Moving in the Cityscape: Performance and the Embodied Experience of theFlâneur

Walter Benjamin's concept of theflâneurhas been widely used to conventionalize ‘the disinterested voyeur, the lonely figure haunting the streets of cities, the person who watches the spectacle of modern life’. Petra Kuppers argues that theflâneuris as central to the ‘nineties cityscape as to that of Baudelaire's Paris, of which Benjamin was writing, or to his own inter-war Berlin. She responds to feminist and other objections and, while recognizing the validity of later writings on the nature of the body such as Foucault's, argues that theflâneurremains valuable in counterbalancing ‘aspects of contemporary theory that use the human body as metaphor’ with the physicality of ‘a lived set of material practices and inscribed discourses’. To illustrate and develop her argument she uses moments from Kathryn Bigelow's filmStrange Days(1996), performances by the Austrian group Bilderwerfer and by Francesca Vilalta-Ollé, and the camera-dance made for TV,Pace(1996). Petra Kuppers is Research Fellow in Performing Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University.