Drawing a Circle in the Square: Street Performing in New York’s Washington Square Park

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Description

This gratifying study of a phenomenon that has imprinted itself upon the folklore of big–city life, is a joyful book focusing upon the road performers in Washington Square Park in New York City.

While documenting the complex expressions of street performance in a specific out of doors environment over a period of four years, Drawing a Circle in a Square gives a broad examination to the relationship between out of doors performance and urban culture.

In this book we learn that most American cities prohibit street performance, charging such entertainers with vagrancy or soliciting, the performer–joyfully, cautiously, heroically–persists.

On sidewalks all the way through the country, in theaters reduced to their barest essentials, the performer juggles, blows fire, performs magic, and tells jokes, appealing both to our humorousness and to our eager for a moment of spontaneity in our city–structured lives.

Drawing a Circle in a Square is the first scholarly documentation and analysis of street performance. Based primarily upon original research, it makes a contribution that may be as much toward a particular subject. Promoting the study of performance as the most important and valuable vehicle for inter-disciplinary research and thought, this can be a model of the sorts of research being developed within the emerging field of performance studies.

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