, site-specific performance project Invisible Cities, which has staged performances in dozens of cities across Europe and the Americas. The final part of the book offers useful exercises for artists and travellers interested in researching their own invisible cities.

Written for practitioners, travellers, students, and thinkers interested in the city as site and source of performance, The Invisible City mixes travelogue with criticism and cleverly combines philosophical meditations with theatrical pedagogy.

1

Thinking (with) the city

Figure 1.1Drawing by Beverly Morabito

The city has long played a foundational role in western culture’s performances of myth, justice, and power. Over six millennia ago in Mesopotamia, Uruk became the world’s first true city, the birthplace of writing and stone architecture. The ancient Sumerian city later garnered poetic fame as its quasi-mythic king Gilgamesh starred in the world’s oldest extant epic. In the Iliad, Homer sang of Troy and the war outside its walls. In the Odyssey, he sang of long journeys home afterwards. Centuries later, Aeschylus’s ancient trilogy the Oresteia begins with the return of Agamemnon after conquering Troy and slaughtering or enslaving its citizens. In the first play, Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon in revenge for the sacrifice of their daughter; in the second, Orestes murders his mother Clytemnestra. In the trilogy’s final play, Aeschylus creates a utopian image of the democratic city Athens to replace archaic blood feuds and monarchies with civic justice determined by a jury. Orestes’ murder of his mother—and the generational net of retribution around his vengeful act—threatens the community beyond the cursed House of Atreus: this web of violence hinders progress more generally towards a public and deliberative polis by making it difficult for citizens to trust in safe civic space. Tribal blood feuds, with their clannish infanticidal or matricidal acts and endless acts of revenge, must be replaced, sublimated into the progressive Athenian vision of civilization. Hence a city on a hill where courtrooms replace battlefields, democracy replaces tyranny, and theatres replace fortresses.¹

During the City Dionysia Festival so fundamental to classical Athenian identity, in the Theatre of Dionysus embedded in the heart of the city, Aeschylus staged a mythic Athens as the embodiment of democracy, the triumph of classical urban deliberation over tribal affiliations (and of Athena’s patriarchal allegiance to Zeus over old pre-Olympian gods and their chthonic matriarchal roots beyond city walls). Athena and the jury transform the vengeful Furies into harmonious Eumenides who swear to nourish the city and its citizens forever. At the end of the trilogy, chorus, tragedians, and audience progress out of the open air theatre, into the city. Aeschylus’ trilogy, at least mythically, cultivated earth and old tribal energies into democratic urban flourishing. Wealthy citizens funded and performed the plays that competed in the City Dionysia Festival, ostensibly as devotional acts to Dionysus, thus infusing the theatrical with the political and religious status of the city. Sharing images, stories, and discourse publicly, the ancient Greek theatre thus imagined the city as a site where citizens participate in the same spectacle, the same myths whereby Athens can negotiate shared civic identity.

In part as a reaction against the democratic and theatrical character of Athens, Plato took the ancient Greek polis as a helpful model through which to imagine more clearly the interrelated parts of the individual mind, or soul. Through the character of his mentor Socrates, Plato imagines the hypothetical city of his Republic as a way to show why it is better for a person to be just than unjust, better to pursue wisdom than to remain blinded by appearances—even though unjust people and those intoxicated by images can all too often appear more successful or comfortably entertained. Injustice and delusion, threats to anyone’s character, and therefore happiness, grow more apparent when magnified to the size of a city—here, interrelated parts of society reveal how injustice and imbalance cause suffering. Suspicious of Athens’ democratic institutions and theatrical fictions, Plato imagined a city ruled instead by properly educated philosophers, guided by rational inquiry and clear thinking. His city would be organized around the Truth as understood abstractly: ideal Forms outside time, not prone to mutable opinions of the pleasure-seeking populace and its theatrical depictions of social relations. So should the ideal citizen be ruled, Plato’s Socrates reasoned: by looking for the source of the light, by a desire to understand the deepest nature of reality and ethics, not by getting caught up in sensory images and seductive stories. The ideal Forms of heaven transcend not only artistic depictions but even concrete particulars that litter city streets—things themselves being mere copies, imperfect, all too mutable.²

Plato’s ideal truth cannot be found in the tragic fictions of Aeschylus shared in a city theatre. These deceptive images, as Plato saw it, were just so many shadows projected on a wall of the cave, seductively confusing spectators about their veracity. If Aeschylus’ theatre offered images, mythic figures, and patriotic narratives, it still left humankind in the dark, no better than cave-dwellers; it still left citizen-spectators just as blind to the nature of things. From prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings to Plato’s allegorical cave, was civilization to remain stunted at this primitive illusionistic phase, still walled off in self-imposed artifice, dripping with superstition, emotional manipulation, and magical thinking? Plato’s ideal city would invert the cave’s darkness and dissimulation, drawing citizens into the light. The theatre, like the cave, would have to be left behind (or radically transformed) for a balanced city, for a balanced citizen. Athens invisibly underlies Plato’s ideal city in photonegative: the dangerous public sphere of theatrical space, spectacle, sophistic opinion-peddling, and democratic speeches. Yet Athens also provided locations for Socrates to question sophists and challenge young aristocrats to examine their assumptions. (This city eventually provided the jury that ‘democratically’ condemned Socrates to death for corrupting the youth.) Plato founded his Academy, where he staged lectures and dialectic philosophical inquiry on the outskirts of the city, just beyond Athens’ ancient walls.

Centuries later, St. Augustine of Hippo built on top of Plato’s ideas to conceive his influential City of God, which contrasted the ‘Earthly City’ of Pagan Rome against the divine joy and harmony of a ‘Celestial City.’ The City of God, where divine worship spills out of church buildings into pure city streets populated by the elect, brings cloistered ritual into public performance and resembles a vision of urban flourishing imaginable to Roman citizens of late antiquity but idealized into an ur-city of pure spirit, one that operates in direct opposition to the moral decay (violence, pleasure, riches, decadence, and debauched theatricality) of the ‘Earthly City.’ As Rome was sacked, Augustine argued against those who blamed the young religion, Visigoths spared churches, where providence protected the only aspect of Rome worth saving: its nascent Christian community.³ Against a backdrop of Roman comedy’s harsh satirical depictions of Christians—and more violent entertainments involving torture by fire, lions, and crucifixion—the early church shared Plato’s distaste for theatre proper and also the city’s paratheatrical entertainments. Early church fathers shared the ancient philosopher’s scepticism of urban pleasures.

Despite its bloody circuses, persecuting emperors, and capacity for sinfulness as depicted in the Hebrew scriptures (Sodom and Gomorrah), the city also provided Christians concrete ways to imagine heaven and a renewed significance to Jerusalem. Cities’ interaction across cultures and languages made possible the religion’s first centuries. City names came to shape the founding documents of the New Testament: the Letters of Paul to churches in Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, Thessalonica, and, of course, Rome. Rome itself continued after the ascendancy of Christianity as the state religion under Constantine to make of its streets elaborate displays of objects, animals, human beings, and cultural performances sacked from conquered cities. Within a few centuries, collections from across the former empire and beyond not only filled private villas and public piazzas, but especially the endless galleries of the Vatican Museums: galleries of objects that witness to and perform global imperial power culturally and financially long after the fall of the western empire. The church, meanwhile, gave birth to liturgical dramas that spilled into city streets across Europe, nourishing the very theatre early church fathers once decried as satanic. The medieval church’s architectural and theatrical work tried to stage the invisible city, the celestial city, in the very streets of the mortal city, the temporal city: Oberammergau, York, Avila.

Western literature’s visions of paradise or the infernal are deeply interwoven with theatrical visions of the city. In the European medieval imagination, celestial realms often appeared urban in their population density and elaborate fantastical architecture or arrangements of bodies on successive levels, from the seven-walled city of Heaven filled with beautiful perfume and music in the Irish poem Vision of Adamnán to the city of Dis in the sixth circle of Dante’s Inferno. Renaissance popes and nobles spent vast fortunes on building Vatican City and Florence into open, well-planned heavens on earth (even as powerful families like the Borgias and Medici created illicit cities hiding in plain sight or behind hallowed doors). Theatre, processions, and spectacles played an important role in these urban displays of divinity and debauchery. Protestant theocratic cities such as John Calvin’s Geneva and Oliver Cromwell’s London banished theatre and celebratory public festivals, associating these modes of performance with the ritualistic, latently pagan, and theatrical cities of Roman Catholicism. Jewish culture and thought flourished—though often under terrible persecution—in neighbourhoods in Rome, Krakow, Amsterdam, and Cordoba where synagogues, theatres, and literary and intellectual life wrote the ongoing history of the people outside Jerusalem. Jerusalem stands, of course, at the nexus of the three Abrahamic faiths, a city traumatized by millennia of sacking and pregnant with meaning for most of the world’s population. Before Mecca, Jerusalem was the first Qibla, the Islamic holy city all the faithful prayed towards.

The theological significance of cities is hardly restricted to monotheistic or western traditions. Buddhism, though associated with Thai forest monasteries, Tibetan mountains, and Indian deer parks, flourished through its dissemination in cities, as Hinduism had already thrived on the populated banks of the Ganges. Shinto shrines and Zen temples are deeply interwoven with the urban aesthetic of old Japanese cities like Kyoto even as they idealize monastic life outside cities. Confucian rules govern not only filial piety and civic behaviour but also the geometric arrangement of Beijing’s Forbidden City and related holy sites. Confucianism regulates city life—political, familial, architectural, and bureaucratic relations—with great ritual care that keeps things in harmony with traditional modes of authority. Even Taoism, associated as it is with rivers and secluded mountains, informs urban design practices through feng shui concepts. Taoist priests and laity memorialize the dead in elaborate temples from Taipei to Hong Kong; funerals fill the streets outside temples with rich singing, colourful costumes, dances, incense, and ritualized mourning practices.

Religions, though so many originate in deserts and forests, become themselves most theatrically in cities: Bodhgaya, Lhasa, Kyoto, Varanasi, Mecca, Jerusalem, Cairo, the Vatican. It is in cities that religion’s processions and architecture most vividly sanctify everyday space, bringing invisible ghosts into daily life. But religions often eschew cities too, retreating to caves and beneath trees to find God, or goddesses, or enlightenment. Monasteries offer alternatives to the city’s seductive, excessive ways, working salvation by offering an alternative to urban life. The rhythms of Benedictine and Shaolin monastic orders alike tend to those whose suffering magnified in cities. Then again, religions of the desert or mountains often imagine an ideal or promised city, a Kalapa or Jerusalem. Within or outside the city, organized religions rarely ignore the city. Like a secular pilgrim, I gravitate towards sacred spaces when I travel, seeing in temple architecture and devotional ritual performances particularly theatrical expressions of the world’s religions, shadows of the city.

Secular modern thought often examines cities as microcosms that stage civilization’s political or psychological ills. Karl Marx’s experiences and research in London helped shape his understanding of bourgeois capitalism’s alienating effects on the factory-bound proletariat. In the following century, cities from Paris to Moscow would become the epicentres of revolutionary acts inspired by his writings. For Sigmund Freud, Rome offered an imperfect but influential model for the individual psyche, with its ruins of previous stages built upon and sublimated into new structures:

let us make the fantastic supposition that Rome were not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the latest. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars were still standing on the Palatine and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus was still towering to its old height; that the beautiful statues were still standing in the colonnade of the Castle of St. Angelo, as they were up to its siege by the Goths, and so...