# From Performance to Grounds and Back Again: Re-staging practice for a mobile urban world

John Bingham-Hall

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John Bingham-Hall. From Performance to Grounds and Back Again: Re-staging practice for a mobile urban world. John Bingham-Hall. Staging Ground: Infrastructure, Performance, and Bodies in Movement, dpr-barcelona, pp.140-147, 2025, 979-13-990879-0-1. hal-05382331

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Submitted on 26 Nov 2025

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<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Participant in a choreographic workshop led by Rafael Alvarez as part of the Staging Ground residency. Credit: Daniel Mebarek.</figcaption></figure>

John Bingham-Hall

The pace of what Magda Maaoui refers to in this book as a 'culture of constantly transforming projects' in Paris is simultaneously dizzying and glacial. The Grand Paris Express has been in discussion, in various iterations, for at least 30 years, but is suddenly materialising in a vast spread of construction and tunneling sites across the region, rapidly transforming its geography and introducing new routes and stations for absorption into the mental maps of 10 million grand Parisians. The Périphérique has resisted significant physical change despite decades of debates about its future, but the introduction of a 50 kilometre per hour speed limit, in October 2024, represented a sudden disruption to its choreography. All over *intra-muros* Paris, in rapid succession, streets are being excavated and reformulated around new 'bioclimatic' priorities of walking, cycling, shade, and clean air. Every time I move around Paris, a new cycle lane has carved its way through the city, a new school street has closed to traffic.

As a resident of a peripheral northern neighbourhood in Paris, I cannot help but celebrate this 'taming' (as it is described in the city's bioclimatic urban plan) of an environment previously dominated by cars. But I also wonder what this constant change means for shared cultures of public life, the permanent need to relearn everyday navigations, to absorb new spatial configurations into bodily habits, from the micro scale of the plants proliferating in streets to the macro scale of new trajectories through infrastructural networks. The impact, as Maaoui highlights, is measured in terms of passenger data, CO2 savings, decibels of noise, parts per million of air pollution, centigrade of temperature reduction, and so on. Of course, we need these measures to understand whether mobility infrastructures are effective in reducing the harm of travel to both bodies and climate. But if, as urban theorist Ole B. Jensen argues, 'the meaning of places is constituted by their movement as much as by their morphological properties,'¹ we also need
142 better strategies for imagining and designing, together, the ways mobility infrastructures intervene in the symbolic and sensorial dimensions of our everyday lives. Without these, we risk radically reshaping cities around the technical necessities of climate breakdown with little understanding of the impact this will have on the cultures of movement, across scales, that are central to the politics of urban life.

Infrastructural change is not a sudden shift from one state to another, but a constantly shifting ground that city dwellers must keep making sense of. When Ewa Effiom and Margarida Waco gather together voices being raised around the Grand Paris Express along a soundwalk through Paris, they are piecing together the sense of a new metro line as its arrival in a neighbourhood is narrated by a diverse cast of characters. Whether listening from afar or whilst traversing the imagined lines projected onto the ground via the new metro map, they make audible the ways institutions imagine themselves rewriting the symbolism of the circles and spirals of Paris' urban form, but also how the carving of a new line feels for those whose lives will be crossed by it. Expanding on this, gel office find the sense not only in new spatial forms of infrastructure, but what it feels like to wait for them. As well as critiquing the permanent suspension of reality created by the contemporary megaproject and its projections of the future, they offer the strategy of *spin-off-ing*, the following of tangential threads of possibility that spread out from the waiting room of infrastructure. Neo-futuristic Walks offer a strategy for humanising the sometimes abstract future of the narrative of climate breakdown, as well as these megaprojects that respond to it. By thinking through characters whose diverse relationships to water are inspired by human organs, they create a fiction in which embodied, visceral knowledge can help imagine what different futures—of catastrophe but also adaptation—might feel like.

If these ideas help to think about infrastructural change as it registers in the sensorial and symbolic life cities, another set of projects highlight how bodies themselves register in, and transform, the technical systems designed for movement. Infrastructures, as political scientist Prince K. Guma argues, are always incomplete, their futures always incomplete and

143 being remade by those that use them.<fnref n="2" /> As much as municipal authorities would like to project infrastructures as fixed solutions whose performance can be controlled and monitored, 'the quality of moving bodies contributes to the qualities of the spaces in which these bodies move. Put another way, spaces are—at least in part—as moving bodies do,'<fnref n="3" /> as geographer Derek McCormack has observed. We also need, then, better ways to understand how moving bodies bring infrastructures to unfold in unexpected directions. Jonathan Steiger's film *Roaming the Périphérique* documents the footpaths that are evidence of clandestine pedestrian movement around its banks, as well as the careful way the motorway negotiates bodily remains as it crosses the Batignolles cemetery. In both cases, the obvious image of a closed concrete system for the uninterrupted movement of metal vehicles reveals more filigrane structures formed by and around fleshy beings when exposed to the filmmakers gaze. In materialising and animating actor-networks that take shape as plants and chemicals creep through cracks in the concrete—forming rhizomatic relationships with vehicles, commuters, or birds—Studio Inscape make visible the more-than-human processes that exceed function predetermined by human design. Myrto Delimichali’s choreographic explorations not only exceed, but reject the determination of constant movement, asserting that a feminist mobility justice must claim opportunities for stillness and rest.

By what mechanisms, then, do bodies mark infrastructures as they take shape in more or less foreseen ways? According to Rubble's reflection on these last three projects, it is through *impulse*, a sudden desire or intention in a particular direction; the *impression* left in material form as impulses repeat over time to become ritual. Drawing on language evoked elsewhere in this book, we might add the mirroring and looping that takes place as infrastructures reflect what we expect of them whilst reshaping our imaginaries of the world, through breakdowns or simply the ways systems fashion human action. This is what Jane Bennett calls the agency of 'vibrant matter', the materials and non-human lives whose participation in the staging of public life cannot be reduced to the sum of human

<footnote n="2">2. Guma, 'Incomplete Futures of Urban Infrastructure'</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. McCormack, 'Geographies for Moving Bodies', p. 1823</footnote>
144 intentions.<fnref n="4" /> Movement, and therefore the meanings and cultures of places, is constantly impressing itself onto infrastructure whilst also being redirected by it. This is the reciprocal, co-active, encapacitating potential of a performatively-conceived infrastructure noted by Dimitri Szuter in his account of the architecture-dance collaboration of the Halprins.

These capacities embedded into infrastructures, that have the ability to re-route human action, are what Keller Easterling calls its disposition,<fnref n="5" /> the possibilities it sets up, ones that both enable and constrains the actions staged and channeled by infrastructure. Easterling's analysis of the 'power of infrastructure space' describes subtle ways in which small shifts at crucial junctures within infrastructure systems can ripple out across the network. This effect has been put to use, for example, by Extinction Rebellion, to amplify the impact of their protests against inaction on climate breakdown. It only takes a few bodies to block Oxford Circus or Waterloo Bridge in London, but their centrality to the city's circulatory infrastructure mean these blockages can bring large areas to a standstill.<fnref n="6" /> So, alongside the incompleteness and the meaningfulness of mobility infrastructures comes their potential to be hacked, or as Rubble might put it, the mischief by which their intended dispositions can be diverted to other ends. Geographer Pushpa Arabindoo, in her work on ecological consequences and potentials of another orbital motorway, this time the Outer Ring Road in Chennai, India, has described infrastructure not as an object but a way of knowing about a region and landscape.<fnref n="7" /> To think through the material flows and formal processes staged by infrastructure is not to know what a landscape is, but how it works, what it does, its way of performing itself. Keller Easterling describes this way of thinking as knowing-to, a knowledge that thinks of possibilities and capabilities, is not static, but is remade every time it is staged on a ground whose disposition reshapes that knowledge. Conversely to this is knowing-that, the knowledge that fixes a single meaning and function for infrastructure, which knows that the banks of the Périphérique are crucial to holding up the surface of the motorway but does not know how to find their more filigrane

145 structures of ecological or bodily movement.

Scores—those ‘guides for collective action’ so valuable to a contemporary world of atomisation and multiplicity—are exactly this kind of operational knowledge. Multiple manifestations of the score as strategy are proposed throughout the contributions here. Melissa Harrison’s collective movement scores, when performed, allow for the gradual emergence of a common space held between a group of performers, one that cannot be seen but is clearly felt, and changes the disposition of the infrastructures it is staged within. Myrto Delimichali’s project does not offer a cartographic map of spaces for rest, a *knowing-that* such spaces exist in specific locations, but rather deploys scores for moving in ways that might reveal opportunities for rest in any landscape. A map is also a score, and the walking route drawn out by Ewa Effiom and Margarida Waco is an invitation to perform a particular trajectory on the ground whilst hearing the voices that narrate its shifts. The Halprins’ *RSVP Cycles*, as Dimitri Szuter argues, show how contemporary concerns such as adaptive re-use, participatory planning, and democratic oversight, can be contained in a single performative infrastructure. Even the subheadings of an essay can be score-like invitations to action to be deployed in thinking infrastructure in any landscape, as gel office’s incantations show: loop a promise; trace a corridor; plan ahead; spin-off; metaproject a megaproject.

The common thread through all of these strategies is movement, in a diversity of choreographies of which all are necessary in order to apprehend how movement infrastructures are constantly remaking the grounds for our diverse, overlapping realities. Nigel Thrift summarises this necessity as follows: 'In a world in which numerical calculations are being done and redone continuously, so that static representation becomes subordinated to flow... the nomadologic of movement becomes the natural order of thought.'<fnref n="8" /> In the book *Walkscapes*, architect and walker Francisco Careri argues that the first materialisations of the 'built' environment were not manifestations of the sedentary nature of the human, but rather of nomadism. The standing stones that were the first modifications of the landscape acted as waymarkers for nomadic early humans, as well as processional architectures

<footnote n="4">4. Bennett, *Vibrant Matter*</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. Easterling, *Extrastatecraft*</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. Kostourou and Bingham-Hall, 'Infrastructures for Voice'</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. Arabindoo, 'Ecologies of Infrastructure'</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8. Thrift, 'Movement-Space', p. 590</footnote>
146 for ritual. ‘In reality’, he argues, ‘nomadism has always lived in osmosis with sedentarity, and the contemporary city contains in it both nomadic spaces (voids) and sedentary spaces (masses) which exist side by side in a delicate balance of reciprocal exchange.’<fnref n="9" /> This is more the case than ever: movement is such a fundamental condition in contemporary cities that ‘roads no longer lead to places, they are places,’ as geographer J.B. Jackson observed.<fnref n="10" /> Mobility infrastructures are our public places, movement the foundation of shared experiences of the city and the public culture that emerges from them. Walking (in its most expanded definition, including every possible kind of pedestrian mobility aid), must be at the centre of the practices of urban research and design if we are to imagine infrastructures that can take care of both the vast ‘climate’ and the billions of individual beings that inhabit it, as well as the sense those beings make of the grounds they walk on. Individual beings such as those captured in Daniel Mebarek’s portrait series as they cross an infrastructure that was not conceived for them but is nonetheless the stage for their everyday trajectories. Walking allows us to feel what it is to need to rest, to hear voices of contestation in their context, to notice informal footpaths around a motorway and the nomadic lives they are evidence of. And of course, walking will always be a political act, even a protest, so critical at a time of rising fascism, as Rebecca Solnit so powerfully argues in her treatise *Wanderlust*:

'Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile, empty-handed, shareable experience of the land. Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries that define nations; walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of private property.'<fnref n="11" />

I want to conclude this book, then, with a series of calls: for mobilising the bodies of architects and urbanists within education and practice; for paying attention to the crafts of

147 performance as a wealth of strategies for this mobilisation; for the importance of sensory, sited, sensitive knowledge that artificial intelligences will never replace; for scores as ways of *knowing-to* perform in ways that expand capacities for such knowledge; for thinking on the go in order to conceive of cities for moving bodies. None of these calls are new, all have been made before, but I reiterate them here in the context of work that offers strategies to respond to them. I hope that you, reader, listener, mover, will take this book out and stage some of the strategies we offer here on the grounds you move through, to see how they might be made more fertile, more nourishing, for the diverse bodies that walk on them.

References

Arabindoo, P. (2022). *Ecologies of Infrastructure: Materialities of Metabolic Change*. In *The Routledge Handbook of Social Change*. Routledge.

Bennett, J. (2009). *Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things*. Duke University Press.

Careri, F. (2020). *Walkscapes: la marche comme pratique esthétique*. Éditions Actes Sud.

Easterling, K. (2014). *Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space*. Verso Books

Guma, P. (2023). *Incomplete Futures of Urban Infrastructure*. In *Infrastructuring Urban Futures* (pp. 199–208). Bristol University Press.

Jackson, J. B. (1994). *A sense of place, a sense of time*. Yale University Press.

Jensen, O. B. (2009). *Flows of Meaning, Cultures of Movements: Urban Mobility as Meaningful Everyday Life Practice*. *Mobilities*, *4*(1), 139–158.

Kostourou, F., & Bingham-Hall, J. (2022). *Infrastructures for Voice. The Urban Transcripts Journal*, *5*(1).
McCormack, D. P. (2008). *Geographies for Moving Bodies: Thinking, Dancing, Spaces*. *Geography Compass*, *2*(6), 1822–1836.

Solnit, R. (2014). *Wanderlust: A History of Walking*. Granta Books.

Thrift, N. (2004). *Movement-space: The changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness*. *Economy and Society*, *33*(4), 582–604.

<footnote n="9">9. Carreri, *Walkscapes* (author's translation from the French version)</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10. Jackson, *A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time*, p. 190</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11. Solnit, *Wanderlust*, p. 162</footnote>