ABSTRACT
Performance is the very stuff of the city, and therefore offers a concrete way to reveal or intervene in a city’s routes. One of the most influential performances to engage the city as both performance and text, Forced Entertainment’s Nights in this City put spectators on a bus tour through Sheffield—and, in an iteration, Rotterdam. Nights in this City performs not only the dialogue between different stories but also the displacement and instability lurking in any attempt to connect to the city. In revealing the invisible city, these artists may perform a more aesthetically serious version of what the engaged traveller often does. The traveller can follow impulses and interests to peer into the contradictions or to go behind the scenes of cities. Insofar as tourists enter the economic, political, and cultural activities of a city, they shape its appearance in theatrical ways.
