Urban Theatre’s Everyday in Do’s and Don’ts

In early 2019, 55 years after Street Dance, our two-hour journey began in the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm foyer. As all of us in the audience arrived, we picked up our tickets and lolled about, waiting to be collected and taken to the truck. From the program notes, we learned that:

The observation of “everyday human behavior” in the urban “laboratory” (a controlled space for experiments) marks a shift, not dissimilar to that witnessed in Street Dance, from the usual theatrical experience of watching performers portraying characters. Instead, the viewer as rhythmanalyst becomes an ethnographer applying observational methods to study the quotidian and uncover real people’s behavior in a social setting.

Figure 2.

Rimini Protokoll, Do’s and Don’ts (Berlin 2018). By Aljoscha Begrich, Helgard Haug, and Jörg Karrenbauer. Dido Antonia Aquilanti pictured on a stage before a red theatre curtain. (Excerpt from the video documentation by Jay Lee, videostill © Mischa Leinkauf 2021)

Eventually, we were asked to board the truck and I chose a seat in the top row of three and fastened my seatbelt. Before setting off, a screen was lowered and we were presented with the “Prologue,” a recording in which a conventional theatre space was projected along the inside length of the vehicle. In the video of the Berlin performance, ^{Footnote 7} a girl named Dido (the same role as Arun in Frankfurt), perhaps 10 or 11 years of age and dressed in blue jeans and a purple sweater, slips through the curtains and comes to stand near-motionless downstage, her legs tightly together and arms by her sides. Her body language — with a limited range of movement, front-on and self-contained — sets the tone for the work.

The girl introduces us to the protocols and rules of theatre: the “do’s and don’ts” of the stage and auditorium. For instance, one is not supposed to whistle onstage, as “this brings bad luck,” an injunction we are told dates back to the time of gas lamps. Also, one is not allowed to eat, or to wear a hat. However, when her role demands it, a performer is allowed to do anything: insult the audience, lie to them, be naked, urinate or defecate onstage, thus overthrowing all the conventions that apply in everyday life. The light then fades, signaling the beginning of the “show” proper, which coincides with the vehicle leaving the theatre’s precinct and the beginning of the ride.

Works by Rimini Protokoll, as Christopher Balme writes, are “predicated on the fundamental idea of situating performance in the real world and thereby problematizing the borders between reality and fiction” (2014:188). This, I argue, is importantly achieved through the presentation of a novel relationship between time and space. The on-screen theatrical proscenium arch frames the truck journey as if it was a conventional performance. Moreover, the work is subdivided into a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue, indicated by titles on the screen at the beginning of each section, suggesting that the “massive laboratory to observe everyday human behavior” (Rimini Protokoll Reference Protokoll2019) in the real world resembles or is the equivalent of a theatrical role-play. This superimposes the traditional rhythm of a theatrical work onto the macro structure of the journey. Rhythms also permeate the organization of material into smaller sections and units (see Jordan Reference Jordan1993:1) with a mix of recordings, street viewings, and live scenes with performers. During the journey we are occasionally left uncertain of whether the projections inside the truck are live or recorded, confusing the senses, and disorienting the spectators’ conception of time by blurring the internal rhythms of the performance with the external rhythms of the city itself.

Yet unlike Childs’s work, which involved professional performers, Do’s and Don’ts elides boundaries between reality and theatre by using “ordinary,” nonprofessional people with little or no prior stage experience, who simply play themselves. This “threatens to unhinge the work’s status as a play” ( Jackson Reference Jackson2011:170), as their speech eschews the rhythmic structures of the trained thespian’s voice, and they lack the bodily comportment or sense of rhythm instilled in professional dancers by their intensive training. Rudi the truck driver has a strong Ruhrgebiet dialect and there are several awkward silences in the young girl’s monologue. Yet as Daniel Wetzel from Rimini Protokoll explains:

In Rudi’s case, his expertise involves operating a large vehicle and the many technical skills required to do so: engaging the clutch, pulling the handbrake, hand-eye coordination to avoid traffic obstacles, as well as his knowledge of traffic rules.

The work does make one more concrete allusion to theatrical convention in the form of a Berlin school choir (which Dido refers to as her choir), whose prerecorded interludes, which are interspersed throughout the work, give a commentary on different scenes and aspects of urban space and regulations. At times their voices provide a background, typically in the form of rhythmic chants, while at others we see some of the children on screen arranged in geometrical patterns (invariably rows of three) singing lines mostly in unison, a 21st-century Greek chorus: a homogenous group of performers who occasionally comment on the dramatic action.

The City

As the on-screen auditorium darkens, our journey’s first segment, entitled “Street Life,” commences. Projected in real time into the cargo space where we sit, we encounter Rudi the driver sitting next to Dido. The pair engage in conversation about the rules applying to trucks, such as the type of license needed to operate the vehicle we are sitting in. The screen then lifts and we see the city streets passing by. We soon notice the spatial and temporal regulation of the urban environment (particularly the traffic) that was mentioned in the program notes, and register its associated rhythms. We see cars in the right-hand lane wait patiently before red traffic lights, while those traveling straight on move in a seamless stream, with punctuated regularity as the lights change from red to amber, and two seconds later to green. Similar alternating cycles of signals, changes of motion and speed, queuing processes, and rhythmic repetition feature throughout much of the work. As we cross through a residential area, trees pass by the truck’s windowpane at regular one- or two-second intervals. Pedestrians wait for green lights before crossing the street — their bodies disciplined to act according to rules — while others smoke or talk in front of shops, gesticulating and chatting to one another. These scenes create “interactions of various repetitive and different rhythms” (Lefebvre [1992] 2013:40) that enliven the street.

Figure 3.

Rimini Protokoll, Do’s and Don’ts (Frankfurt 2019). By Aljoscha Begrich, Helgard Haug, and Jörg Karrenbauer. From left: Arun Tönsmann and Rudolf (Rudi) Bühne in the driver’s cabin. (Photo © Alexandra Kolb)

As our journey proceeds, we pass through the areas of the city that serve different functions: quieter residential zones with neatly arranged houses, the lively center with its main square, fringes of parks and other uninhabited quarters, and finally suburbia. Such zoning, as Lefebvre critically remarks, rationalizes space and propagates segregation and separation, for instance between “ghettos” of leisure and those reserved for specific social groups, such as university campuses (1996:144). Our experience of the fragmentation of urban space is echoed and fortified through the visual dramaturgy. The alternation between live street scenes and recordings, heralded by the raising and lowering of our blind to the outside world, gives rhythm to our journey and punctuates our perceptions to highlight certain parts of the city while shielding others from view.

The imposition of traffic codes and the zoning of habitats were historically triggered by the collective chaos of urban space. In the 18th century, cities struggled to cope with a population explosion, leading to congestion of horse-drawn carriages, unsanitary conditions, and muddy, often flooded streets with gutters carrying away human waste (White Reference White2009). Introducing street lighting (in Paris and London from the early 19th century), paving roads, broadening streets to counter traffic congestion, and removing other hazards helped remedy the situation by stabilizing urban territories. This essentially marked the beginning of modern city planning, turning cities into more predictable and controllable spaces:

This new spatial configuration also “resulted in, and was combined with, new predictable timescapes” (424): a synchronization of temporal rhythms that had significant impacts on the human body. Examples include regular school timetables and working hours, fixed breaks and mealtimes, commuter rush hours, and preset bus and train schedules with peak and off-peak variations. These timescapes were designed to change the city from a state of arrhythmia — an injurious discordance between rhythms (associated in corporeal terms with illness and suffering) — to one of eurhythmia, the smooth and harmonious combination of rhythms we experience when in good health and as “normal (which is to say normed!) everydayness” (Lefebvre [Reference Lefebvre, Elden and Moore1992] 2013:25).

This increasingly linear (in Lefebvre’s sense) approach to time reflected a broader rationalization of life under capitalism, with the imposed rhythms often furthering the interests and logic of exchange-value production and economic growth. ^{Footnote 8} These imposed rhythms superimposed “themselves on the multiple natural rhythms of the body” (18–19), such as respiration and heartbeat. Act 3 of Do’s and Don’ts entitled “Who Rules?” highlights the possible endpoint of such urban rationalization processes, as we are presented with the organization of a “Future City” around technology-based smart solutions. Futuristic computer animations of the metropolis are projected on screen with motorways full of driverless cars bumper-to-bumper in time-lapse, fingerprint recognition and facial ID devices, and fridges with integrated computer screens. Such a vision would likely have filled Lefebvre with horror, as he feared life experience being appropriated by increasingly abstract forces, to the point where the city “no longer lived” and was “no longer understood practically” (1996:148).

Yet glimpses of a less-regulated side to the city can also be gleaned from exposure to the alternative rhythms of its underbelly. In the work’s second act, entitled “Sending-off,” the truck halts at a square — in the recorded Berlin version the notorious Hermannplatz, reputedly one of the city’s least attractive public spaces. ^{Footnote 9} On screen the children’s choir sings high-pitched repetitious words and syllables of unvarying accent and duration (such as “Ich - Ich - Ich”) at short regular intervals, accompanied by synthesized sounds that quickly become monotonous. The screen then lifts to reveal a variety of market huts, stalls, vans, and cycles scattered around in disorderly fashion, set against the backdrop of a large busy street, houses, and a few trees.

Figure 4.

Rimini Protokoll, Do’s and Don’ts (Berlin 2018). By Aljoscha Begrich, Helgard Haug, and Jörg Karrenbauer. View of Hermannplatz Berlin from the inside of the truck; Dido Antonia Aquilanti on the grassed area to the left. (Photo © André Wunstorf)

The corporeal actions that present themselves on the square are set against the regularity of the choir’s accompaniment. Merchants sell goods and customers are bunched around stands with inexpensive clothes. A woman perched on a stone wall and a wheelchair user clad in a beanie hat and jeans — strangely slumped forward as if unconscious — are juxtaposed with the contrasting movements of people walking past and groups hovering excitedly around the stalls, as everyone exudes subtly differing degrees of motion or stillness with little synchronicity. The square is clearly a polyrhythmic space in which various rhythms interact. Members of the choir in turn criticize the square for being “loud and ugly,” “messy,” and “unruly,” and complain about dog turds, cigarette butts, scattered rubbish, unpleasant smells from fish and kebab stands, and homeless people in the same breath. Dido alights from the stationary truck and walks onto a grassed traffic island, coming to stand almost motionless with her legs tightly together and arms crossed below her chest as in the earlier theatre scene, to deliver a short monologue. She points out that the square is surveilled and policed according to the rules of a KBO (high-crime zone); its association with theft, drug-trafficking, and even murder grants police officers powers of intervention, including the right to ascertain someone’s identity and frisk-search them without a warrant.

By expressing fear of homeless people and marauding drunks, Dido and the choir condemn, or so it seems, the misconduct of the socially marginalized. In contrast to Childs’s work, which appears to celebrate the inhabitants’ “right to the city” (see Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre1968), the young choristers prioritize urban safeguarding and good order (which traditionally includes bans on graffiti, begging, and street sleeping) over the rights of the individual to occupy and use public space. Their view chimes with conservative ideological perspectives on city planning, such as R.C. Ellickson’s (1996), which regard strict social control and law enforcement as a precondition for shared use. Others, however, view such mechanisms as curtailments of liberty, and advocate actions that produce “antagonistic effects” (Lefebvre [1992] 2013:48) in the face of attempts at social control.

Dressage, Control, and the Body

The regulating social rhythms that urban forces dictate have a significant effect on bodily comportment. In applying the concept of dressage, Lefebvre uses an analogy of the “breaking-in” of horses to comply with the patterns of behavior expected by their trainers:

Practices learned through repetition are imposed on individuals from an early age through rhythmic regimes of training. Temporal and spatial arrangements of people in everyday contexts are produced through various (for example, parental or political) forms of control and become routine and habitual.

The urban dressage to which we are exposed on our journey is immediately apparent. Little children are trained, through regular teaching, to look right and left before crossing roads and to respond to signals. Consequently, (older) people’s bodies have learned to obey the particularly strict traffic rules of German cities: we see pedestrians stop at red lights and walk when they change to green. They have acquired the technique to navigate the pavements in orderly, efficient, and methodical rhythmic patterns; neither too slowly nor too hastily, and mostly in straight lines. Dressage, as Lefebvre writes, “determines the majority of rhythms. In the street, people can turn left or right, but their walk, the rhythm of their walking, their movements [gestes] do not change for all that” ([1992] 2013:49). In the residential areas we traverse, we do not see anyone walking in circuitous curves, skipping along the road, or stopping without reason: they, and others, would consider such behaviors inappropriate for adults.

Other scenes in Do’s and Don’ts underscore the dressage that underpins daily life’s socially acceptable conduct. Some families, as the chorister children tell us off camera, operate point systems with marks awarded or subtracted for good or bad behavior, for instance for (not) tidying their room or (not) helping in the household. Introduced in childhood, the concept finds reverberations in later life. Rudi mentions, for example, the penalty points doled out for contravening traffic codes. The corporeal techniques people learn over time become internalized through reiteration, including both formal and informal rules of comportment in public places (the latter, mentioned in one scene, include not staring directly into another person’s eyes). People thus comply with them “to avoid guilt feelings” (Ellickson Reference Ellickson1996:1194), even if there is no external penalty or disadvantage for failing to do so. Dressage, in Lefebvre’s words, “puts into place an automatism of repetitions” ([1992] 2013:49). ^{Footnote 10}

Yet formal regulatory mechanisms and sanctions also ensure public compliance, should internalized codes prove inadequate. At the Konstablerwache square in Frankfurt, Rudi and Arun point out the closed-circuit (CCTV) security cameras that have become iconic implements of mass disciplinary surveillance, believed to promote “smarter” cities (predominantly through the prevention of crime). Video analysis, a digital tool that recognizes a person’s facial features and enables the authorities to follow their every step once captured by a camera, is featured in the filmed Berlin version. There is also mention of the Gefangenensammelstelle (or GESA for short), which we drive past: a building where people are taken after an arrest, often for “civil disobedience,” ^{Footnote 11} when regular prison cells are unavailable to accommodate them.

Such tools and institutions regulate street behavior by bringing individuals’ bodies into sync. Like the regularization of bodily comportment and expression through dressage, observation is designed to exert control and exemplifies the state’s overarching concern with surveillance, security, and order (corroborating Lefebvre’s critical stance towards urban planning and design). In another poignant scene, we are exposed to a series of short camera shots showing small groups of choristers — nine per group, arranged in lines of three, superimposed against the roofs of various local authority buildings such as the railway and police stations. Standing almost motionless and facing us front on, they sing in unison (to a piano accompaniment) repetitive melodic snatches of the words “Trust is good — control is better/Vertrauen ist gut — Kontrolle ist besser” in both English and German. This eventually segues into each group intoning the single word “control,” at different pitches, before the camera cuts to the next. Their locations are exactly where we might expect to find CCTV cameras, rendering them “objects-turned-human” (or vice versa); while the camerawork having them look down on us makes them appear both omniscient and powerful.

These frequent allusions to surveillance reminded me of the power of choreography, manifested by our own positioning inside the truck, whose huge glass panels allowed us to see outside but not be seen by those on the streets. This had distinct overtones of the panopticon: the prison designed by Jeremy Bentham (and discussed in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish [(1975) 1979:214–22]) that allowed the guards to observe inmates without their knowledge. The passersby whom we were able to survey were oblivious to us as we watched. Our status thus largely seemed to be that of voyeurs: able to observe everyday actions without the agents’ awareness. This said, I recall that while we were parked momentarily on Konstablerwache in Frankfurt, several passersby noticed that the vehicle strangely seemed to contain an audience, and moved back and forth around the truck to gain a better view and ascertain our presence. This produced a lot of laughter and waving on our side, and (eventually) theirs. It was also, I felt, an apt illustration of the cracks and fissures that can undermine total surveillance.

Figure 5.

Rimini Protokoll, Do’s and Don’ts (Berlin 2018). By Aljoscha Begrich, Helgard Haug, and Jörg Karrenbauer. Police station at Alexanderplatz with choristers superimposed on the roof. (Excerpt from the video documentation by Jay Lee; videostill © Mischa Leinkauf 2021)

Capitalism and the Shopping Mall

When we first encountered Rudi, he informed us that our mobile auditorium was a former refrigerator truck that had once carried pig halves. By comparing us to fresh meat ready for consumption, Rudi’s comment introduced the dominant rhythms of the market economy. From my place on the top row, I could observe the kinesis of the spectators’ torsos, which visibly swayed from right to left and back again, just as the pig halves likely had once swung from side to side in time with the vehicle’s movements. And just as the pig halves had hung suspended in an orderly fashion from the ceiling, we were obliged to wear seat belts and sit in three neat and tightly arranged rows, enacting legal and social imperatives.

Yet not all was in order. Already feeling distraught due to the death of an aunt and harboring an illness, I experienced nausea on the truck due to the extreme heat of the top row, even though it was February. ^{Footnote 12} I thus became acutely aware of my body’s malfunctions, in line with Lefebvre’s observation that “it is only in suffering that a particular rhythm breaks apart, modified by illness” ([1992] 2013:37). While longing for fresh air to be pumped into the cargo space (which happened at regular but infrequent intervals) I pondered the fact that rhythm is, after all, not merely cultural but primarily biological. These sensations, which produced an acute sense of arrhythmia in my body, seemed in ironic contrast to the truck’s original function of keeping pork refrigerated.

Figure 6.

Rimini Protokoll, Do’s and Don’ts (Frankfurt 2019). By Aljoscha Begrich, Helgard Haug, and Jörg Karrenbauer. Shopping mall scene projected on the screen. (Photo © Alexandra Kolb)

The linearity of rhythms became most pronounced in a poignant scene towards the end of Do’s and Don’ts, which captures the insidious and markedly iterative snappiness of many forms of advertising. The screen is lowered and the audience sees a video of the Kurfürstendamm, a major shopping street in Berlin — with its range of shops including Shoes Leiser, United Colors of Benetton, Mango, Adidas, Esprit, as well as the famous German department store Kaufhaus des Westens — as if driving past them in real time. The image then shifts to the interior of a large indoor shopping mall; I distinctly remember the transition being smooth enough to trick us into wondering whether our vehicle had actually entered such a space. Our virtual journey through retail precincts is accompanied at first by recorded acoustic, unmelodic, and rather unpleasant recurring beats, followed by cuts showing the children’s choir singing advertising slogans in repetitive staccato rhythms, alternating between the full chorus and short interjected solos and duets. The slogans are synchronously overlayed on the screen in large white capital letters: “JUST DO IT!–JUST DO IT! THINK DIFFERENT”; or “JUST DO IT–JUST DO IT–JUST DO IT. I’M LOVING IT!”; or “YOU ARE FREE, I AM SO FREE!” (“Just do it” is of course the Nike catchphrase, while “Think different” is an Apple tagline).

The on-screen intrusion of the advertising slogans and repeated intonations of the children’s choir lend contrapuntal rhythm to the gliding motion as we ride along the mall; the pronounced accents and stresses of the former belying the latter’s smoothness. The slogans themselves, alternately in English and German, have similar short rhythmic structures, usually containing one or two stressed syllabi: “Break the rules” and “Mach dein Ding” (Do your thing), for instance, can be notated as/x/(stresses on the first and last syllable). Others begin with an unstressed syllable followed by a stress, such as “Just do it!” and “Think different!”: in notation x/x. The slogans’ regularly alternating rhythmic patterns make them catchy and easy to remember; indeed, it has been recognized in linguistics that:

Psychologically, motivational slogans about freedom, agency, and individualism are designed to instill a feeling of power. Visually the products, presented in glassed-in shops or window displays, bestow a quasi-theatrical effect: an “advertising show” as Schivelbusch puts it ([1988] 1995:146). Spatially and temporally, shopping experiences in malls are carefully choreographed. In contrast to the outdoor market, which is devoid of choreographed routes, the mall induces customers to enter each floor at one end and exit at the other, obliging them to traverse its entire length in a straight line to maximize their purchases and consequently the company’s profit. The customers’ movements are forced to oscillate between rhythmic routines of action (crossing the mall) and contemplation (gazing at the window displays).

In stark contrast to the proclaimed freedom and endless possibilities promised in the slogans, the scene evokes the dominant form of repetition derived from the dictates of production. Emphasizing the linearity of capitalism’s rhythms through the chanting of unremittingly monotonous phrases to a facile musical accompaniment, the rhythm reflects the predictability, tedium, and banality of the neoliberal service economy centered on the consumer. What is more, the body language of the children choristers is at odds both with the spectacular concepts evoked by the corporate mottos and the brightly lit, colorful window displays. As we pass along the mall — observing people moving through the walkways — the choir is singled out by its relative stasis. A mixed-gender group, they stand facing the camera in three rows, mirroring the spectators’ own three-tiered seating arrangement and thus perhaps inviting us to reflect on ourselves. The singers at first remain completely still and (while repeatedly intoning “Just do it!”) sway slightly in unison from side to side, their arms hanging beside their bodies. Set against a black backdrop, they are clad in gloomy, dark clothes: black or navy jeans, long-sleeved sweaters and jumpers that leave only their faces, necks, and hands uncovered, standing out like small dots of lights in a sea of darkness. They present the image of a dull homogenous mass, an impression further promoted by their facial expressions. The camera focuses on a nerdy-looking boy in spectacles (think Harry Potter) who, while declaring “Discover the possibilities. Do something different,” looks as if he is having an endlessly tedious day.

Figure 7.

Rimini Protokoll, Do’s and Don’ts (Berlin 2018). By Aljoscha Begrich, Helgard Haug, and Jörg Karrenbauer. Shopping mall scene with superimposed advertising slogan. (Excerpt from the video documentation by Jay Lee; videostill © Mischa Leinkauf 2021)

Boredom in contemporary society is an experience Lefebvre frequently, if unsystematically, alludes to throughout his writings. The modern phenomenon of “unrelenting boredom” is a result of “stultifying routine, the banalization of culture and the colonization of subjectivity by the spectacle,” as Michael Gardiner writes in an essay on “Henri Lefebvre and the ‘Sociology of Boredom’” (2012:39). Reverberating Georg Simmel’s observation that city dwellers are bombarded with internal and external stimuli associated with capitalism, eradicating personal identity and leading to mass anonymity ([1903] 1969:48), Lefebvre reflects on the endless distractions and activities of the market economy as “homogenous,” “tedious,” “uniform and monotonous” ([1992] 2013:82, 83). These shallow entertainments significantly compromise the quality of everyday life and the formation of meaningful individual identities. Accordingly, commodity time is quantitative and controlled, abstract, dreary, and predictable.

In the shopping mall scene, the bright, artificial lighting relegates natural cyclical rhythms such as day and night and the seasons to the outside world, controlling an unvarying climate. The continual sameness induced by rationalization echoes in the affective experience of repetitive musical beats and the restricted, subdued nature of the chorus movements and their homogenous, bland-colored clothes; they seem to embody a denial of fathomable lived experience. Thus boredom, as Gardiner writes with reference to Lefebvre, allows us to understand “wider anxieties, socio-cultural changes and subjective crises” (2012:37). Yet if boredom is a historically contingent condition, it follows that “it can be at least partly superseded, especially if we realize that boredom itself might occasionally harbour flashes of subversive insight and the seeds of transformational praxis” (38). The same observation applies more generally to the urban everyday.

Resistant Choreography, or the Exception to the Rule

Homeless people present poignant examples of a transgressive corporeality that resists manifold attempts to manage the urban environment. We see several of them on the streets of Berlin. Rudi’s insistence that “everyone is the architect of their own fortune” suggests they are responsible for their own life choices, and may be seen to embrace the neoliberal ideal of rugged individualism. But whether by misfortune or choice, those outside of society’s mainstream defy dominant behavioral norms, and their presence on the street — and consequently in the artwork — provokes reflections about the interaction between bodies, place, and time, as highlighted in Nicholas Blomley’s intriguing article on “How to Turn a Beggar into a Bus Stop” (2007). Blomley argues that the regulation of urban life, notably through traffic codes, redirects an issue of rights (the urban poor’s right to shelter) to an argument about people’s activity and use of space. In democracies, individuals’ civil rights typically include free access to public spaces and they cannot be discriminated against on grounds of social status. Yet this has led, Blomley claims, to an adjustment in many countries’ laws and other social-control mechanisms that seeks to criminalize bodily actions in space instead. Specifically, local authorities can justify removing people for loitering or being immobile (sitting and lying in doorways) on the basis that they are obstructing the smooth flow of pedestrian traffic, presenting a safety hazard on streets, and thwarting their main function as transportation corridors. According to Blomley’s analysis, the homeless are thus seen as static objects in a similar way to mailboxes, café tables, and vegetable stands.

A lack of motion, of course, spawns its own alternative rhythms. The immobility of the homeless is the flip-side of the tyranny of societal dressage and capitalist norms, with their imposition of normative and socially acceptable behaviors on everyday life. Vagrants often occupy city locations designed for other purposes; for instance, sitting in front of shops where convention would demand an upright standing or walking posture. What’s more, they disturb the rhythms of passersby who have to skirt around them or stop to give them money, turning a (permissible and invited) contemplation of shop-window exhibits into a (often clandestine) gaze at these alternative human “displays.” Temporally, homeless people contravene the regularities of capitalism: the pursuit of efficiency and productivity that imposes strict rhythms on individual bodies. They typically eschew the usual distinctions between work- and leisure-time, are not bound by productivity requirements, and disrupt expected patterns of free-market exchange — for example when they attract voluntary donations, scavenge for discarded items, or commit minor acts of pilfering. They might thus be branded as outcasts of the capitalist system; as Phil Jones and Saskia Warren remark, with reference to Lefebvre, “bodies outside these rhythms can be considered abject. The regulation of time can thus be seen as marking any attempt to resist capitalism as abject” (2016:287).

Figure 8.

Rimini Protokoll, Do’s and Don’ts (Berlin 2018). By Aljoscha Begrich, Helgard Haug, and Jörg Karrenbauer. Jasper Penz stands on the platform at the Berlin Südkreuz Station. (Photo © André Wunstorf)

As I argued in my Act 2 section above, the segregation of public space was designed to combat the chaos that had reigned on city streets in bygone eras. Restrictions on beggars, street entertainers, and vendors, who are given strict instructions about where they can ply their trades, fulfill a similar function. But these regulations are liable to be judged in different ways depending on one’s political standpoint. Blomley suggests they are motivated by authoritarianism or a “police-power mentality” (2007:1703). Others defend them in the interest of capitalist forces, asserting that the presence of beggars leads to an “exodus […] of street users” and negatively influences consumer behavior (see Ellickson Reference Ellickson1996:1175). Yet others cite a deep-rooted (albeit contested) Western belief in freedom: Kärrholm articulates this view by pointing out that “[t]here is a long-standing association in liberal thought between mobility, individualism and liberty” (2009:1707). The equation of freedom with mobility, which we also observe in advertising slogans, can be traced back to Hobbes who defined liberty as the “absence of […] external impediments to motion” ([1651] 1968:261). Following this logic, those who block walkways by sitting or standing on them are not only viewed as impediments to consumers or through traffic, but as attacking the very core of our liberal understanding of freedom. Hence, by removing obstacles on the street (human or otherwise) we ensure this worldview remains intact.

The theme of motionlessness or stillness is explored in Do’s and Don’ts. In one scene, Dido’s socially critical older brother Jasper, who is perhaps 17 years of age, joins us on our journey as the girl is required to return home by the Youth Protection Act. He will later out himself as a left-wing opponent of the capitalist system, which he associates with control, authoritarianism, and a predilection for rules and order. We see the teenager standing motionless on a platform, broad-legged and in semi-profile, his gaze fixed to the left into space. In the recorded Berlin version, this takes place at Südkreuz station behind two train tracks, while in Frankfurt a tram station was used for the equivalent scene. At first, we do not notice the boy, who blends into the backdrop of everyday activity as did the performers in Street Dance. Yet the dialogue between him and his sister, who is still on the truck, gives his presence away. Jasper explains that by standing there completely still, he is seeking to undermine the rule that we must always have a reason to be somewhere (as opposed to loitering without purpose). Not doing anything, he argues, can be a disruptive act.

In a scene towards the end of the piece, the motif of stillness as resistance to dominant norms of mobility surfaces again, when Jasper encourages the driver to stop in the middle of a large, busy junction, temporarily halting traffic and creating a long queue of stationary cars. In Frankfurt, this caused a memorable and hilarious moment when a frustrated and aggressive Mercedes motorist drove, at intervals, closer and closer to the side of our truck until his hood almost bumped it. As the scene took place after nightfall, we saw his headlights flashing and heard his horn being used wildly and repetitively, reminding us that many people have internalized their right to mobility as an element of freedom, and react harshly against those who threaten that right.

These sustained moments of inactivity could be seen to offer, in Lefebvre’s words, “a new usage of the body, of time and space, of sociability” (1988:86–87) that presents a utopian alternative to the status quo. By using a nonnormative gestural language and choosing to do nothing, Jasper refuses the role that society has identified for him and confirms his own agency; by stopping traffic (however momentarily) he rejects the functionality and rationality of the prescribed uses of space. The act of standing in public places has been deployed elsewhere as a form of protest, both in the political context of demonstrations and indeed in the work of certain choreographers. In the US civil rights movement, as Susan Foster convincingly argues, it was used as a “stoic, non-compliant non-action” (2003:399) by African Americans to undermine discriminatory segregation laws. In Turkey, meanwhile, it served as a “legal form of resistance” (Foellmer Reference Foellmer2016:58; see Mee Reference Mee2014) against a police ban on demonstrations in a square in Istanbul. André Lepecki considers various politically charged deployments of motionlessness in dance or by dancers, for instance in Jérôme Bel’s The Last Performance (1995) and by Yoshiko Chuma, who in 1992 stood at St. Mark’s church in New York “saying that the state of the world was such that she didn’t feel like dancing” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki, de Belder and Tachelet2001:43). Such intentional acts of stillness, in Lepecki’s words, trouble the “dusty folds of agitation in the name of progress” (44).

Stillness is an alternative form of temporality, which challenges the routine rhythmicities of capitalist forces with their constant succession of (supposedly) novel activities. It injects moments of disturbance and disobedience into an otherwise over-regulated world. Of course, being still also changes our corporeal rhythms. As all dancers know, and choreographer Steve Paxton has explicitly observed, total stillness does not exist even in the act of standing, which actually entails “quite a lot of minute movement” (in Zimmer Reference Zimmer1977:11). Lefebvre reflects similarly that for the observant rhythmanalyst, “apparent immobility […] contains one thousand and one movements” ([1992] 2013:26). By being still, we draw attention to the distinction between our body’s conscious and directed movements (external rhythms) and its internal physiological ones such as breathing and tiny gestures we cannot control, like the blinking of our eyes. This also means that our alignment to dominant social rhythms is never complete, as our natural bodily processes cannot be fully suppressed or annexed by hegemonic forces.