It's about Time Creative placemaking and performance analytics
Date
2015-07-04
Author
Editors
Vourloumis, Hypatia
Argyropoulou, Gigi
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Abstract
The U.S. philanthropic discourse known as “creative placemaking” unites a historically
unprecedented number of institutional investors in the instrumentalization of art
toward civic, social, economic, and environmental goals. Since coining the term in
2011, the National Endowment for the Arts has supported 256 arts interventions in
all fifty states with funds totaling more than $21 million. Not without its critics,
“place-based” grant programs hail artists to collaborate on municipally driven, often
six-figure budget initiatives that use culture as a backdrop for “comprehensive community
cultural development.” Compared to the characteristic shortsightedness of institutional
approaches to arts philanthropy in the U.S., many “placemaking” residencies offer
significantly expanded periods of cultural engagement between artists, community members,
and institutional liaisons. While the discursive emphasis on “place” by institutional
investors has incited much debate among policy makers and practitioners, less attention
has been paid to the instrumentality of time and embodied interaction within these
elongated arts residencies. These exceptional circumstances signal a crucial point
of intervention for performance scholarship.
In this essay, I study cooperative time spent over the course of one NEA-funded residency
to shift foundational understandings about how artists and project participants challenge
the mechanisms of capitalism through practical and direct cooperation with institutional
agents. Drawing upon project documentation and interview testimony from a team of
lead artists, administrators, and community participants, I highlight three temporal
strategies through which the Project Willowbrook team failed to faithfully reproduce
institutional norms guarding “creativity” and “place”. By stalling time (reframing
the neighborhood's present-day cultural textures and rhythms), spending time (cultivating
conversations with residents about Willowbrook's vexed history of foiled planning),
and sub-contracting time (rewriting county art contracts twelve times to account for
changes), the team's iterative approach suggests the anti-choreographic possibility
that collectively embodied solutions to institutional problems cannot be planned in
advance.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17246Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1080/13528165.2015.1071046Publication Info
Wilbur, Sarah (2015). It's about Time Creative placemaking and performance analytics. Performance Research, 20(4). pp. 96-103. 10.1080/13528165.2015.1071046. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17246.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Sarah Wilbur
Associate Professor of the Practice of Dance
Sarah Wilbur is an Associate Professor of the Practice in Dance with a secondary appointment
in Theater Studies at Duke University. In addition to Sarah's longstanding work as
a cross-sector dance artist, choreographer, and dance educator (1996-present), she
also conducts academic research on US arts labor, economics, and infrastructures.
She studies and interprets the hidden economic, cultural, social, and practical dimensions
of artists' daily work out of a desire to make the co

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