Imagining cosmopolitan space: spectacle, rice and global citizenship

Abstract

How do you stage the world? This article reviews how a series of performance installations by the theatre company Stan's Cafe have approached global space. It examines the way Plague Nation and Of All the People in All the World tackle national and global scale through the representation of populations. Drawing on a discussion of cosmopolitanism by the geographer, David Harvey, the paper argues that the school versions of Plague Nation point towards a geographically rooted drama pedagogy for global citizenship. This pedagogy displays political and aesthetic features in common with Baz Kershaw's theorisation of ‘spectacles of deconstruction’. The article concludes by exploring how the installations' own global travels might be understood as a practice of global citizenship.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitanism
• citizenship
• global health