Drop Dead: Municipal Crisis and the Geographies of Performance in New York City, 1972-1982
Item
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Title
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Drop Dead: Municipal Crisis and the Geographies of Performance in New York City, 1972-1982
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:156280facaac:11810
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identifier
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12423
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Creator
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Miller, Hillary,
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Contributor
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David Savran
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater history | Theater | Performing arts | Coney Island | Downtown Brooklyn | Fiscal Crisis | Lower East Side | New York Urban History | Times Square
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Abstract
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In this dissertation, I argue that the fiscal upheaval that occurred in 1970s New York did not only affect the budget sheets of city-funded organizations; it also stunted the distribution of theatre across the city and the movement towards decentralization that began in the 1960s. I demonstrate the ways in which the policy responses to the fiscal crisis---which formed the early foundations of neoliberal governance in New York City---had contradictory results in specific localities and across institutional domains. In the examples presented within these four chapters, theatre mediated conflicts over public resources, spatial inequities, and community identity.;In Chapter 1, I argue that as performers reconfigured representations on stage, Off-Off Broadway evolved in a dialectical relationship with neighborhood groups and local politicians. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate the ways in which the municipal vision of a river-to-river expansion model grounded in a thriving Times Square led to initiatives that often ignored the fundamental characteristics of theatre production in the city, when its strongest currents lay in decentralization, not a central district.;Chapter 3 examines the dynamic theatre programming of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which, I argue, was not the stable center of rebirth, but rather part of many overlapping zones of performance activity that re-shaped contested urban spaces during the 1970s. In Chapter 4, I investigate two performance troupes in Coney Island and establish the ways in which performers were separated from the contexts of their neglected home neighborhoods. This study interrogates theatre as a social practice in times of municipal crisis, and establishes the 1970s as pivotal in the institutionalization of the arts in New York City.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Theatre
