Moving through place: itinerant performance and the search for a community of reverie

Abstract

On the morning of 19 May 2005—FA Cup Final Day—Lawrence Bradby, poet and performance maker, and Carl Lavery, teacher and writer, embarked on a Situationist-inspired dérive or drift through Norwich, a city which both of them knew well.

During the drift—which they preferred to call ‘a mobile site-specific performance’—they aimed to evade the routine paths which the city encourages one to take. Instead they wandered across boundaries and through different zones, on a route which was both structured and improvised. The structure was provided by Thomas Cleer's True and exact mapp of Norwich from 1696. Bradby and Lavery used the map to identify the sites of the ten medieval gates. Their drift intersected the wall, or its remains, at each of these sites; in between they improvised, allowing themselves to be led by their attention to the teeming detail which in daily life must be ignored. They engaged people in conversation, always asking the same few questions: Where are you going to? Do you use this street often? How does it make you feel? These dialogues were the points at which the performance of the drift declared itself, like a narrator addressing the audience.

Bradby and Lavery's playfulness concealed a serious intent: to locate the community normally silenced by the banal consensus produced by the society of the spectacle. They wanted to know how people inhabit, represent and practice space, both collectively and individually. In common with Gaston Bachelard's notion of reverie as an operation that poetically reconfigures place, the performance allowed people to stage their personal responses to their surroundings. As imagined by Lavery and Bradby, this was community theatre and site-specific performance of an entirely different order, based on a utopian attempt to reassert what Henri Lefevbre called ‘our right to the city’.

Figure 1. Thomas Cleer's True and exact mapp of Norwich, 1696 (Stephens, 1927)

The drift was both a performance and a way of thinking by walking. To sift and order these thoughts in the months afterwards, Bradby and Lavery began a dialogue in letters. These letters have little interest in re-presenting their walk in writing. Instead, they seek to reflect on their performance and theorise their practice by picking out key parts of the drift.

Figure 2. The porous city produces a type of joyous civic improvisation

Figure 3. Which way now?