Performing a future (in) performing a past: Identity,cultural performance,and the Utopian impulse

Dancing in circles: the sardana and Catalan nationalism

I was running. It was my birthday and it was hot and I was running through the cobblestone streets of the Barri Gotic, the old medieval section of Barcelona. But I was late, so I had to run. My guidebook told me that it started right at noon, and I could hear the cathedral’s bells ringing already. As the clapper struck the bell for the twelfth time, I turned the corner into a large, bustling plaza.

The cobla, the traditional Catalan band of 11 musicians, was gathered on the steps of the Catedral de Barcelona, Barcelona’s 700-year-old Gothic cathedral. The streets of the Barri Gotic were filled with tourists and native Barcelonans. The Plaça Nova, the large square in front of the Cathedral, was particularly crowded, thanks largely to the beautiful weather. Tourists continued to shuffle into the square, later than even I was for what was about to take place—an event they read about in their guidebooks and heard about from friends who have visited this capital of Catalonian culture.

As I stepped in front of the cathedral, the musicians of the cobla raised their woodwind instruments to their mouths or stood with their drum sticks at the ready. A group of elderly men and women emerged from the crowds of people in the plaza. The ladies dropped their purses and bags on to the ground in neat piles, and these aged men and women joined hands to form two circles in front of the cobla. Before the twelfth bong from the carillon faded, the band began to play and the circles of people began to dance.

The dance was peppy and upbeat. The music was quaint and had a striking, optimistic rhythm. The circles of people hopped about, turning clockwise, then counter-clockwise, trying to keep time with the music. The dancers—lifelong Catalans that surely had been performing the dance for many years—were old and arthritic, so the dance seemed somewhat subdued. Even so, I could tell what the dance looked like when these elderly Catalans performed it in their younger days. The dancers’ faces beamed with smiles; they performed the dance as if it were a mandate. One old man was particularly feeble; his feet hardly left the ground, but his commitment to the movement was completely visible. I imagined him farming the fields of Catalonia as a boy. The woman next to him was elegant in her frailty; she wore a bright purple suit and a dazzling smile on her face. I imagined her to be a ballerina or an actress in her younger days.

The dance lasted for about eleven minutes. Then the band played a final, harmonized note to conclude the song. The circles of people broke. The ladies grabbed their purses. The farmer went one way, the ballerina another. Soon the square looked just as it had twelve minutes earlier, before my first encounter with this dance: the sardana, the national folk dance of Catalonia. (Personal experience)

The sardana is performed in this way every Sunday at noon exactly (Figure 1). Tourism scholar Dean MacCannell writes, “A version of sociology suggests that society is composed not of individuals but groups, and groups, too, figure as tourist attractions” (MacCannell, 2004: 66). Surely the group of Catalans performing the sardana falls into this category. Tourists come in droves to catch a glimpse of this performance, which is advertised in most guidebooks; these guidebooks describe the sardana as the official Catalonian folk dance. It represents an important cultural performance that is viewed by crowds of tourists each week in Barcelona, and as such it functions as a practice that constructs a cultural identity for host culture and tourist alike.

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Figure 1.

Dancing the sardana in the Plaça Nova, Barcelona.

Cultural identity is, of course, not an inherent quality. Rather it is something that emerges through shared knowledge and history. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, performance studies scholar Diana Taylor explains how culture emerges through various epistemologies or ways of knowing. While history has given special privilege to ways of knowing that emphasize the archival, written transmission of knowledge, Taylor stresses the necessity of seeing performances and embodied practice—what she calls the “repertoire”—as equally valuable modes of cultural knowledge transmission (Taylor, 2003). German scholar Manfred Pfister (2008) echoes Taylor’s recognition of performance as an essential aspect of cultural identity. He writes,

National identity is not some naturally given or metaphysically sanctioned racial or territorial essence that only needs to be conceptualized or spelt out in discursive texts; it emerges from, takes shape in, and is constantly defined and redefined in individual and collective performances. (p. 9)

Cultural performances are a key means for groups to outwardly manifest their own cultural identity. Likewise, they are also important tools for allowing outside groups (who are interested in learning more about a foreign culture) to interpret and understand the identity of those who live life in a completely different way.

The sardana, like all cultural performances, is an example of what performance studies scholar Richard Schechner calls “restored behavior,” in that it is a re-performance of the past in the present (Schechner, 1985: 35). When these dancing Catalans perform the sardana every Sunday at noon, they are performing a dance with a long history; each step they make has a citationality (Butler, 1997)—it references all the steps of the sardana danced by every Catalan in the past who danced the same step. That said, even though cultural performances like the sardana re-iterate what is already past (through the invocation of traditional practices and means of expression), this does not mean that they are exactly as they were at their inception. Every new iteration of a cultural performance offers the chance for change and alteration (Schechner, 1985). As Schechner (1985) writes, “Restored behavior offers to both individuals and groups the chance to rebecome what they once were—or even, and most often, to rebecome what they never were but wish to have been or wish to become” (p. 38). As instances of restored behavior, cultural performances offer the opportunity to perform a group identity that may have never even existed, but that represents a physical manifestation of that group’s ideals or desires for the present and future. In this way, each dance of the sardana does not only reference the past but also has one eye on the present moment—evident in the particularities of this group of dancers on this day performing the dance in this specific fashion—and another eye towards the future—as the insistence on performing this dance every Sunday implies that it will also be performed next Sunday, and the one after, and so on. Cultural performances, then, exist in a condensed temporality, in which the past and the future are both collapsed into the present moment. The question then becomes what that present moment represents.

Performance theorist Victor Turner offers an answer to this question by asserting that cultural performances act not just as mirrors, reflecting the values and traditions of a group as they are understood in the present, but as “magical mirrors of social reality” that work to “exaggerate, invert, re-form, magnify, minimize, dis-color, re-color, even deliberately falsify” the culture of the performers (Turner, 1987). Cultural performances not only reflect the culture of the performers; like a funhouse mirror, they provide an altered image of what they are reflecting, and this altered image often represents what a culture wants to be more than what is actually is (Turner, 1987). Thus, the particular performance mode of performing culture to other cultures stands as a specifically powerful form of meaning-making. Through it, groups reflect not only who they are, but who they want to become. As such, the present moment in this condensed temporality of cultural performance represents the physical embodiment of a group ideal that is shared not only among the performers, but is also offered to the spectators.

To complicate this fact, performances of cultural identity to the other are never only one-sided; these performances are actually intercultural, as the act of watching a cultural performance is a performance of culture in itself. Pfister calls these intercultural transactions the performance of difference, and it is this performance of difference that amplifies those aspects of one’s cultural life that “make a difference.” This type of performance “‘draws a line’ between self and other—boundary lines that are, however, constantly being redrawn and renegotiated, and remain instable and shifting” (Pfister, 2008: 9). The performance of and reaction to cultural performance, then, consistently redraws the figurative border lines between what designates one landscape and what separates it from neighboring places. In the case of the sardana, one can think of the circles in which the dancers dance as these figurative border lines. Those within the circles are marked as “host.” Those without are marked as “other.” The sardana itself is the performance of difference that separates these two groups.

What also separates the two groups—to a large extent, at least—is the cultural knowledge of the sardana’s history, evolution, and politics. For nearly 1000 years, one of the dominant issues in Spain has been the relationship between the central government of the country and that of its many regional governments (Wiarda, 2000: 48). Historically, one of the largest sites that has seen this conflict play out is Catalonia, an eastern region of Spain that borders France and the Mediterranean Sea and has Barcelona as its capital. For centuries, Catalonia has operated largely autonomously from the central Spanish government. Catalans speak their own tongue, called Catalan, which is not a dialect of Castillian Spanish but a language all its own. Furthermore, Catalans have a rich cultural history of art, music, dance, and other traditions. While many of these traditions—like the sardana—remained unstandardized for most of Catalonian history, the Catalonian renaissance, or renaixença, of the nineteenth century saw a concerted effort to preserve Catalonian culture by standardizing and proliferating the Catalan language and its cultural traditions (Edles, 2003: 318).

Catalonia suffered particular hardships during the reign of Francisco Franco after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. In his efforts to unify Spain under a single federal government, Franco rescinded Catalonia’s autonomous regional government, which had only been established less than a decade earlier, and banned the public use of Catalan language and traditions, like displaying the Catalan flag or dancing the sardana. Under Franco’s reign, dancing the sardana became a revolutionary act—a performative revolt against Franco’s suppression of Catalan culture. Cultural traditions like dancing acted to solidify nationalist myths, which, as sociologist Laura Desfor Edles (2003) puts it, “opened up new political possibilities, including the very idea of political nationalist mobilization” (p. 320). People would stop on the streets of Barcelona to dance the sardana with friends or strangers. It was defiant and it was risky, but it also gave the oppressed Catalonians a way of celebrating their abjected culture.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Catalonia was again granted its regional autonomy. To this day, one of the largest points of contention in Catalonia is the role the federal government in Madrid plays in controlling Catalonian policy. There is even a significant number who desire Catalonian independence from Spain altogether. ⁵ Over the past few years, both in 2010 and 2012, Barcelona has seen two massive street protests with thousands of Catalans petitioning for independence. While not every Catalan may desire actual independence from Spain, however, many of the people of Catalonia value their national identity as Catalans even more than they value their identity as Spaniards. One of the ways Catalans stage this nationalist sentiment for the world is by dancing the sardana every Sunday at noon for the hordes of tourists who come from across the world to watch them.

Taking Urry’s idea of social identities emerging “out of particular structures of feeling that bind together … space, time, and memory,” it could be said that this cultural performance is most concerned with the first of these elements; it is a performance of nationalism that declares the space around them as central to the identity of the performing group. The sort of nationalism seen in Catalonia and embodied in the weekly dancing of the sardana is a manifested passion not only for one’s local geography, but one’s cultural landscape, which includes not only geography but also the people and traditions that are a part of it. While the term nationalism can have a derisive and dark side, I use the term here in the most neutral form possible to mean only love and devotion to one’s own homeland, its people, and its culture. In fact, one could even call it a performance of homeland, as some cultural performances that focus on the element of space are not directed towards the nation-state as such; their spatial objects can be much more local in nature. They are performances that respond to a real or imagined, geographical or cultural landscape that certain groups call home. The sardana, I argue, is one of these cultural performances of the homeland that places emphasis on space as a central preoccupation of group identity. Because of the specific cultural and political implications of Catalonia and its claims of nationhood, however, this performance is assuredly also a performance of nationalism.

As the old Catalans perform the sardana for the spectators, they are laying claim to the space surrounding them. Just as the sardana was performed as a revolutionary act under Franco’s regime, it is performed today as a reminder of Catalonia’s own history and culture separate from that of the rest of Spain. This experience is validated by guidebooks and websites like Barcelona.com, which advises tourists not to join in on the dance, as “one wrong move can put the entire circle out of step.” By prohibiting tourist participation in the sardana, these tourist resources are also authenticating the performance itself, conferring on it a requirement of expertise and a sense of exclusivity that the non-Catalan would be loath to disrupt.

Of course, space (exemplified through performances of homeland) is not the only element at play here; time and memory have their place, as well. Time, exemplified through a performance of progress, seems least at play of the three elements, though it is definitely present. After all, this performance of this folk dance is the result of the Catalonian renaixença, which saw the standardization of the sardana and which is seen as a huge moment of “progress” for Catalan culture and identity (Edles, 2003). The renaixença saw the development of the modernisme movement—exemplified most acutely in the work of moderniste architect Antoni Gaudí—which was perhaps one of the most important cultural jumps of the last several centuries (Edles, 2003: 318).

On the other hand, it is much easier to notice the element of memory here and to see the dancing of the sardana as a performance of nostalgia for a lost past. The dance is a centuries-old tradition being recreated in the present; this recalling and re-performance of the past seems heavy with the weight of nostalgic thinking. Catalan scholar Joan Ramon Resina (2003) provides an intriguing counterpoint to this argument, however, supporting the view that nationalism is truly at the center of the performance of the sardana:

A penchant for the past is, of course, typical of nationalism; but it would be a mistake to assume that the past is necessarily cultivated in a nostalgic mode. The past furnishes arguments to the present. And since it is a function of the need to live in the present, it is always a contemporary phenomenon, always, therefore, in the making. (p. 68)

Even though the sardana is a recreation of an age-old tradition, it is being created with a sense of the present at its core. It is a declaration of nationalist passion and a performance for the rest of the world to see that passion embodied. In this way, the elderly Catalan dancers, as they perform for the crowds of visiting spectators, create their nation anew every Sunday at noon. It is left to the spectators to respond to this performance of nationalism by disseminating its emphasis on space to others they encounter.

Touring Stalin’s folly: “moving forward” in Nowa Huta

A tiny black car called a Trabant pulled in front of the Holiday Inn where I was staying near Central Krakow, and a young Polish guide named Cyril, clad in a bright orange jacket, emerged from the car to greet my boyfriend and me. Cyril was not very old … younger than both of us. We would later find out that he was four years old when the Wall fell. My boyfriend, who grew up in Romania, was nine. I was seven, but that did not mean as much for me, since I was the only one of the three of us who did not live behind the Iron Curtain before that historic day. Regardless, the three of us piled into the miniscule Trabant, and Cyril turned the ignition. The car shook, the engine rumbled, and the three of us sputtered away from Central Krakow to a nearby neighborhood called Nowa Huta.

Our journey began at a tiny café that Cyril told us was once a hangout for the top Communist officials when Nowa Huta—“Stalin’s Gift to Poland” and what was intended to be the ideal Communist city—was built. We drank some coffee and had a shot of vodka as we listened to stories about the history of Communism in Poland, narrated by Cyril as he flipped through a picture scrapbook on the table.

We ventured off to the steelworks on the outskirts of the town—Nowa Huta, after all, is Polish for “New Steelworks”—and caught a glimpse of the factory that had left all the once-pristine buildings of Nowa Huta black with soot. We visited an apartment building still decorated in the tradition of the Polish men and women who lived in Nowa Huta in the 1970s and 80s, drinking more vodka as we watched a Communist propaganda film. We drove to the first church the Poles were allowed to build in Nowa Huta—Poland being too Catholic for even Stalin to prevent them from indulging their impulse for the religious. We sat for lunch at an old “Commie” Milkbar to dine on pierogi and sausages, surrounded by the residents of Nowa Huta who were on their lunch breaks. Finally, Cyril took the two of us to an empty parking lot where we got to drive the Trabant, hoping that it would not fall apart thanks to our ineptitude with manual transmission, along with the three or four shots of vodka we had consumed.

Then, four hours after our journey began, Cyril dropped us back at our Holiday Inn and drove away in his tiny, black car. (Personal experience)

Crazy Guides Communism Tours is a popular and fast-growing English-language tour in Krakow, Poland, that takes interested tourists on a personal tour of Nowa Huta, which was once a city unto itself when its construction began in 1949, but now has been incorporated within the borders of greater Krakow. The Communist neighborhood is one of the many failed experiments of the Soviet Union when Poland was a part of the Eastern Bloc (1945–1989), and Crazy Guides Communism Tours is the only tour company in Krakow that takes curious tourists to visit this less-attractive but history-laden part of the city. According to their website, since the company began, Crazy Guides is now “Europe’s most famous alternative tours company” ⁶ and has been featured in most travel guidebooks, as well as on many major media outlets.

Based on Urry’s theory of social identity formation, the element most at play in the Communism Tours is Urry’s second element, time, exemplified through a masterful performance of social progress, which seeks to instill in the tourist a sense of Krakow’s advancement into the future and triumph over an oppressive or insufficient past. It should be noted that I use the term “progress” here understanding that there is a certain level of irony in applying the term to a tour about Communism. After all, the notion of progress was a rallying post for many of the detrimental policies of Poland’s Communist leadership, not to mention for any number of other regimes that have committed massive human rights abuses in the last century. For the purposes of this article, however, I resort to this term and define “performances of progress” as practices that characterize themselves as demonstrations of an evolution from the past—one that is viewed as an improvement or “leap forward.”

Krakow, like all of Poland, fell under Soviet influence after the end of World War II. After already experiencing the devastation of German occupation, Poland was now subject to another repressive regime that attempted to impose the Communist Ideal on the vehemently Catholic landscape of Poland. As such, Poland (and Nowa Huta in particular) can be seen as a chronotopic space. Polish theorist Kapralski (2001) expands on Mikahil Bakhtin’s literary term chronotope—“the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships”—to mean also a “real but symbol-laden and often mythologized place in which events important for the construction of a group’s identity either actually happened … or are symbolically represented by—for example—monuments, the very arrangement of space, and its social functions” (p. 36). Nowa Huta, in this sense, is a chronotope, it being a “symbol-laden” space filled with a meaningful and controversial history. Crazy Guides Communism Tours works to unlock this history and interpret many of these symbols for tourists, most often with a strong sense of irony and wit that conveys—with a wink and a nod—that Krakow has progressed infinitely beyond the failed Communist experiment of the Soviets.

It would be possible to argue that nostalgia for the past is the predominant element at play in this performance, but Crazy Guides actually uses the past as a counterpoint, a means to an end: that of portraying a present that has advanced triumphantly beyond that past. In this sense, I use the idea of “performances of progress” to describe cultural performances that, either through sincerity or irony, emphasize the triumphant advancement of a group over the past. It just so happens that, in the case of Crazy Guides, irony is the main means for performing this sentiment, and this irony presents itself in a number of ways. By using the language, places, and artifacts of Poland’s oppressive Communist past as a means not only to make money through the industry of tourism but also to ridicule the ideals of Communism by turning its own language and tools against it, Crazy Guides exemplifies a complex performance of progress that presents to tourists a specific picture of modern Polish identity. In other words, the Crazy Guides Communism Tour guides have reappropriated the techniques of the Communists they criticize to paint a picture of their own “progressive” nature. They do this most clearly through the use of several specific instruments of the past.

The first instrument in this performance of progress is the Trabant car that Crazy Guides uses to drive around their customers. The Trabant was a car manufactured in East Germany during the Cold War (Figure 2). It is a very small, two-door car with both the engine and the fuel tank under the front hood. Having personally sat in the car, I can say that it is not only uncomfortable, but also a little frightening. As the Trabant rumbled along, I would not have been surprised were it to fall apart completely in the middle of the street. Furthermore, there is no gas gauge in the car, so there is the very real possibility that it could run out of fuel with no warning whatsoever. Throughout the tour, the guides constantly acknowledge the defectiveness of the car, drawing attention to the rocky and dangerous nature of the ride. On the Crazy Guides website, the company tells customers about the car with an ironic nostalgia in a way that actually helps to convey a disdain for the past and a sense of triumphant progress over that past—a sentiment that underlies the entire discourse of the tour. “Our Crazy Trabants are authentic East German automobiles,” says the website. “These masterpieces of East German engineering may occasionally cause us some headaches, but these hiccups are all part of the unique Trabant experience.” By driving the tourists through a failed Communist city in a failed Communist car, Crazy Guides is using humor to convey a sense of knowledge—the knowledge that they, too, believe that the Communist system is a failure.

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Figure 2.

Trabant used by Crazy Guides Communism Tours.

The second element of this performance of progress is the language the guides use and stories they tell. Guides are armed with an arsenal of one-liners that, again, communicate a sense of ironic nostalgia. Since most of the tourists who go on these English-speaking tours are young Americans, Brits, or people who did not grow up behind the Iron Curtain, this language also displays a bias towards capitalism, satisfying a notion of superiority in the tourists’ economic system and way of life. Both on the website and on the tour, the guide would several times say, “In Communism, everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.” In the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section of the company’s website, under the question “Are you Communists?,” it reads, “We are real communists, because we earn sh*t and our boss Crazy Mike, who is the most equal amongst equals, takes all the benefits.” There is also constant sarcastic reference to “the good ol’ days” to describe Poland under Communist rule. ⁷

Crazy Guides uses a set of specifically curated locations as the third tool on its tour. From the sad looking “Communist restaurant” where the tour begins to the “Communist apartment” that is still decorated in the style of the 1970s, the stops on the tour highlight the failure of Nowa Huta. In the dated apartment, tourists sip vodka, eat pickles, and watch a Communist propaganda film, which contributes to the satire of the tour itself. Each of these stops is framed as a comical example of how “behind the times” things were during Communism. This comedic positioning of the past is put on hold for one stop of the tour, however.

One of the final stops tourists make is of the first church that the Soviets allowed the Poles to build in Nowa Huta (Figure 3). The striking building is undoubtedly a product of the 1970s, with its curved exterior and its abstract, modernist interior. The guides tell tourists the story of the church’s construction, which was complicated by the fact that, although Stalin finally allowed the Poles to build the church, he would provide them with no construction materials. The Poles managed, however, since the church was so important to them, and the entire exterior of the church is testament to their dedication. Its walls are composed of millions of smooth river rocks, which the guide says were collected by all the Poles of Nowa Huta, who then placed them around the church’s exterior. This story, in particular, is fascinating, as it is both a performance of progress—in that both the design of the church and the locals’ triumph over the obstacles set before them are quite progressive—but also a performance of nostalgia—in that the story of the church’s construction is a wonderful memory of success and resistance against an oppressive regime. It marks the one moment of the tour that is purely sincere, with no sense of irony to tinge the meaningful nature of this site.

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Figure 3.

First church of Nowa Huta, Poland.

Kapralski (2001) writes,

When two communities dwell on the same territory they tend to turn it into the chronotope of their respective identities. This situation may, and indeed always does, lead to a conflict over landscape, since both groups try to symbolically mark their presence in the same physical space. (p. 37)

Only decades ago, two communities did dwell in Nowa Huta—the Poles and (at least figuratively) the Soviets—and there was a huge conflict over the landscape of the city. Today, one can argue, a different conflict exists, between the historical community and ideas of Nowa Huta and the present Nowa Huta, which is no longer subject to Soviet influence and which resides in a country that is now prospering. While Urry’s other elements are surely at play to some extent, it is the element of time that takes particular precedence here. The notion of “progress” is certainly a subjective one. As such, not everyone may agree with the way Crazy Guides understands advancement over the past. Even so, it seems beyond dispute that Crazy Guides Communism Tours is fighting the battle over the cultural landscape of Nowa Huta, using the instruments described above to “symbolically mark” the space as past and, in doing so, to mark the “progressive triumph” that the Polish people themselves have made over that past.

A death in Venice: nostalgia amid a dying city

It was Saturday, November 14, 2009. I was not in Venice. I wish I were in Venice. Venice is my favorite city in the world, so I would always like to be in Venice. But on this day, I was not in Venice. I was in my apartment. In New York. At my computer. I was watching with rapt attention the news feeds on the internet as an event I had been anticipating for several weeks unfolded in front of me.

The stone streets of the ancient city were packed with people—locals and tourists alike—clamoring for a view of the Grand Canal of Venice, the magnificent central waterway that cuts a slithering “S” through the city, dividing it into two separate halves. A fleet of black gondolas—Venice’s most famed mode of transportation—glided somberly through the murky, blue-green water. Some of the gondoliers were wearing black hoods, and their faces were painted a ghostly white, evoking both the masks of Venice’s famed Carnevale, as well as death masques. Another boat supporting a shiny, black grand piano accompanied the fleet, as a pianist played mournful dirges that echoed off the crumbling palazzos and down the curving waterway. At the head of the fleet sailed an ornately decorated pastel gondola that carried as its cargo a vibrant pink coffin draped with the flag of Venice—a deep red field with a golden lion of St. Mark in the fore.

The funeral procession approached the arched, white Rialto Bridge, which crosses the Grand Canal almost exactly at its center. For centuries this bridge was the only pedestrian route across the Grand Canal, though three newer bridges have been constructed in the last century or so. The hooded pallbearers removed the pink coffin from the boat and marched it solemnly to the Ca’ Farsetti, the palazzo that houses Venice’s City Hall. In front of a large group of fellow mourners, one of the hooded men read somber poetry written in Venetian dialect. It was a requiem mass fit for the “death” of a centuries old cultural capital. This was Il Funerale di Venezia—The Funeral of Venice. (Barry and Constantini, 2009; Kingston, 2009; Natanson, 2009)

The Italian city of Venice is facing a series of difficult challenges in the present moment, all of which seem to put the city’s literal survival into question. The threat of rising water, a faltering economy, the constantly diminishing population, the massive effects of industrial pollution in the lagoon surrounding the city, and the undeniable fact that the Venetian islands, while a miracle of construction in their day, are now sinking lower and lower into the ocean floor, have all contributed to a global discourse regarding the Death of Venice. This discourse seems to be perpetuated not only by tourists from across the world, who rush to see the city before it turns into a second Atlantis, but also by the lingering residents of Venice, as exemplified by the staged Funeral described above. Apparently, the future of Venice seems questionable at best and an impossibility at worst. The refrain most frequently invoked laments the fear of Venice becoming a “floating museum,” and surely there is credence to this fear. Venice is sinking, both physically and economically, but there are, perhaps, other forces at play here.

In her book Destination Culture, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1998) writes that heritage “is the transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead and the defunct” (p. 149). This transvaluation, created through marking a space as a heritage site, ultimately leads to a “second life” for that space (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, 1998: 149). Venice seems to be going through just such a process. The city, indeed, is battling against incredible odds, and these challenges are surely causing a shift in the very nature of Venetian identity. Yet while many claim these trials will lead to Venice’s death, perhaps they are also contributing to the transformation of Venice, marking it as a site of heritage and solidifying its importance in the global community. In this way, Venice is utilizing Urry’s third and final element of social identity, memory exemplified through performances of nostalgia, as its predominant tool in disseminating a Venetian identity to the world.

The Funeral described above was organized by a group called Venessia.com . The group meant the Funeral to be a wake-up call to the Venetian city government, signaling that something needs to be done. At its height, the population of Venice peaked at 164,000 inhabitants. Today, that number has sunk below 60,000 (Kingston, 2009). Since Venice sees an average of 55,000 tourists each day, there are many days when the number of tourists in the city of Venice exceeds the number of actual Venetians. All of these factors pushed Matteo Secchi, a Venetian business owner, to organize the Funeral of Venice (Kingston, 2009).

While the Funeral’s foremost audience may not have been tourists, the performance was observed by a huge number of them and was covered by many major media outlets around the world, so the Funeral spectators far surpassed the Venetians themselves and the politicians of the Venetian City Hall. Furthermore, one of the leading factors cited by the Funeral organizers as contributing to the so-called death of Venice is the influx of tourists. Because of the rise in tourism, cost of living expenses have risen exponentially in recent years, making living in Venice a constant financial struggle (Newman, 2009). Furthermore, since the passage of a law in 1999 that uses financial incentives to encourage the conversion of houses into tourist lodgings, the number of hotels and inns has increased sixfold (Newman, 2009). In the face of such an increase in tourist accommodations, there have not been any new buildings for Venetian residents since 2005, and the list of those awaiting public housing continues to grow (Natanson, 2009). The Funeral is as much an indictment of the tourist hoards as it is a plea to the city government; it alleges that the presence of tourists is the central threat to Venetian identity. While the Funeral makes no specific demands of what should be done, it seems especially focused on the idea of the past, when the problems of today might not have existed. As such, it evokes strong and celebratory images of an idealized past to critique and alter the present.

First, one of the Funeral’s central images, the gondola, is perhaps the most widely recognized symbol of Venice across the world, and that symbolism is enmeshed in the sense of history that surrounds the vessel’s use. Gondolas have been in use for centuries in Venice and are a mode of transportation unique to the city. By making them such a central element in the Funeral procession, the participants are performing nostalgia for what was once the only mode of transportation in Venice. Second, the playing of Venetian dirges and reading of Venetian poetry has obvious references to the past, evoking the memory of art forms that are now less and less pervasive. Finally, the leader of the procession carried a white mask with him—a reference to two-centuries-old traditions of Venice: the annual celebration of Carnevale and the artisanal craftsmanship of masks.

Performances of nationalism and progress are assuredly present in the Funeral, as well. Venice, one could argue, is a nation unto itself, at least in the mind of most Venetians. (One Venetian once told me that there is a common saying in Venice that came into existence after the Austro-Hungarian empire (which controlled Venice from 1814–1868) built the one bridge that connects Venice to the mainland. The saying goes, “Before the bridge, Venice was the continent, and the rest of the world was the island.”) This sense of pride in Venice as a land apart is demonstrated by a recent initiative by the National Geographic Society to collect DNA samples from Venetian men to track the Venetian genetic code before it disappears (ADNKronos, 2009). In this sense, the Funeral of Venice is an act of Venetian nationalism, attempting to preserve it and its traditions in light of the presence of so many non-Venetian inhabitants. The Funeral is also a performance of progress, since the central point of the Funeral is to motivate government action in the face of the challenges Venice faces, pushing for the triumphant advancement over these hardships. Still, these reforms mostly involve preserving an “old” Venetian way of life rather than enacting a new one, so nostalgia colors this sense of progress to a large extent.

For the tourists viewing the Funeral, they are seeing two conflicting acts at play: an observance of tradition, as well as a focus on the future. As Frederic Jameson and José Esteban Muñoz assert, however, a sense of futurity is always tied up in nostalgia for an idealized past (Jameson, 2005: xii; Muñoz, 2005: 9–20). In this way, the Venetians’ call for action is really a cry for the return of some past time when Venice was not sinking, when tourists were not rampant, and when the economy was not in such tatters. As is so often the case, of course, Venetian history does not necessarily contain a time when none of these situations was a problem. Nostalgia is elusive in that way.

This performance of nostalgia does serve an important function, however, which could be contributing to the survival of the city. Through the Funeral of Venice, the Venetian “mourners” are marking their city as dead or defunct, transforming it into a place of heritage, according to Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 149). In so doing, the “mourners” are surely accomplishing something in terms of reframing Venice in the public discourse. Even as they mourn the death of Venice, they are also proclaiming its “hereness,” as Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1998) would say (p. 153). That declaration of “hereness,” then, will be disseminated around the globe by the tourists who visit this “dying” city, as well as by those who witness the Funeral through other media. In effect, the mourning of Venice and the nostalgia it evokes are perhaps the Venetians’ last best hope of keeping Venice’s social identity vibrant.

This assertion is supported by Alberto Zambenedetti, a professor of Italian cinema at New York University, who is a Venetian himself and who grew up in the city before coming to the United States for college. Zambenedetti laughs off the claims that Venice is dying, chuckling at the theatrical display of the Funeral of Venice. “There’s always somebody celebrating the death of Venice. But are they mourning the loss of an actual place, or are they mourning the loss of the way they remember it was?” asks Zambenedetti. “It’s just another shift, just another transition. I think it’s very shortsighted to say it’s just, oh, okay, it’s dying.” Citing events like the famed Biennale of Venice, he argues, “How can you call defunct a city that has such a huge cultural impact on the world? It’s very tainted with this idea of solipsism and nostalgia, but it’s not the whole picture” (Alberto Zambenedetti, Personal Interview, 17 November 2009). After all, how can a city so present in the public discourse ever truly die?

Tourist productions and the Utopian impulse

Each of these cultural performances represents not only performances of a cultural history, but also performances of sentiment—structures of feeling—that are essential to the identity of the performers. While some shine through as performances of space and nation, others resonate as performances of time and progress, and still others seem more like performances of memory and nostalgia. If the article thus far has examined how the three performances differ in the identities they present through the structures of feeling that they make manifest through embodied practice, the question remains if there is some element that links together these performances and the sentiments they perform. Is there a common theme that unites these cultural performances despite their unique contexts?

Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1998) writes, “Tourism can be taken as a barometer, and it operates as an instrument, of local and national self-understanding” (p. 141). It seems only logical to note that the displays and performances of culture viewed by tourists are also an instrument of “local and national self-understanding.” Expanding upon this statement, tourism also becomes an instrument for transcultural understanding, or the lens through which the outsider understands the stranger’s local and national space. If, as Jeremy Boissevain (2004) concludes, tourists, while traveling, assume new identities for themselves, opening themselves to new experiences and the possibilities for new behaviors (p. 254), then it also seems plausible that tourists are open to seeing the identity of others anew, reconstructing notions of other cultures and ways of being that they then take home, process, and disseminate.

This interchange between tourist and host culture, along with the identity formation that occurs through the host culture performing a specific and curated cultural act, constitutes a form of Utopian construction through which the host culture performs for the spectator its more perfect version of what its society should be. Victor Turner (1987) describes this phenomenon as performance in the “subjunctive mood” (p. 41). Just as in language, the subjunctive mood is characterized as that which expresses possibility, potentiality, and hope. It is never certain; it is often predictive. These cultural performances could be seen as subjunctive in that they communicate a vision of the world that speaks more to what it could be than what it actually is. Similar to the cultural performances analyzed in this article —all of which manifest, I argue, in the subjunctive mood—there is another concept that exists always in the subjunctive mood: the notion of Utopia.

In his treatise on the construction of Utopias, Jameson argues that underlying the politics of any Utopian thought runs an always shifting “dialectic of Identity and Difference.” These two juxtaposed forces work to construct a new imaginary that is radically opposed to the present one (Jameson, 2005: xii). If this dialectic is an essential marker of Utopian thinking, then cultural performances—those described above and most others—exemplify at least some element of the Utopian impulse, in that they are all concerned with the distinction between that which is of the host culture—Identity—and that which is of the spectator culture—Difference. Of course, this relationship of Identity and Difference also works likewise, as the exchange between tourist and host culture is not unidirectional, but always mutually constitutive. The remainder of the article will examine how these cultural performances are united through the fact that they are using this dialectic of Identity and Difference to perform the utopic impulse, to embody an ideal future identity for themselves and their collective in the present moment.

Jameson (2005) writes that Utopias emerge within enclaves—spaces carved out of larger spaces within which the Utopian impulse may grow and differentiate itself from the dominant cultural forms. ⁸ Each of the tourist performances addressed in this article represents a Utopian enclave of some sort: the enclave created within the circles of the sardana, out of which radiates the aforementioned nationalist impulse; the enclave within the Trabant, which acts both as reminder of and transport to the sites that communicate a sense of triumphant progress; the enclave of the Funeral procession, which carves its path through the winding waters of Venice to the doors of the city hall, demanding a return to that more perfect past. All of these enclaves want to grow, to envelop their cities as a whole. These performers seek to make their home a Utopian enclave unto itself. Within these enclaves, and through the help of Jameson and another scholar of Utopian theory, Muñoz, it becomes clear that all three elements of Urry’s and this article’s thesis—space and homeland, time and progress, memory and nostalgia—are also essential elements for the construction of any Utopia.

While social sentiments of nationalism have come to evoke some suspect and often frightening realities, the basic idea itself, which calls for a devoted love of country, along with the independence of that country and its people, recalls the very first Utopia, created by Thomas More in his famous text from 1516. More’s (2012) Utopia is an island, separated from the rest of the world and the world’s peoples by not only ideological differences, but by a physical body of water. Jameson writes that the politics of Utopia occur exactly in this gap—this water or border—between the “newly created island and its non-Utopian neighbors” (Jameson, 2005: 24). Nationalist sentiment seeks to mimic this separation, if not by water, then at least by a drawing of borders that separate one culture from the others. It longs for this gap to be more boldly marked, and the performance of national-cultural acts for the public—like the dancing of the sardana in front of the Cathedral of Barcelona—is a call for that marking to take place. The circles of the dancers draw a line in the ground just as numerous Catalans would like a line to be drawn between themselves and the Spanish government in Madrid. Moreover, the circle of dancers is a closed one, not admitting anyone who does not know the dance and, therefore, does not fully understand their Utopian vision. In this way, the steps of the dancers feet are figuratively tapping out Jameson’s Utopian gap in 2/4 time.

The relationship between Utopia and performances of progress seems the most obvious. After all, the desire for Utopia is characterized by the desire to progress from the current state of things to a more perfect, more idealized, more Utopian state. It may seem odd, however, to look at the Crazy Guides Communism Tours of Krakow as exemplifying the Utopian impulse, particularly since, as Jameson (2005) reminds his readers, the politics of Utopia were often used by twentieth century Socialists to describe what they were attempting to achieve (p. xi). Indeed, at the time of its construction, Nowa Huta itself was meant to be a Utopia that would outshine the neighboring city center of Krakow. And yet the Socialist project of Nowa Huta failed miserably. Furthermore, the Crazy Guides themselves do not speak of their tour as Utopian in any sense. As the website’s company history describes, it is a business venture that allowed the owner to quit his boring job as a receptionist at a Krakow hotel. ⁹ Still, even if the vision of an idealized future is not evident in the Communism Tours, it certainly conceives of the present—both the personal present of the guides themselves, who have escaped the drudgeries of menial labor, and the present of Poland, which has escaped the oppression of Cold War Communism—as a triumphant advancement over the past. The ironic negativity—what Muñoz (2009) (after Shoshana Felman) might call “radical negativity”—used to introduce the tourist to Nowa Huta works to position the present against the failures of that past. This irony then becomes “the resource for a certain mode of … utopianism” (Muñoz, 2009: 13), one that might not actually name the future towards which it strives, but that actively names the past from which it flees.

Both Jameson and Muñoz discuss the important role that memory plays in the formation of any Utopian impulse. In his work, Jameson (2005) invokes an age-old maxim when he writes, “Nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses” (p. xiii). He goes on to write about how truly impossible it is to envision a new future world that is not only a collage of what has already existed (Jameson, 2005: xiii). Yet these limits inherent in our thinking do not mean that we are hopeless. Muñoz (2009) points this out when he writes, “It is important to call on the past, to animate it, understanding that the past has a performative nature, which is to say that rather than being static and fixed, the past does things” (p. 27). With the Funeral of Venice, the constructors of the event are using nostalgic evocations of a lost past—Venetian poetry, Carnevale masks, local symbology—to conjure into the present that which has been lost. In this instance, the Utopia the performers wish to construct is the imagined idea of what has already been. Compared to the numerous hardships faced by modern-day Venetians, the romanticized stories of the past seem infinitely more promising. “If only things were like they used to be” is not only nostalgic, but also Utopian in its intent, because that very phrase encapsulates an impulse to create a new and better world in the present. And while nostalgia is most clearly seen through the Funeral of Venice, this remembrance of things past is also present in the sardana, the Commie tours, and most other cultural performances.

Despite the evidence that these three performances exemplify elements of the utopic and the touristic at the same time, Jameson remains skeptical that a symbiotic relationship between Utopian thinking—which he asserts implies a level of self-sufficiency and locality—and tourism—which implies a reliance on and communication with a global community—can exist. He writes, “Tourist art is certainly a new space of creation and production, but scarcely a form through which an older national or local culture is produced and reproduced” (Jameson, 2005: 215). Even so, each of the three cultural performances examined in this article offer a counter argument to Jameson’s theory. Utopian thinking seems to be something ingrained in the human psyche. While not all of these performances are meant to be viewed solely by tourists, it is without contest that each of the performances has become subject to the tourist gaze, as tourism is an integral and undeniable aspect of life in these three cities. As the world becomes more globalized and individual societies become less self-sufficient, participants in these performances demonstrate to themselves and to outsiders how cultures have adapted to change by simultaneously nurturing a relationship with outsiders while maintaining strong cultural identities and developing their own political, Utopian projects, as exemplified through their public, embodied practices.

Conclusion

In her theorization of the repertoire of embodied practices through which cultural knowledge is transmitted, Diana Taylor (2003) tells her reader that “the repertoire, like the archive, is mediated” (p. 21). There is a “process of selection, memorization or internalization, and transmission” that occurs within the repertoire (Taylor, 2003: 21). This article attempts to examine that exact process, by pointing out and analyzing what has been selected, internalized, and transmitted through these interactions between host culture and tourist. While these mediated performances will continue to evolve (even as they become a part of the archive through tourist photographs and videos or in articles like this one), they speak to the innermost beliefs of their respective cultures in the moment of their performance, providing insight into how people view themselves and how they wish to be viewed by others.

Using Urry’s model of social identity, this article finds three specific elements particularly present in some form in most tourist performances—performances of nationalism, of progress, and of nostalgia. How a group or culture chooses to perform or not perform these three elements demonstrates their own self-understanding or their own desires for how they hope to be seen by others. There are, of course, some problems with this process. For one, as Davyyd J. Greenwood (2004) writes, “The onlookers often alter the meaning of the activities being carried on by local people” (159). Host cultures can be as careful as possible and still have no control over how tourists will interpret their performances. There are, assuredly, people who go on the Communism Tour in Krakow wondering how the guides could still be so supportive of Soviet Socialism. There must be those who see the sardana and describe it to their friends as a Spanish folk dance, rather than a Catalan one. Also, this article focuses only on tourist performances in three developed, democratic cities in a relatively prosperous Europe. Future investigation must surely be conducted as to how this model changes when applied to developing cities, as well as cities or countries that operate under more autocratic rule.

As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the identity of individuals as well as of societies is in constant flux, and the repertoire of these places continues to expand. Performance studies scholar and anthropologist Deborah Kapchan (2007) writes, “…[W]e are also always involved in the coming to terms with cultural identity, the codification and objectification not only of other cultures, but also of our own” (p. 231). In a world where this is undoubtedly the case, it is essential to examine these identity shifts, and specifically how cultures are trying to shape them. There is much to be learned from watching people perform their own culture, for this performance is, at its core, a forceful, interventionist act. At first glance, it may seem like the elderly Catalans are just dancing an old dance or that the mournful Venetians are only playing dress-up, but these cultural performances are revolutionary in the deepest sense. They are working to intervene upon locals and newcomers alike, to change their minds, to shift completely their way of seeing and knowing. Indeed, they are building a new, more perfect world.