ABSTRACT
The rhythms of traffic differ in many cities around the globe and adaption of rhythm may become a question of life and death. The actor Emil Abossolo Mbo considers the skill to adapt to urban rhythms a cosmopolitan competence; given the increasing mobility, mechanisation and digitalisation, handling different rhythms is as important as dealing with different languages. Urban anthropologists have, to date, neglected rhythm, an entity that many film directors and Henri Lefebvre consider the most significant feature of urban life. Lefebvre tried to find a qualitative approach to urban rhythm but admitted that the problem consists of the necessity of being simultaneously inside and outside the rhythm, an exigence allowed for by re-enacting. Actors explore how airports, supermarkets and cemeteries react to gait, respiration and heartbeat. Abossolo Mbo and the author suggest experiences to explore how feelings of belonging or alienation occur in urban space because people do not encounter others in white cubes but in buses, hospitals and universities, and each location commands another rhythm that people are either able to adapt to or not.
