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So I’ve re-focused (sic) my reading-and-viewing on artists in the city.

First, I watched In a Dream, the film Isaiah Zagar’s son made about his father. I’m enchanted by Zagar’s South Philadelphia murals (and want us to go see them, as part of this class; I’d like to explore those on the street, outside The Magic Garden); the film just shimmers with these. Zagar’s very compelling in talking about his search “for encounter,” for the “mysterious momentum in everything,” wanting “to be alive in the work, to impregnate the work with his life, exposing himself to us, because it’s what we want…’I do work that’s so candied….people call it eye-candy…but I don’t stay there…I give you some other stuff to chew on…’”

The film is filled with insight into the sources of Isaiah’s art (think how “life sustaining” it can be to “polish mirrors”…? As his wife Julia says, @ one point, Isaiah “lives in a fantasy…he puts me in his work…but the cement doesn’t talk back; he doesn’t want conversation; he just wants to live in his own world… He became incarcerated in everything he had built…”). Though the film is of course set in South Philly, and there are lots of streetscapes, it’s is a little thin on the urban dimensions of Isaiah’s work. He tells some tourists that he spends “$50,000 a year on the city…all artists buy supplies, but mine are all out here, on the street…a hundred murals, seven buildings, seven alleys…it’s a lot of work.” He and Julia bought a number of derelict buildings, which Isaiah mosaic-ed, and then they rented ‘em out; @ the end of the film, they are looking @ yet another abandoned warehouse, and Isaiah says he is “beginning to think about what it could be….”

Another film that might get us closer to (what I think?) I’m searching for (more a back-and-forthing between the grid and the play w/in it, and more an exploration of women’s experiences) is Our City Dreams, about five women artists…will report back when I’ve seen it…

I also looked through two books you’d flagged, Mark--Performance in the City and Performance and the Contemporary City—and found nothing in either of them which (I think) we’ll want to read as a group, though each has interesting moments. Neither volume had anything about Philly particularly, though, in the first volume, the description of a project called Blur Street caught my eye: in this project, students in different countries use video imagery to situate themselves in their local environments, and then post two-minute edited video sequences and urban self-portraits online. Rather than having our students go on scavenger hunts (or, maybe? After having them go on a designed hunt?--

--a friend suggested a range of scavenger hunts: Gorilla Challenge, Philly Challenge, Urban Adventure Race, and PhilAmazing Race; but, Mark, you know someone (more creative) in this business?--

I think we might give them cameras (or ask them to use their own cameras or phones?) to create stills or videos of what they see, walking around… They could juxtapose these images with texts we’ve been reading. They could provide voiceovers (or not? In Blur Street, this wasn’t allowed, so “the images could not deliver a secure narrative…”). Even more interesting, and interactive (less "watching" than "doing"--so others might watch?) was Carl Lavery’s Instructions for Performance in Cities, in the second volume, which is full of fun ideas we might draw on..

Some more possible texts for us emerged for me from these collections:
Elizabeth Grosz, Bodies-Cities

Carman Paplia, Caning the City, Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry 1, 2 (June 2007), in cf. with
Michel de Certeau, Walking In the City, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984

Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” Writings on Cities (1996), about his notion of “the ludic city in the form of the ‘festival’ or ‘collective game,’ which he saw as the ultimate expression of social revolution…
 
Brecht, “On Everyday Theatre” (you must know this!)