Adam Kaasa: Theatrum Mundi

Theatrum Mundi is a project focused on urban culture and brings architects and town planners together with performing and visual artists to reimagine the public spaces of twenty-first century cities - streets, squares, parks and places for culture.

The aim is to understand what brings life to a city, particularly in its public places and ask how these might be better designed.

Theatrum Mundi currently operates in three countries: the UK, the US and Germany. It is a self-organising forum, to which artists, designers and social researchers donate their services. Through its conferences and the website, ideas and projects are shared with a wider public.

Nesta has been involved as advisor and supporter of the project in its first year. In this interview, Adam Kaasa, the London Project Manager of Theatrum Mundi, talks about how the project is progressing and explores links to other areas of work we have been developing.

Tell us about the project and your involvement 

I'm the London Manager of Theatrum Mundi, which is based in London at LSE Cities at the London School of Economics. This project, which is a pilot supported by Nesta, is a new urban forum. It's a space of conversation, dialogue and practice that is bringing together people from the urban disciplines (architecture, urban planning, urban design, engineering, etc) with people from the performing and visual arts (choreography, stage design, sculpture, acousticians, etc) in dialogue over particular themes about the city. 

The main point is twofold. One, it draws inspiration from this phrase Theatrum Mundi, so the 'Theatre of the World', and this notion that in the Renaissance, city makers and city builders would, perhaps, use the theatre and the stage as a test bed, as a site of experimentation for new streetscapes, for new building projects. And they would use actors to test the new social relations that these spaces might engender. So it's not a one-to-one relation, but this inspiration is the reason why we think it's productive today to help re-imagine the way we think about cities, build the spaces, think about the relationships that they open up between different people, to bring together this kind of group of architects and arts practitioners. 

Who set it up? What was the origin?

The director is Professor Richard Sennett. It harks back to Richard's early work in the 1970s, his book The Fall of Public Man and its lineage through much of his thinking around urban design and its relationship to performativity. The notion of politics as a performative language, and the relationship between people on city streets as a kind of theatre of engagement - for him, that's something that's been lost in terms of individuation, privatization, and the increased speed of city development and planning that maybe precludes some of these more slow-burning conversations. 

There's a recent article by Edwin Heathcote in the Financial Times about our project and the way he saw it. I think it echoes with our goals - that Theatrum Mundi is trying to, in his words, 'revivify'. It's trying to bring life back not only to 'the street', but also to test out a method of provocative collaboration that isn't architects building spaces for culture. It's not artists making public artwork in cities, it's a deeper conversation about the practices they engage in to make spaces and to think about the way people react in them. 



There are a lot of ideas emerging around the 'playful city'. How does the forum relate to the individual's desire to have a playful relationship with the city? Or is it more about organised theatrics? 

We host several scales of debate. One is a small 15-person workshop, which brings in maker-to-maker discussions. The next level is 'salons' which are small round tables with public engagement, and the third is larger conferences and public lectures.

But on the other hand, from these workshops and questions we're trying to identify projects that could be interventions in public space. And in the same kind of experimental way, try to test them out. So it's about serious playfulness, a kind of intentional experimentation. And that needs to be something that is playing with the city, against the city, and I think there are a lot of emerging apps and emerging institutions and emerging networked, smaller, ground-up organisations that are playing with the way we think about the city. That's really, really important because it allows a different way to imagine the spaces that you're in, outside of the logic of the commute, work, or prescribed leisure spaces. It shifts the discussion and it shifts the realm of the city. 

Maybe the ultimate aim is to allow local governments to imagine the city in that way and therefore produce public services with this playful, creative approach?

That's a long, long process, but yes. We would be amiss not to think about that relationship, particularly in London and in the UK. We're really interested in these questions about spaces for culture. It's a huge debate here. I know Nesta is working on questions about parks and landscapes. We're working on questions that include those spaces but also broader cultural organisations. We're considering whether these debates are happening in the current climate of austerity, if there are shifts in terms of large legacy organisations towards smaller, temporary uses, and what that means. What is the end point of these kind of movements? What are the implications of that shift? That is something we are trying to address through these conversations.

Could you explain the Spaces for Culture work?

This draws from interventions in all of our cities. We're based in London, Frankfurt and New York. In all three spaces we're having conversations about spaces for culture. In Frankfurt, Clementine Deliss, the Director of the Weltkulturum Museum, is reimagining and remediating what a collection is, vis-à-vis a contemporary city, urban migration, labour and its role in remediation. So she takes her 65,000-object collection and she creates a residency programme that brings in contemporary artists.

The latest exhibition Trading Style which is a partnership with Theatrum Mundi, brought in four fashion designers from around the world for residencies. They created new collections based on inspiration and work with these objects. Within their historical context, out of their historical context, remediating them within current trades and modes of exchange. She's thinking internal to the curatorial relationship with the museum and culture to the city, she is shifting the debate. 

In London, we're partnered with the Barbican, and the Guildhall School for Music and Drama; we have emerging conversations with the Southbank Centre, with the British Museum, with the Young Vic Theatre, and with several other smaller organisations as well. All of them are rethinking what their role is in a city. 

Could you talk about the 'Choreographing the Street' project you're working on?

Well it's early stages yet, but it's partly a motion capture project led by my co-manager in New York, Dom Bagnato, and drawing on the work of Chris Bregler, a professor of Computer Science at New York University. For us, it stems from the first early workshops that were held there in April 2012. These were workshops titled Social Movement. And it was meant to be a bad pun! Because it's about movement in a traditional sense of city thinkers, of transportation, moving through the city. It's about movement in terms of choreography and dance, so there is the kind of artistic side, and gesture, from theatre. And then it's about social movement in terms of politics and protest, and action on the street. What is the relationship between performativity and politics in urban spaces when you have serious confrontations and violent ones at the best of times? You see that here in London and in many other spaces in the world.

A conversation emerged about what can be gained from including these disparate groups, talking about social movement in the city. How does a choreographer react to a protest movement? How does a dancer think about a transport planner's notion for footfall traffic in public spaces? They are completely opposing visions and versions of the body, of public space, of movement, of gesture. But the conversation was so fruitful that we were thinking 'how could this become a project?'.

One idea was to try to confront a history of conversations around the way the body moves through public spaces, and to try to tap into the deep knowledge of choreography and theatre to try to code and understand in a different way than just numbers and movement from above. , how people move through public space. So this notion is: could one, for example, develop a technology of motion capture, of video capture, that could test out several public spaces in say, New York, in Tunis, in London and in Rio de Janeiro. 

And compare them?

Yes, but compare them within groups of people from choreography, from dance, people from the theatre, from the Laban School of Dance, from traffic planners, from landscape architects. And what would that mean, what would that do to our understanding of the way people move, and could you then translate that into some sort of design principle that could be scaled up as a kind of best practice for public spaces in cities around the world? How do you connect these patterns to the narratives people have of their own movement, and their own bodies in space? 

And we could adapt these digital maps to a real city plan?

Exactly. I mean, there's all kinds of implications, for example in the UK we're hoping to work with some tech startups that could work with app developers or other kind of systems, such that the data becomes crowdsourced itself. This expensive process of motion capture could actually become something that people could opt into through video or photography from mobile phones or other devices. 

There's a really interesting link with the work that Nesta is exploring with parks. What are parks for? Perhaps parks should be thought of simply as an open space. 

Exactly. We think of parks in terms of leisure, we have a romantic notion of the country in the city: these pastoral relations to the park.  

But they could actually be spaces for commerce, or interaction, or for free speech and politics? 

Parks in London particularly have both a royal history but also a really political history. Some of the spaces were actually fought for seriously hard, from development, either residential or commercial. So you see the park and it feels like this natural, banal space, but deep in its history is a kind of struggle to have a common ground, a common space in the city that you don't need to purchase. You don't need to be a landed aristocrat, you can be from any class and you can access the space. So in some sense they have a history of what we're talking about with Spaces for Culture, in terms of access and participation, about temporary use, and multiple use, and flexibility. Parks somehow - their DNA is embedded in their social history.  

And in terms of building spaces for citizens to experience the city, would you go so far as to look at spaces for social housing, or education? 

It's really big. I think for us it's easy to be cordoned off around the notion of culture in a very particular sense - professional culture-makers. With words like choreographers, set designers, musicians, these are professions. But I think the notion of urban culture more broadly is what we're interested in. So if a conversation out of Theatrum Mundi emerges that is relevant to the production of social housing, or 'creative campuses', that can be really interesting for universities, or schools, or religious institutions, or neighbourhood associations. Our goal wouldn't be restricted to cultural centres, as one might define them in a professional sense, but in terms of this debate around spaces for culture. A school is a space for culture as much as an art gallery is. A cafe on a street is as much as space of culture, in a sense.

This next year we're focused on this notion of spaces for culture, on the relationship between music and architecture, on the notion of free speech in the city, and the relationship of movement. For now, that's more than enough. But the debates that Nesta is raising , in collaboration with European cities, parks, Digital R&D and rethinking the future of arts organisations and production, all play a role in our thinking, certainly.