Citizenship, Civic Memory and Urban Performance: Mission Wall Dances

Abstract

The meaning of art changes in various contexts. This article examines how an outdoor performance transformed an urban street in the Mission District of San Francisco into a site of citizenship and political communication. This is the story of how choreographer Jo Kreiter and her small group of dancers used the power of memory, the social narratives about her San Franciscan performance site and symbolism to enhance the political message about gentrification embedded in her dance piece Mission Wall Dances. The relevance of public performance, however, does not come exclusively from its location, but rather includes its engagement with civic life. The performance of Mission Wall Dances became a dialogue between the physical site, the specific subject matter and the experiences and memories of the audience members. The associations made between the performance and its neighbourhood location in the minds of the audience members can build a sense of civic identity, at both individual and group levels. The images and ideas present in the performance commingled in the minds of the audience creating a new meaning for an urban landscape.

I think it's great that Jo chose that site for one of her performances since the city streets are rarely used for dance performances. So her having done one there has actually transformed the space for me and, I assume, for many of the others who attended one of those performances. City streets NEED to be transformed in that way to make them more livable and more memorable for ALL of us! (survey respondent 6; female, resident of Mission District).

Mission Wall Dances

Public art can be a social and political event because the meaning of a particular piece of art does not reside with the work itself. Art gains meaning through the nexus created by how the work is presented, the prevailing discourses about art and the interpretive presence of viewers. The meaning of art therefore changes in various contexts. This article examines how an outdoor performance transformed an urban street into a site of citizenship and political communication. This is the story of how choreographer Jo Kreiter and her small group of dancers went into the Mission District of San Francisco and expressed their concern about the effects of gentrification on the neighbourhood. More specifically, I discuss how Kreiter used the power of memory, the social narratives about her San Franciscan performance site and symbolism to enhance the political message about gentrification embedded in her dance piece Mission Wall Dances. Kreiter's intent was to foster a sense of community by linking the past to the present.

The Mission Wall Dances was a site-specific piece performed four times on a three-storey mural in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, in September 2002. The Mission Wall Dances performance work highlighted the recent effects of the dot-com boom on the housing situation of the Mission District by memorialising an arson fire at the Gartland Apartments that occurred in the 1970s during an earlier wave of gentrification in the city. Kreiter wanted to highlight the historical displacement of countless Mission residents through various forms of eviction and the resilience of the diverse communities that have struggled to remain. The piece was specifically intended to use a historical event to comment on the more recent social upheavals that have occurred in the Mission neighbourhood during the 10 years leading up to the performances (personal Communication, 2002, J. Kreiter). In conducting this research, I spent time with the company during the rehearsal period, observed performances and documented the perceptions of the spectators via surveys conducted both at the site and one year later. I was particularly interested in how the site of the performance would be utilised by the audience in their engagement with the content of the piece.

The Mission Wall Dances was executed by Jo Kreiter's company Flyaway Productions. Kreiter expresses her personal and political principles through the dance works produced by her troupe. The name of the company denotes “the emotional power and physicality of freedom symbolised by the concept of flight … [She says hers is a] company of women and in our art we use physical strength as a metaphor for female empowerment” (SPARK in Education, 2004, pp. 1, 3). The performers included Kreiter and six additional female dancers, all young women with varied backgrounds. They were women who had grown up in San Francisco and those who had settled in San Francisco from abroad. They were straight women and lesbians, residents of the Mission District and those who commuted to the site. However, they all shared an affinity that came from trying to find affordable housing in San Francisco. Over the course of the Mission Wall Dances, each performer portrayed several personas designated by costume, spatial placement and movement style changes. The piece also included an original music score by the San-Francisco-based composer Pamela Z, which incorporated the voices of local tenement residents describing escaping from hotel fires and what their current homes meant to them.

From the performances of Mission Wall Dances, a new sense of place was created in the performance site: one where information was combined with emotion to create among the observers a civic memory that lingered after the specific performance event was over. Kreiter used the performances of Mission Wall Dances as an opportunity to open a critical dialogue concerning the history of displacement in the Mission neighbourhood. Kreiter was also highlighting the ability of public art to encourage discussion on cultural and political questions.

Citizenship and Performance

The struggle highlighted in Ms Kreiter's Mission Wall Dances includes claims to citizenship, inclusion, and engagement. Citizenship is no longer defined solely by one's relation to the state (Holston and Appadurai, 1999; Pocock, 1995; Mouffe, 1992; Lummis, 1996; Barnett, 2004). In these writings, among others, citizenship has taken on a broader relational form, in that it can include one's relation to the particular circumstances of one's environment, as well as one's relation to others. Chantal Mouffe argues that anywhere an individual or group identity is challenged, issues of ‘the political’ and citizenship are an “ever present possibility” (Mouffe, 1992, p. 99). This conception of citizenship emerges as a way of imagining the citizen as the link between our private lives and the public good (Rose, 2000). Being a citizen in this estimation involves much more than just voting once every four years. Citizenship requires an active, politically engaged polity; one that is constantly struggling to direct and shape its fate (Mouffe, 1992; Little, 2002; McCann, 1999). This broader conception of citizenship opens up new physical spaces for political action and the dissemination of information. The performance by Flyaway Productions claimed such a political space for itself by challenging social processes through which individuals and social groups are forgotten from public spaces.

A city is a particularly important site for citizenship, because the city can be imagined as a field of competitive relations among individuals (Isin, 2002; Brodie, 2000; Holton, 2000). Urban spaces are articulated as groups within the city appropriate, use and give meaning to them. The city is a multiplicity that mediates between competing political systems, wider social structures and individual actions and relationships. The history of a city can be read in the spatial relationships of the city's forms and places (Gregory and Urry, 1985; Lefebvre et al., 1996; Sorkin, 2000). The analysis of city landscapes can provide information concerning the value systems and actions of those who historically occupied that city (Gunn and Morris, 2001). Consequently, the struggle among competing groups to define and occupy the spaces of the city, to place their identity in the history of the city, is crucial to each group's insistence on the right to make a city its own. Lefebvre saw the right to claim and occupy the city as an expression of urban citizenship, understood not as membership in a single polity, but as an active practice of articulating, claiming and renewing group rights through the creation and appropriation of spaces in the city. For Lefebvre, the right to access and use the city is the physical manifestation of a series of rights: the right to movement, to individualisation and socialisation, and to inhabit the city (Lefebvre et al., 1996). The right to claim a city's spaces is thus the right to democratise the city (Mitchell, 1995).

Baz Kershaw (1992) argues that, by engaging urban space through performance, new understandings of the space can be produced, creating a space where politically democratic communication can take place. Public performance has the ability to transform public urban spaces among the participants and viewers. These new understandings may be mobilised in the construction of a symbolic ‘us’, a sense of shared identity that can then be called upon politically. A sense of community “is constitutive of modern politics, a keyword whose meaning turns on questions of membership, shared meanings, identity and imagination” (Watts, 2004, p. 196). Even temporary identifications, like those forged watching a performance, can be important for creating shared memories or understandings of the subject matter of the event. Furthermore, the context of the performance is just as crucial to its success in building a communal memory as the form of the particular artistic expression. When artists venture away from the gallery showing or the proscenium stage, an entirely different relationship between artists and the public is created (Martin, 1990; Kershaw, 1992; Handke, 1998).

This change in relationship is one of the foundations of John Dewey's (1934) writing on the democratic potential of art. Dewey contested the idea of art as a product solely of individual inspiration; rather he approached art as a social product. Art expresses common memories and meanings, thus all art is tied, at least partially, to the political and social circumstances of its creation. The crux of Dewey's argument was that

art, if closely tied to people's everyday lives, is a form of communication through which people learn about each other's similarities and differences, break through some of the barriers to understanding and awareness, and develop some of the commonalities that define community (Mattern, 1999, p. 54).

In his writings, Dewey overstated the clarity with which art communicates. He recognised interpretation, disagreement and intent, but downplayed their role in the formation of artistic meaning. Because of this, Dewey's writing would not be able to answer Lucy Lippard's question about to ‘which public’ does a particular piece of art speak and how art is able to reinforce groups internally and identify ‘others’ (Lippard, 1984). Despite these significant concerns, Dewey developed a view of art and aesthetics that is deeply democratic in its implications. Modern authors have also dealt with these themes in fascinating ways (Kwon, 2004; Lippard, 1997; Kester, 2004; Bishop, 2006), yet much of this work is, in essence, supporting, refuting, or adding depth to Dewey's basic argument.

Dewey's ideas about art rest on aesthetic experiences being a part of people's everyday lives. The widespread separation of art from everyday life into specialised venues like galleries or theatres, hurt its communicative potential in Dewey's assessment. This theme is evident in the writing on more recent public art practices. In particular, as public art moved away from the ‘heavy-metal, plop art’ common in modernist sculpture, it began to “celebrate instead the particular realities of ‘ordinary’ people and their ‘everyday’ experiences” (Kwon, 2004, p. 107). Moreover, it was argued that public art needs to be in the everyday lives and spaces of people to be effective. Public art began to engage actively with social issues in the sites where they occur, believing this would “offer a more genuine point of contact, a zone of mutual interest, between artist/art and community/audience” (Kwon, 2004, p. 111). This ‘new genre’ of public art embraced ‘non-traditional’ mediums, such as street theatre, dance and murals. Many artists engaged in these practices “aspire to reveal the plight and plead the case of the disenfranchised and disadvantaged, to embody what they [the artist] view as humanitarian values” (Kwon, 2004, p. 105, quoting Raven, 1989, p. 4). However, for a performance, as a piece of public art, to be successful in its role of transforming “spaces into places [and] the public into people” (Miles, 1997, p. 10), the performance must be more than just a cosmetic intervention in a public place. The performance must also merge the individual experiences of the audience members with common societal interests. To reach its full democratic potential, a performance must bridge the so-called public–private divide.

Performance has the potential to straddle the public–private divide because it is, like citizenship, both personal and shared (Vest Hansen, 2002). Performance, as an activity, is done by an individual or group for another individual or group (Schechner, 1977, p. 30). Thus the performers and audience members share the performance event, yet each experience it individually. This is the crux of Brecht's (1957) concept of historicisation. Through witnessing a performance, audience members can become aware of their own perceptions as they compare the performer's actions with their own thoughts, politics and desires (Diamond, 1996). Each, performer and audience member alike, has their own historical subject position and their own relationship to the ‘content’ of the piece. The interaction between the common and social determinants of performance and the personal histories of its viewers is what gives performance its communicative potential. This emphasis also gives performance its political potential. Consequently, public art performances have the potential to transform social relationships through their communicative relationships with their audiences.

The desire to connect the individuals creating art, the individuals viewing a performance and the political and social issues that impact the rest of their lives has led many contemporary performers to see the radical potential of returning the arts from exclusive locations to the everyday lives and spaces of people (Durland, 1998). While not turning away entirely from galleries or proscenium theatres, some socially conscious performers have redefined the appropriate place for art by creating their art with at-risk youth, in prisons, in hospices or just in their neighbourhoods. These artists consciously choose to invest themselves as artists directly in the public, thus becoming an integral part of that public. When they do, the performances produced become a reflection of the particular place and culture in which they were created. The irony of course is that an artist being an integral part of a larger community is not new. Steven Durland argues that, “socially committed, community-engaged artists add depth to our culture and re-enchant their chosen publics, coming back to the reason why art was ever important in the first place” (Durland, 1998, p. xxiii). The artist as a fully engaged citizen is a concept that reinvigorates art in the public realm. One audience member-stated this same idea when she wrote

I loved being on the curb as an audience member. There was something so authentic about the experience … being outside, with noise and cars and weather and clouds overhead … the line between art and life faded for that hour (respondent 2; female, non-resident, second survey).

The performance discussed in this article was neither ‘plop art’ nor was it produced in collaboration with a particular community group. The performance instead reflected Kreiter's artistic vision, was site-oriented and discursive. It was a work that reflected a deep connection to the Mission District, but also was intended to provoke and defamiliarise that connection for the viewer. This is art in the public interest, not necessarily art by the public. Bishop (2006) laments that public art and artists are often judged by the working process (does a work ‘fully represent’ its subjects) rather than by the aesthetics (the art itself). This emphasis on process over product can open up artists like Kreiter to criticism such as ‘how can a housed female artist ever hope to represent the hopes and fears of those displaced over 30 years before?’ I would counter these concerns by qualifying the intent of Kreiter's dance piece. Kreiter never claimed her work was ‘authentic’ to/for those who lived in the Gartland Apartments. What she hoped to do was build a compelling performance which would spark dialogue around the social problem of gentrification, using the erased history of the Gartland as a cautionary tale. Lippard defines ‘good’ public art as one that is “accessible art of any species that cares about, challenges, involves and consults the audience for or with whom it is made, respecting community and environment” (Lippard, 1997, p. 265). Rather than concentrating analysis on either the products or processes of artistic work, scholarship on public art needs to join the interpretation of the work with a close contextual analysis (Kester, 2004).

As a dancer and audience member, I have personally experienced the political power of outdoor dance performances. As a geographer, I wanted to understand how performance produces a space that is both artistic and political. In particular, I was interested in how a performance and the urban form relate to one another to inform the affective impressions of the audience. Consequently, my overall goal with this study was to see if an ephemeral performative event had ‘lasting’ emotional and intellectual impact on the audience members' perceptions of the performance's site and content. Thus methodologically, I chose to conduct in-depth research on the actual site for the Mission Wall Dances, as well as assessing the audience's impressions through two surveys. The first survey was conducted at the performance site, while the second was administered a year after the performance. The audiences of the Mission Wall Dances ranged from 250 to 400 people at each show and I consistently received completed surveys back from about 10 per cent of each audience, for a total of 117 surveys across three performances. The initial four-question survey was designed to establish the level of previous association with the Mission District neighbourhood and see if any change in the sense of place was discernible at that point. Significantly, 87 per cent (99 out of 115 who answered this question) responded affirmatively when asked if seeing the performance changed their perception of the place where the performance was held. Later in the paper, I will detail more on the reasons and form of the changes given by audience members.

On the first survey, I also requested permission to contact the respondents at a later date for a follow-up survey. Unfortunately, less than half of the respondents provided contact information (57) and fewer still answered my e-mail questionnaire the following fall. The biggest methodological challenge was tracking down the respondents (a number of the e-mail addresses provided were no longer current) and then of course getting those I contacted to respond. The follow-up survey that I conducted a year after the performance of Mission Wall Dances had only 15 respondents out of the 42 e-mail addresses that did not bounce back. My second four-question survey was designed to capture information on how the piece, the site and the performance subject matter were remembered a year after the event. Because I knew the responses would be highly individualised, I chose not to create a survey where the respondent would just tick off boxes, but rather asked open-ended questions such as “What do you remember about the site of the performance?”, including prompts such as “(location, proximity to other places, function, any special features, or regular activities you engage in near there, etc.)” to help clarify the questions. I also specifically asked if seeing the performance “changed the way you think about that particular site or the subject of the performance? (memories, connotations, symbolism, etc.)”. I believe this open-ended approach within an e-mail survey contributed to my comparatively low response rate. However, the 15 who did respond remembered and wrote into their responses a lot of detail and 14 of them reported that their perception of the performance site was still changed a year after the so-called ephemeral event. It must be noted that my survey results are skewed by the process of self-selection. Yet even if only those who were deeply affected by the performance chose to respond, it is important to note how long-lasting the impression of a meaningful performance is to some members of the audience.

The Mission Wall Dances: The Place of the Performance

The ‘stage’ of the Mission Wall Dances performance was dominated by a then-incomplete three-storey mural painted by professional artist Josef Norris. Mr Norris was commissioned by Flyaway Production to design and then paint a mural on three sides of a storage facility and parking garage for MUNI, the San Francisco public transport service. The mural is located at the intersection of 14th Street and Harrison Street in the Mission District, facing the back of a Best Buy electronics goods store and across the street from an Office Max. The central image of the mural is of the arson fire that occurred approximately 10 blocks away in the Gartland Apartments at the corner of 16th Street and Valencia Street in the early hours of 12 December 1975 that killed at least 14 residents (see Figure 2).

On top of the central image, a set designer built a metal fire escape that appears to serve the burning building. The fire escape includes three vertical ladders and two horizontal surfaces directly centre stage. Two other scenes are depicted on the wall: to the left of the central image is a fruit stand at night, from which its customers watch the apartment building burn. Between this image and the image of the Gartland fire, a suspended steel umbrella was hung approximately four feet from the side of the building and could be lowered to the ground. On the right of the central image, a dozen suitcase-laden urban refugees are depicted in a procession away from the burning building and towards an area of the mural painted to look like a small one-storey duplex. Above the refugees, a ladder was suspended horizontally at the top of the wall and locked into place by two pulleys. The set designer also had built onto the image of the duplex two hinged metal framed doorways that allowed the dancers to move on and through them. The audience members sat in a closed-off street and looked up at the painted wall while leaning against the back of Best Buy.

The performance itself consisted of Kreiter and the other dancers performing as characters, who were intended to showcase the cultural and social icons of the Mission District, on the intentionally incomplete mural. After the performances were over, Josef Norris completed the mural, incorporating into the final version images from the performances, including a dancer on one of the doorways and a woman suspended from the steel umbrella (see Figures 1 and 3). The mural thus acts as a permanent record of the performances, a memorial to the past, and a reminder of the recent dislocation of so many Mission District residents.

Figure 1 Portrait of the mural after the dancers have been added. Photo: Joel Sass.

Figure 2 San Francisco's Mission District, including the location of the Gartland Apartments fire and the site of the Mission Wall Dances performance. Map: Birgit Muehlenhaus.

Figure 3 Dancer Christine Chen painted into the mural dangling from a steel umbrella. Photo: Joel Sass.

Surrounding the mural itself is the ‘stage’ of the Mission District neighbourhood. The venue of a performance matters as it provides its first layer of meaning (Schechner, 1998; Carlson, 1996). San Francisco's Mission District is the oldest neighbourhood in San Francisco. The Mission District was named after the Mission Delores, the church built by Franciscan missionaries in the 18th century. It is a neighbourhood with a varied history that includes Mexican homesteaders, the 49er gold rush activity, early union organising, ethnic enclaves for the Irish, the Italians and, more recently an influx of many Latin American immigrants (Levy, 1994). For the last 50 years the Mission District has been a blue-collar neighbourhood of cheap homes, light industry and several Catholic churches. However, the Mission District also has a large artistic community, a lesbian concentration and a generally liberal political orientation.

All of these groups have painted their histories on the walls of the Mission District neighbourhood in the form of murals. In fact, San Francisco has the highest per capita output of murals in the world (Dresher, 1991) and the most significant concentration of murals in the US (Solnit, 2000). The murals that adorn walls, garages and fences in the Mission District represent art as a part of everyday life. The abundance of murals in the Mission District means that Mission-dwellers are surrounded by iconic memories in their everyday activity spaces. The residents move through stories and past heroes and legends on their way to work, church and the grocery store. Often, the murals act to reinforce ethnic and sometimes feminist identities, to serve as a celebration of radical history, and they represent a populist form of art for those who see, paint and display them. Since the early 1970s, the murals painted in the Mission District have presented political messages about the desired outcome of neighbourhood change, particularly as a way to confront and resist gentrification (Cordova, 2005). The mural commissioned for Mission Wall Dances is thus continuing a powerful tradition in the neighbourhood.

The Mission District is a neighbourhood that has repeatedly faced the challenge of gentrification. Urban development and gentrification were occurring in the Mission District at the time of the Gartland Apartments fire in the 1970s (Castells, 1983). This gentrification was symbolised by the opening of two Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) subway stations within the neighbourhood in 1974 that were specifically designed to make it easier to get into and out of the Mission neighbourhood. The transit plans also included the development of ‘South-American-styled’ tourist attractions particularly around the two transit stops. When informed of the development plans, community activists in the Mission District argued that the “land around the BART stations will become too valuable for poor people to occupy” (Los Seite de la Raza Organisation; quoted by Cordova, 2005). Many locals feared the redevelopment plans were designed to displace low-income residents. The residents of the Mission District fought back by forming the Mission Coalition Organization, using grassroots activism and nurturing a radical artist community to inform residents and resist institutional change (Castells, 1983; Cordova, 2005). Except for the spate of fires located near the 16th Street BART station discussed later, the Mission residents of the 1970s were largely successful at blocking the wholesale revamping of their neighbourhood. The more recent residents have not been so fortunate.

The recent controversies in the Mission District surrounding gentrification are the flashpoint of a much deeper problem facing San Francisco—an affordable housing crisis. San Francisco has had the most expensive housing of any major city in the country for two decades (Solnit, 2000, p. 14). The housing is so expensive that some argue that San Francisco may become the nation's first fully gentrified city. Over the decade from 1989 to 1998, the rents in San Francisco increased 38 per cent, but the median income for renters with children only grew by 6.3 per cent (Zoll, 1998). And the rents continued to climb, rising by 30 per cent overall in the three years of the dot com boom, 1997–2000. In 2000, some neighbourhoods saw rent increases jump by 20 per cent in just 6 months (Solnit, 2000, p. 14). Some neighbourhoods saw vacancy rates below 1 per cent and houses selling for $100 000 over the asking price (Alejandrino, 2000).

Gentrification in San Francisco is actually just one of the more visible urban changes wrought by the profound economic, social and spatial restructuring that has been happening since the middle of the 20th century (Smith, 2000; Smith and Williams, 1986). “Gentrification is the shark's fin, whereas the new economy is the shark beneath the water” (Solnit, 2000, p. 13). The spike in housing prices in San Francisco is created by the geography of the city, the meteoric rise of its technology sector, its proximity to other urban areas that are also booming and the planning processes set into motion by Mayor Joseph Alioto during his term of office from 1967 to 1975. San Francisco is only 47 square miles and is surrounded on three sides by water, limiting the city's ability to expand. Add to this that the technology industry thriving in the city and in nearby Silicon Valley creates nine new well-paying jobs for every singe housing unit built and you have a recipe for gentrification.

The rise in housing prices is transforming the nature of San Francisco, driving out the poor, the working class and those who devote their lives to less lucrative pursuits such as art or social activism (Chonin and Levy, 2000; Hayes, 2000; Nieves, 1999). Unfortunately, the housing stock made available due to the displacement of lower-income residents is often taken by other San Franciscans forced by gentrification from their own neighbourhoods. Within the ensuing cruel game of musical neighbourhoods, many of those at the bottom have nowhere to go but to leave the city (Borsook, 1999). Underlying the changes in the urban landscape of San Francisco are specific economic, social and political forces reshaping the city (Harvey, 1989). In San Francisco, Mayor Alioto and his successors transformed the transport infrastructure, initiated redevelopment according to the Model Cites Act and actively cultivated an international business sector (Castells, 1983). All of these factors led to the displacement of vulnerable populations in San Francisco.

The Mission District has been particularly hard hit by gentrification this time around. By 1998, almost two-thirds of the residents of the Mission District were new arrivals to the neighbourhood (Borsook, 1999). The population of the Mission District is more vulnerable to being evicted as gentrification changes their neighbourhood because 84 per cent of the residents are renters (Garofoli, 2002a). Landlords can take advantage of the housing crisis by pressuring tenants to move through evictions, increasing rents beyond allowed levels, refusing to make repairs and outright harassment (Stoll, 2002). Some examples that indicate the impact of gentrification in the Mission District are: rents in the Mission District have been raised in some cases over 300 per cent in a single year, the percentage of owner move-in evictions is 7 per cent higher than would be expected from the comparable city-wide average and the numbers for other legal forms of evictions are also unusually high in the Mission District (Alejandrino, 2000).

The most disturbing numbers, however, come from the use of arson to evict residents of tenement hotels. In the 15 years leading up to the 2002 performance of Mission Wall Dances, 1651 rooms in San Francisco had been lost to fire and many were not rebuilt (Stoll, 2002). Of those 1651 rooms, approximately two-thirds were in the Mission District. Although most of these fires were not investigated as arson, the sheer number of fires is reminiscent of the number in years before and after the Gartland Apartments blaze. Within one year of the 12 December 1975 Gartland Apartment fire, police counted 11 suspicious fires within an 8-block radius of the Gartland site and a total of 132 fires in the two years 1974 and 1975. Interestingly, many of the fires during this time occurred near the new BART station at 16th and Mission Avenue (Cordova, 2005). Correspondingly, in the 4 years prior to the performance, 840 residential hotel rooms were lost to fire, or half of the total number of units lost for the entire preceding 15 years (Sullivan, 2001b). This alarming rate of residential hotel fires prompted the San Francisco City Board of Supervisors to propose legislation to require hotel owners to install automatic sprinkler systems throughout their buildings (Sullivan, 2001a). This ordinance represented the most significant improvement in the standards for residence hotels since 1983, when hotel owners were required to provide heat and hot water. The sprinkler requirement was passed on 27 June 2001, to be implemented by 30 June 2002. There were on-going battles after the legislation passed to extend the deadlines for implementation (Stoll, 2002). This was the context in which this performance took place in the September of 2002.

The Mission Wall Dances: Symbolism in Motion

The dance itself consisted of three interwoven elements: virtuosic aerial movements, character studies of iconic figures in the Mission District and symbols of remembering, forgetting and moving on. The aerial displays included performers dancing on a ladder suspended two stories high, leaping and flipping in unison while diving off and returning to the fire escape, being hung and lowered on a giant umbrella and, lastly, at times performing without safety equipment. One audience member described it a year later as “daring and beautiful” (respondent 8; male, resident), while another remarked on “being surprised at the absence of safety equipment” (respondent 11; male, non-resident). To my eyes, the movement was athletic, dynamic and dazzling. The contrast between the freedom of flying and the rigid control of gravity through the rigging highlighted a suspension of reality and the contrast between safety and surrender.

The symbolism in the dance centred on remembering, forgetting and moving on from the fires. Kreiter commemorated the victims of the Gartland Apartments fire during the first portion of the dance through her use of neighbourhood icons representing those who lived, worked and died in the neighbourhood at the time of the fire. Three symbolic characters were presented in the forms of painters, a flower seller and the lovers. The acrobatic movements were seamlessly integrated into the character studies as the ‘painters’ performed virtuosic actions from a ladder suspended above the audience. The ‘flower seller's’ movements conjured images of displaced residents as her flowers kept falling to the ground. While in the final character study, two dancers portrayed fictional lesbian ‘lovers’ lost in the Gartland blaze (see Figure 4). During this section, the music included sounds mimicking crackling fire, a slow sultry salsa and the recorded voices of tenement residents describing a fire's heat, the panic of escape and then the cold night air while standing on the street watching their home burn. The dancing was very sensuous with the two dancers in physical contact for the entire section. The duet included one dancer hanging from the platform above, the other dancing on the top of the platform's railing and even using counterweight techniques to incorporate movements in the open space in front of the landing. Since the two women were not anchored by wires, they literally needed each other to avoid falling.

Figure 4 Dancers Tamara Welch (standing) and Yayoi Kambrara performing a daring salsa. Photo: author.

After the character pieces, the dance moved into a long section in which water was used as a symbol of forgetting and recovery (see Figures 5–7). This section of the dance included dancers moving on top of the building as well as on the fire escape, performing a series of unison flips and dives which carried their bodies away from the safety of the fire escape. Finally, a slowly spinning dancer was lowered from the roof to the ground suspended on a large metal umbrella. The section on water was different from the earlier section because it was more abstract. There was no direct referent for a woman suspended from an umbrella. Despite this fact, it was at this point in the dance where the political undertones began clearly to show themselves in the piece. Water does more than just stop the fire, it washes away the debris. Thus water has the power to heal the community by washing away the anger and resentment and letting the community begin with a fresh start. However, the negative aspect of this same symbol was that it also symbolised the ‘collective amnesia’ (Garofoli, 2002b) of San Francisco, which has forgotten the poorer residents of its communities in the past. Jo Kreiter has stated that one of her main purposes for doing this piece was to tie the more recent controversies over gentrification in the Mission District to the long history of displacement that she believes has often been overlooked by more recent activists (personal communication; Garofoli, 2002a). Consequently, the water was a symbol of healing while providing a cautionary note not to let members of the neighbourhood be swept away by time and evictions and thus forgotten.

Figure 5 Dancers Tara Brandel, Anje Marshall, Aimee Lam and Christine Chen during the ‘water’ section. Photos: author.

Figure 6 Dancers Tara Brandel, Anje Marshall, Aimee Lam and Christine Chen during the ‘water’ section. Photos: author.

Figure 7 Dancers Tara Brandel, Anje Marshall, Aimee Lam and Christine Chen during the ‘water’ section. Photos: author.

In an effort to remind the audience of the aftermath of displacement, the final third of the dance dealt with the transition and resettlement of populations after a tragedy. It began with a duet performed by the same women who had earlier portrayed the lovers, but now, instead of closeness, the audience was struck by their distance from one another. One woman was on top of the building above the image of the burning Gartland Apartments, packing and unpacking her suitcase in quick, frenetic movements that gave the audience a sense of panic and indecision. Her partner, on the other hand, was suspended from a wire above the lines of people pictured in the mural walking away from the burning building and towards a single-storey home. This performer, leaping and flipping, ran back and forth on the wall with a suitcase in her hand. At some points, the two women moved in unison; at other times, the movement of one quieted so the other could have the audience's attention. At other points in their duet, the two performers almost competed with one another for the audience's attention as it was difficult to keep both women in the same visual frame. I believe this was intentional on the part of Kreiter, a way of reminding the audience that we cannot see all the suffering that is happening around us; we just have to make a choice and watch one dancer, knowing that we are missing something on the other side of the performance space.

The last section of the dance focused on recovery. It took place on the left side of the mural where a single-storey home was painted about 10 feet off the ground. Attached to each of two adjacent doors painted on the home were steel door frames that could swing out and a narrow platform. The two women, who began the show as the painters, now literally scaled the wall to reach the doors and began to dance on these movable, swinging doorframes, transferring between doors and interacting with each other (see Figure 8). This section provided a utopian vision of what home is and of what neighbourhoods should be. In this section, the women were not rigged; yet instead of the fear and neediness conveyed by the lack of rigging for the lovers earlier in the performance, these dancers supported each other from a place of kindness and community. For the first time in the piece, the two performers smiled at each other as they swung across and traded doors. Despite all the negative images that had interspersed the dance to this point, the audience was left with a positive image of the aftermath. Home is a wonderful place and neighbourhoods are our homes.

Figure 8 Dancers Christine Chen and Anje Marshall dance in unison on their doors. Photo: author.

I think it is significant that the ‘home’ at the end of the piece was a single-family dwelling rather a return to an apartment building. Unlike the apartment building that burned earlier in the piece, ‘home’ was no longer threatened or traumatising. It was represented as an “inner geography where the ache to belong finally quits, where there is no sense of ‘otherness’, where there is at last, a community” (Zandy, 1990, p. i). The irony of course was that by idealising a single-family dwelling as the source of an idealised community, the queered, raced and classed critique of housing injustice in the Mission District implicit in the dance was silenced in last moments of the piece. Perhaps Kreiter was intending this last image of home to recall bell hooks' homeplace, or home as a site of resistance (hooks, 1991, p. 47). However, despite this intention, ‘home’ in the piece expressed a kind of nostalgia for comfort and solidarity that is likely never to have existed (Massey, 2005). In this dance the displaced achieved the American dream of homeownership, and were better off for it.

Everyday Life, Memory and Politics in Performance

The performance of Mission Wall Dances was ephemeral, collective and explicitly grounded in the everyday lives and spaces of the audience members. The performance used symbolic images in a political manner hoping to build a community of individuals who care about those displaced from the Mission District neighbourhood. Kreiter did this through (re)writing the memory of the locale for the audience through performance. Mission Wall Dances was specifically intended to help modern audiences identify with the history of the Mission District neighbourhood that is often forgotten or unknown, showing a relationship between the gentrification issues of the past and those in the present. The performance challenged the social processes through which the individuals and social groups featured were excluded and forgotten from public spaces. Mission Wall Dances was a public performance that transformed the space by both evoking and creating memories. Flyaway Productions thus opened a space for the exchange of information and public debate surrounding the direction of the Mission District neighbourhood. It became a site for an ‘imagined’ community to form as a group of artists dramatised the cultural history of their neighbourhood (Anderson, 1991; Hoelscher, 1998).

Jo Kreiter's Mission Wall Dances produced a sense of community through urban performance. Community in this context is, “a ‘projective’ enterprise … a provisional group, produced as a function of specific circumstances instigated by an artist … aware of the effects of these circumstances on the very conditions [then produced]” (Kwon, 2002, p. 154). The audience members of Mission Wall Dances were not a homogeneous group and there were differences in emphasis and understanding of the various themes Kreiter was addressing. Yet Miwon Kwon discusses how art practices create a sense of community by “reassur[ing] the viewer with an easily shared idea or subject … the viewer is affirmed in his/her self-knowledge and world view through the art work's mechanisms of (self) identification” (Kwon, 2002, p. 97). The question is, then, what identities were reassured? The audience members who returned my first survey were predominantly White, although one person commented in the follow-up survey that he remembered “that the audience was a great diversity of ages and ethnicities and that [the groups present] seemed to follow what the act was about” (respondent 9; male, resident, second survey). Many audience members initially mentioned coming to the performance because they like to support local art projects while others attended specifically because of the subject matter. It was interesting that audience members would comment on the diversity in the crowd and yet highlight their commonalities (either through supporting public art or housing issues activism). These comments highlight how the performance reinforced their sense of belonging to a community among those who attended, formed by their similar interests. They were reassured that they were not alone, and this feeling was not forgotten

I remember being there, sitting on the pavement, on a sunny afternoon, it being a gathering-point for many people I knew and more I didn't (respondent 2; female, non-resident, second survey).

I came with my partner and a good friend who had never heard of Jo and her group and she was absolutely delighted with the event. I met several friends of mine in the audience as well and that, too, delighted me knowing others I knew enjoy this kind of performance as much as I do (respondent 6; female, resident, second survey).

These spectators incorporated the performance into their daily lives as individuals and as citizens. Civic life is embedded in the collective processes of creating memories, representations and visions of the city (Belanger, 2002). Wilkinson wrote that “community is not a place, but it is place-orientated process” (Wilkinson, 1989, p. 339; quoted by Meegan and Mitchell, 2001, p. 2173). The associations made between the performance and its neighbourhood location in the minds of the audience members can be viewed as giving the city shape and meaning. Memories of one's city are infused with history, both personal and shared, and thus play a constitutive role in urban social life. A sense of civic identity, at both individual and group levels, can be generated through the recollection of the events and characters that make up the history of one's city.

Yet civic identities and memories associated with them are a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in a community's history (Sturken, 1997).

Every social community … is imaginary: that is to say, it is based on the projection of individual existence into the weft of collective narrative, on the recognition of a common name, and on traditions lived as the trace of an immemorial past (Watts, 2004, p. 195; discussing Balibar, 1991, p. 93).

Performance, as an activity that is both personal and shared, is an excellent site for ‘community’ to form as an artist interprets and then dramatises one version of the cultural history of an area for the enjoyment of insiders and outsiders. Thus the history of a place is remembered through the particular stories that are told about it, how and by whom these stories are told and, finally, which story in the end becomes dominant (Massey, 1994; Hoelscher, 1998; Foster, 2000; Lippard, 1999). Hence public memory is inherently political. By memorialising the victims of a single arson fire, Jo Kreiter's performance of Mission Wall Dances created a history of this event for those who have none, thereby building a counter-narrative to the story of displacement and disappearance. This feature of the performance was recognised by some audience members who commented on it directly in the first survey stating, “I learned about the fire. It adds depth to the neighbourhood” (respondent 23; female, resident) or “I feel like I have a piece of an experience that I didn't actually live” (respondent 37; female, nonresident).

Marianne Hirsche might call this a ‘post-memory’ of the event of the fire. Post-memory is the repetition and canonisation of particular images producing the effect of trauma in others who did not live through it. It is a powerful form of memory precisely because “its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation” (Hirsche, 2001, p. 9). Hirsche is specifically writing about referential memory, the passing on of first-hand knowledge of trauma to the second generation. Writing about the Holocaust, Hirsche describes the relationship of children to the collective trauma of their parents as “remembered through narratives … powerful and monumental enough to constitute memory in itself” (Hirsche, 2001, p. 9). The notion of post-memory, however, recognises that memory, or what we call memory, is passed from one generation to the next in very complex ways. Post-memory can thus also be used to describe the process of relating traumatic events to those with no direct tie (Stanley and Dampier, 2005), such as revealed in the audience comments earlier. However, it must be noted that the representations and visual cues used in the creation of post-memories are not always ‘accurate’. Retelling the tale of trauma creates myths and stories, often with a certain moral order, but not necessarily directly referring to ‘the facts’ (Stanley and Dampier, 2005, p. 98). Mission Wall Dances was not actually trying to recreate a referential memory of a fire from 30 years ago. Mission Wall Dances was a performance that created an image, evoked a memory and was designed to serve a purpose. It becomes one layer in how the events of gentrification in the Mission District neighbourhood will be remembered by San Francisco residents as ‘history’. Collective memory is not remembering an event in its entirety, but stating that one aspect is important and should be remembered as such. All memories are created in tandem with forgetting (Sturken, 1997). History is an end-product of the process where particular memories, details and voices are forgotten in favour of remembering others. Memory is thus a part of the narrative of an experience rather than a replica of the experience. The instability of memory is what makes it both political and subject to debate. The important question is not necessarily “Is a memory true?” but, rather, “What does the reliving and retelling of the memory reveal about how the past is intersecting with the present?”.

The production of civic identities in space is fundamentally related to how the public realm and history are constructed (Pile and Thrift, 1995). Memory is often perceived to be located in specific places or objects (Sturken, 1997; Foote, 1997; Till, 2001). However, places are not passive receptacles of cultural memory. Memory is produced through the meanings attached to objects and images and then emplaced in particular locales. Particular places become sites of memory through the act of producing and/or sharing meaning items in them. As Jean-Luc Nancy wrote “there is no communion, there is no common being, but there is being in common … the question should be the community of being and not the being of community” (Nancy, 1991, p. 4; quoted in Kwon, 2002, p. 153) The act of being an audience member at a specific event can create a common bond and feeling of solidarity among the witnesses, of being ‘in common’. This is true of the international audience watching the buildings of the World Trade Center fall on live television on 11 September 2001 or, much more locally, those audience members watching Jo Kreiter's dancers hang from the side of a building re-enacting the dispersal of residents forced from their homes by arson.

I find this area particularly industrial and the literal imprint of the piece onto the architecture is a very powerful statement. It gave me a sense of sorrow and hope (respondent 28; male resident, first survey).

Performance is a shared event that can act as a catalyst and receptacle for individual and collective memory. The images remain as the compelling items of memory for this audience member. This coincides with the key observation by Yi-Fu Tuan who “argued that the actual material object is not what is meaningful but rather the human experience it reifies” (Till, 2001, p. 276). Audience members were moved to tears by the images presented during the ‘water’ section of the dance describing how, “I cried … when residents were falling out of the building” (respondent 43; male, non-resident, first survey). It should be noted that the physical object, particularly the mural that was commissioned for the piece, is also a compelling object of memory. A different audience member remarked how he drives through the Mission District neighbourhood “and reminisce[s] when I spot the mural. I've had a few dreams since of the wall dances” (respondent 3; male, resident, second survey). Both the mural and the performance that took place on it are idealised versions of a much more complicated political and social history. The completed mural, which included the dancers (some of whom were not even born in 1975), is a picturesque image of urban history. It emplaces the ephemeral performance, while at the same time enforcing a different kind of erasure. Kreiter's interpretation of the Gartland Apartments fire is the only point of reference for many in the audience. In fact, only one respondent (no. 78; male, resident, first survey) to my surveys mentioned first-hand knowledge of the fire or its aftermath, this performance created “an imago, an idealised image from a memory so satisfying you don't look beyond it” (Klein, 1997, p. 3). The site, the subject matter and the performance became mixed in the audiences' memories. Two of the clearest examples of how audience members expressed this follow, but 11 of the 15 who responded to my second survey integrated these ideas in some manner

I pass that building often and I like the way they've now painted the dancers on the wall, as if they left their shadows there (respondent 1; male, nonresident, second survey).

I'm glad that I hadn't ever seen that space before, and that it had no other connections, because now when I see it, I always connect it with seeing that performance (respondent 5; male, resident, second survey).

However, the ‘technologies’ of memory are social practices that are inevitably implicated in the histories of those who view the event and then make associations and memories (Sturken, 1997). This is the case because memories, and the spaces associated with them, are not a simple script. They are variable, unstable and subject to contestation. So for instance, while one audience member-stated, “I think it's interesting that they tried to leave some performance residue by painting the dancers into the mural”, she continued by asserting that “If I hadn't seen the performance and known the political and social issues attached to the performance, I would write off the mural as a mediocre attempt at socially relevant public art” (respondent 7; female, non-resident, second survey). In this case, the mural became associated with the issues gentrification and displacement because of the performance. The mural alone (as a technology of memory) would not have been meaningful to this audience member. The ability for interpretation (and reinterpretation) is crucial to collective memory's cultural function as a site of the political. It is precisely the instability of memory that allows it to denaturalise the everyday and render what had been assumed visible for re-evaluation (Moran, 2004). As another audience member noted

I think about [the piece] anytime I hear about an apartment fire (I'm a teacher, and one of my students last year lost his apartment to an apartment fire in the city). (respondent 4; female, non-resident, second survey).

The previous interpretations of Kreiter's Mission Wall Dances were not evidence of community knowledge being transferred from one generation to the next. Instead, these audience members made connections between themselves and the past. Whether being inspired to dreams, empathising more deeply with one's students or recognising one's artistic preferences in public art, the audience members who responded to my surveys acknowledged “the weft of collective narrative” (Watts, 2004) of their individual recollections. The audience was guided through a series of visual and kinesthetic images which, after the performance ended, left a void in which each person was able to create memories, filling in the blanks with their own experiences, associations and imagery. For instance, one audience member remembered:

The site, the technical rigging and the mural all added to the performance. It allowed the dancers to evoke a sense of freedom, even though they were tethered to the ropes. The sense of flying and freeness in movement is the foremost symbolism that I came away with. There was grace and beauty of movement (respondent 13; female, non-resident, second survey).

Another audience member commented on much the same thing, but from an entirely different viewpoint. This audience member remarked

One thing that left an impression on me for months happened after the show was over. People were starting to move away from the alley and towards Harrison. I was still sitting there with my friend, taking it in, enjoying the sun and the people walking by. I saw an elderly woman walk by holding the arm of an even older woman. The older woman walked very tentatively, even resisting the pull of the first woman, leaning back from her arm. The younger old woman said, “C'mon! Stop pulling. You have to walk”. The older old woman continued to shuffle and resist. The first woman turned to the second and said, “What's going on? Why won't you walk?”. The first responded, “I'm afraid I'll fall.” I'll never forget that. After watching an amazing hour long feet [sic] of gravity and grace, feeling so awestruck and anxious about the dancers reeling on the wall, the old woman's comment made me recognise that our experiences are all so different and unique. It was remarkable, even if I'm not capturing how much so here. (Respondent 2; female, non-resident, second survey)

In the case of this audience member, the most important memory evoked was not actually related to the Gartland Apartment fire, or arson fires at all, but about the frailty of the human condition. This memory was profoundly meaningful to this audience member, yet could never have been predicted by Jo Kreiter as she rehearsed her piece. Both of these audience members remembered most vividly the body in motion, yet were diametrically opposite. The memories created by the performance of Mission Wall Dances did not create ‘real’ memories of the Gartland Apartment fire or even its aftermath, but it did allow the audience to create memories of the performance that were significant to them. It should be noted, however, that most of the audience members who answered my surveys did directly connect the past history of the fire to the present in their memories of the piece. For example

Seeing this performance was a great experience, just knowing that there is more in life than just the mundane hustle and bustle of surviving in this city, and not only that it was Free. It was nice to see that from a terrible fire/tragedy that people were able to pay tribute in such an elegant way (respondent 9; male, resident, second survey).

Kreiter's Mission Wall Dances created a new sense of place by inscribing the displaced and forgotten onto a wall in the form of the mural and into the memories of her audience. When displaced residents are represented in public space, that community is also claiming the right to be in the city, to not be forgotten or displaced. In looking for new spaces of citizenship, Chantal Mouffe is calling on us to recognise the power of these kinds of lived experiences to the sense of identity of those who live in a city. The democratic ideal requires attention to all aspects of society, including art. Performance is a viable avenue for participation in public life. The key to the success of the performance, however, is to understand it in its physical and social context—namely, the relationship of the piece to wider networks of meaning.

Conclusion

Thoughtful analysis of works of art requires a deep understanding of the context in which they are set. The context of the performance is just as crucial to its success as the form and content of a particular artistic expression. The urban form of San Francisco's Mission District has changed over the years. Some buildings have been painted and others have burned to the ground. The Mission District has been altered by wider economic forces that influenced housing, transport and demographic patterns. Gentrification has always been resisted in this neighbourhood and occasionally has even been beaten back. However, the speed and ferocity of the housing price spikes in the last wave of gentrification were impossible to stop until the tech economy bottomed out. Nevertheless, the arts community resisted throughout. Jo Kreiter's Mission Wall Dances was an example of this resistance. Kreiter used icons of the neighbourhood such as the Gartland Apartments fire, the Latina flower seller and the mural itself to place her art explicitly into the dialogue on the gentrification of the Mission District. The place of the performance mattered.

The relevance of public performance, however, does not come exclusively from its location, but rather includes its engagement with civic life. The performance of Mission Wall Dances became a dialogue between the physical site, the specific subject matter and the experiences and memories of the audience members. Thus the back of transit garage became a memorial after it was incorporated into the Mission Wall Dances performance and a nondescript corner 10 blocks away took on a new meaning for those who did not know its history. The act of making this portion of the Mission District's history visible in public space changed the sense of place for many of the audience members. The surveys confirmed that the space was transformed for many in the audience and the political intent was communicated and remembered. Although the audience may have initially experienced the space of the performance passively, over time their imaginations actively made and remade symbolic use of their memories of the experience, including the spatial objects in the site, such as the mural. However, it was not just an understanding of the site that changed. The places of importance to the Mission Wall Dances performance were also infused with a sense of togetherness and of civic life built on these communal experiences. The audience re-incorporated these sites, their histories and the new associations into the communal memory of the neighbourhood.

A performance site is an inherently social space which means it is complex and varied. It becomes a political space when the identities of the site, performers and/or audience members are altered. Jo Kreiter was expressing herself as a citizen of San Francisco by providing a public forum where hidden stories were allowed to be heard and seen. She was also highlighting the common bonds of citizenship that united her ‘subjects’ to her audience by challenging our shared sense of ‘justice’. This performance created empathy in her audience to those hidden voices through a kinetic connection to their plight. While Jo Kreier's audience may have understood rationally the vulnerability of tenement house dwellers, to see the two women who performed the salsa dancing two storeys up without any kind of safety equipment made that vulnerability more tangible and frightening. Mission Wall Dances made the displacement of Mission District residents an intellectual, physical and emotional reality for the audience. The performance of Mission Wall Dances demonstrated the potential political power of the ‘new spaces of citizenship’ recognised by Mouffe (2001). However, while the lasting image of the mural does keep the issue of those forced to leave the neighbourhood in the minds of those who saw the piece, is more awareness enough? From my data, I cannot put forth any conclusions about actual changes in the actions of audience members regarding resisting gentrification. Nevertheless, whether or not there was a change in ‘actions’, this performance work opened up the ‘imagined community’ of the audience members to include more of San Francisco's inhabitants. In creating an effective memorial, the performance of Mission Wall Dances was successful in adding depth to neighbourhood consciousness and building a ‘post-memory’ of those that had been displaced.

The site was appropriated and used by the muralist Josef Norris and choreographer Jo Kreiter to articulate a message of remembrance and hope. They used paint, emotion, sound and incredible athleticism to take their audiences to a fire that burned over 30 years ago. The Gartland Apartments fire and its aftermath were an allegory for more current concerns about gentrification in the Mission District and a shortage of affordable housing in San Francisco more generally. By building a sense of community that linked the past with the present, the performance of Mission Wall Dances gave new meaning to an urban landscape. The images and ideas present in the performance commingled in the minds of the audience creating, not a real memory of the fire, but another frame for understanding information learned about gentrification, tenement hotel fires, activism or evictions. This performance left an indelible mark on a wall in the Mission District of San Francisco, but also left its mark in the memories of its witnesses.