{"id":464,"date":"2021-12-14T20:45:56","date_gmt":"2021-12-14T20:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/?p=464"},"modified":"2026-06-19T10:36:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T10:36:42","slug":"sounds-of-the-city-dramaturgy-space-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/sounds-of-the-city-dramaturgy-space-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"Sounds of the City: Dramaturgy, Space, Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Katie Beswick<\/strong>*<\/a> and Javon Johnson<\/strong>**<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This article offers a response to the question, \u201cHow can we think about cities within the frame of a dramaturgy of sound?\u201d Drawing on our scholarly interest in cities, we, the authors, consider how city meanings are produced and transmitted through music cultures. We tentatively explored this question previously, in a \u201cSalon<\/a>\u201d discussion, recorded and available as part of the Aural\/Oral Dramaturgies project, curated by the editors of this special issue at the website www.auralia.space. We recommend you listen to that discussion, here<\/a>, before reading this article. Here, we reflect further on the relationship between sound and cities, offering a mixtape of tracks and parsing our personal experiences in relation to them to make sense of the ways music has shaped cities in our experience. The reflections below blend personal and critical perspectives to offer city stories, and stories of ourselves in the city. We have drawn upon notions of urban dramaturgy (Donehower; Ferdman) to find a style of writing which, \u201cplays with the structure rhythm and flow of the city\u201d in order to begin untangling questions of \u201cwhat our cities are and for whom\u201d (Dramaturgs\u2019 Network<\/a>, 2015).

Keywords<\/strong>: Urban dramaturgy, space, place, cities, music cultures, aural dramaturgy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Opening Thoughts<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

We are both city people. Growing up in London and Los Angeles respectively, we were formed within metropolises and influenced by their affective qualities. Cities are perhaps curious texts to subject to dramaturgical analysis: as dynamic spatial entities they cannot properly be framed \u201cas\u201d performances. A city is not a dramatic work, like a play text or staged performance\u2014but cities are nonetheless implicated in a narrative logic, and can, therefore, be positioned as complex cultural objects that produce, sustain and transmit meanings. To approach the city as a site of analysis is to think with spatial theories, but we might also call upon traditions of dramaturgical analysis that consider, in the words of Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt, \u201cthe ways in which levels of meaning are orchestrated,\u201d \u201ctheir compositional logic\u201d and \u201cwhat is being presented and how\u201d (29).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Metropolises and \u201cworld cities,\u201d in particular, such as London and Los Angeles, as the work of Edward Soja makes clear, exist not only as real, geographical sites but as affective concepts that circulate beyond themselves to create meaning and replicate that meaning elsewhere. This might be understood as a dramaturgical process. In other words, cities are not only stable and located but also exist as a series of ideas, events and feelings constructed as narratives. Such narratives are both deliberately fashioned (through for example city planning, tourism initiatives, architectural interventions) and incidental (resulting from the informal ways cities are practiced, embodied and experienced by their inhabitants).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cultural products such as film, television and, perhaps, especially music, emit transient atmospheric affects which further produce the narratives of particular cities and cities in general that sustain and stabilize meanings. This dynamic process, wherein space is produced through interactions between distinct registers, is what Henri Lefebvre calls the production <\/em>of space. Doreen Massey refers to a \u201cfixation of meaning\u201d (20) that attaches itself to specific places and, as Mark Aug\u00e9 and others have pointed out, creates a fixed place identity (whose permanence is, of course, illusionary) (45). Fixed place identity is possible not only because of what happens in specific places, but also because of how the felt ideas about places transmit elsewhere and are thus stabilized and reproduced. In this article, we contribute to understandings of space identity by reflecting on dramaturgies of sound: that is, how sound cultures shape city meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For us, the (re)production of city spaces happens, perhaps most viscerally, in the realm of daily life, through music and sound cultures. These cultures are experienced within the city but speak out to the world beyond, shaping our social, cultural and political experiences. We, thus, position music cultures as features of urban dramaturgy that narrate, shape and imbue cities with enduring meaning\u2014 using this article to illustrate the ways urban dramaturgy is practiced and performed in quotidian, daily life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike many other cultural performance forms, music is impossible to avoid. And in the cities where we have lived and which we know most intimately, music is everywhere, bending and creating the culture: spilling from the windows of passing cars and open shop doorways and from the mouths of teenagers on buses or the subway; bleeding out of headphones on the underground; booming from the speakers at bars and nightclubs. Music culture touches you, moves you, enfolds you in its logic, whether you seek it out or not. Popular and underground music practices both express and transmit the feeling of a city, as well as shaping and reflecting located political meanings\u2014they also enable individuals to make sense of their identities and their relationships to others within cities, offering physical and creative possibilities for practicing city space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coming to know oneself in a city or cities, through music, is an ambivalent, aural \u201cdramaturgical\u201d process, then, which we have attempted to parse below. We do so through a mixtape selection of tracks (with links), which we use as a mode of reflection on wider musical cultures and their social and political implications. We connect these tracks to specific cities and to ideas about cities, such as notions of cosmopolitanism and nation. The overarching city or theme provides the section title, with the tracks and our reflections on them beneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you will see, our reflections begin to reveal how sound cultures make meaning and construct narratives within cities and beyond. However, our reflections also point to tensions and contradictions: we do not perceive the musical and attendant social and political cultures under discussion in precisely the same way, and our experiences (as a white British female living in England and as an African American man living and working in a range of U.S. cities) begin to illuminate how perception is not neutral but conditioned by our distinct perspectives born from geographical, cultural and embodied knowledge, and from structural conditions that do not condition everybody in the same way. We have deliberately left such contradictions unresolved; we are not attempting here to build a logical theoretical argument piece by piece to offer a neat reflection on urban tensions. Rather, our personal accounts of city-space, of individual tracks and of wider musical cultures begin to reveal the unresolved ways in which personal as well as place identities are implicated in processes of urban dramaturgy, and how factors such as race, ethnicity, class and sex might modulate our experiences of music and contribute to our narrative \u201csense of self.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We invite readers to engage with the article by listening to the title tracks, reading our reflections and making their own links between the accounts that follow, and the sensory, emotional and political resonances of the tracks themselves. We also suggest that where a particular theme or idea speaks to you, you may gain further insight into the ideas and cultures we discuss by listening to the supplementary tracks embedded in the prose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We offer this article in the spirit of a mixtape, which Jared A. Ball positions as a \u201cradical form\u201d (5) that seeks to push against colonial and capitalist power-structures. As Ball argues, the mixtape offers a site in which stories might be told \u201cfrom the perspective of community members, in ways that are not possible in the context of the mainstream media that targets their communities\u201d (129).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our reflections thus reveal the role that aural urban cultures play in helping us to shape and make meanings about our cities, our communities and ourselves. Our reflections also reveal how music can facilitate both understanding and finding means of withstanding the wider social and political realities that structure and produce our urban spaces, in all their inequitable reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Los Angeles (Javon)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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