Abstract
This paper develops means of apprehending the rhythms of everyday practices and performances. Emerging from the context of recent calls for more explicit engagements with issues surrounding research methods and methodologies in the doing of cultural geography, and in particular in the examination of the geographies of practices, the paper responds to critiques of recent discussions of urban and social rhythms that highlight limitations in the articulation of methods for actually apprehending everyday rhythms. As such, in conversation with Lefebvre’s portrait of the rhythmanalyst and other works interested in the significance of rhythm to social practices, the paper proposes time-lapse photography as a useful component of such a rhythm-analytical, and more generally practice-orientated, methodology. In doing so, the paper draws attention to this method’s ability to document and facilitate the reflection upon the complex durational unfolding of events and the situation of key occurrences within this polyrhythmia. This is illustrated in relation to the everyday rhythms of a specific urban space in Bath, UK and a street magician’s variously successful attempt to intervene into the everyday life of Bath.
Introduction
Rhythms: the music of the City, a scene that listens to itself, an image in the present of a discontinuous sum. Rhythms perceived from the invisible window, pierced into the wall of the façade . . . No camera, no image or series of images can show these rhythms. It requires equally attentive eyes and ears, a head and a memory and a heart.
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Repetitions, movements, cycles, intervals, serenity . . . these rather trivial rhythms seem impossible to register . . . no camera or tape recorder could easily articulate the experience of this lifeworld.
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In this paper I am interested in how we apprehend the everyday rhythms of public spaces and the situation of specific practices within them. Understanding the rhythmic ordering of society is highly significant to the study of a multitude of socio-cultural practices given its enfolding with notions of power, 3 mobility, 4 sociality, 5 and corporeality. 6 Geographers have now for some time been interested in trying to understand the temporality of social life in relation to these themes. This can be seen in time geography’s attempts to trace, note and visualize the trajectories of people through space-time and the ways this is constrained. 7 Equally, humanistic geography drew attention to the experiential aspects of this and so the significance of rhythm to the dynamic nature of lifeworlds and the ‘complex everyday experience of human beings in their diverse social and material environments’. 8 Developing this further, structuration theory was concerned with the spatio-temporal structuring of such routinized patterns of behavior through which social reproduction and change occurred, though doing so without recourse solely to structures or human agency alone. 9 And more recently, in light of the practice turn in the social sciences, the scope of such studies has been broadened further with geographers becoming interested in rhythm in terms of the ways in which recurrent actions or ‘refrains’ can ‘inform efforts to organize the non-representational powers of corporeal movement’. 10
Both in addition to and permeating through these discussions, geographers have become increasingly interested in ‘rhythmanalysis’ 11 as an analytic lens for understanding the organization of social life and exploring how ‘places are always in a process of becoming, seething with emergent properties, but usually stabilized by regular patterns of flow that possess particular rhythmic qualities whether steady, intermittent, volatile or surging’. 12 Work here has examined a range of topics both related to what rhythmanalysis has to offer to how we conceive space-time and, increasingly, how it can facilitate our understanding of specific practices. 13 For example, in terms of the former, studies have engaged with: what rhythmanalysis offers to re-thinking time-space as produced in practice rather than as a container in which practices play out 14 and how rhythmanalysis provides an alternative approach to understanding the urban notions of constant speeding up. 15 In terms of the latter, studies have engaged with: the rhythms of tourism and consumption; 16 the choreographed rhythms of the body in performance; 17 the significance of rhythm and movement to music as it plays out in practice; 18 the presence of socio-natures in the city; 19 and the rhythms of sociality and encounter in the city. 20
However, one topic that has not received substantial or sustained attention in this work interested in rhythm is the question of how to actually do rhythmanalysis or research rhythm in an empirical, and especially practice-based, context. For example, while developing a ‘materialist metaphorics’ of the city through employing rhythmanalysis as a ‘loose, critical attitude’, 21 Highmore says little about the issue of the recording and apprehension of rhythms in the undertaking of rhythmanalysis. Highmore suggests that ‘[r]hythmanalysis is an attitude, an orientation, a proclivity; it is not “analytic” in any positivistic or scientific sense of the term. It falls on the side of impressionism and description, rather than systematic data collection’. 22 However, I would argue differently when it comes to employing rhythmanalysis in the examination of the unfolding of everyday practices. This becomes particularly evident when, in discussing routine forms of ‘homework’ practices (such as cooking), Highmore comments that rhythmanalysis ‘suggests forms for grasping the experiential actuality of the everyday’ but does not elaborate how such ‘grasping’ might actually take place. 23 Further, while a wide range of empirical engagements with Lefebvre’s ideas appear in Edensor’s recent collection on rhythm, and a number of methods are used within these (interviews, mobile ethnography, participant observations, visual recordings, and so on), little is said when it comes to reflecting on the specific challenges engaging rhythm presents. 24
This lack of engagement with the issue of method is somewhat surprising. There is in fact a substantial need to develop methods for attending to rhythm. For example, Lefebvre for one was ‘frustratingly elusive . . . about the tools of such a practice’ and failed to present any ‘clear methods for rhythmanalysis, only . . . metaphors such as receptivity and exteriority’. 25 Equally, in the few places where geographers and others have picked up on these points in Lefebvre’s writings, there has been a tendency to simply echo his discussions of the importance of the body, the need to ‘listen’ to the rhythms of social life as well as look at them, and this tension of receptivity while maintaining exteriority. 26 Similarly, connections have been drawn between Lefebvre’s ‘rhythmanalyst’ and that ‘archetypal occupant and observer of the public sphere’, 27 the flaneur, given its assumed dual disposition of ‘boredom and ennui which seems inescapably linked to . . . curiosity and voyeurism’. 28 However, such work has not fleshed out Lefebvre’s somewhat elliptical comments in terms of suggesting means of how to actually do rhythmanalysis or what techniques could be employed in maintaining this sort of disposition.
Perhaps this gap is not all that surprising though. As Latham notes, 29 while work has been quick to theorize practice, 30 there has been a more modest and slower response in terms of a move toward methodological development and innovation based on this theoretical animation. 31 This has especially been the case when it comes to being ‘more articulate and openly explicit in print about . . . methods and methodologies’. 32 That said, a few notable exceptions to this have recently emerged. For example, Latham has reflected on the use of diary-photo and diary-interview approaches in engaging the performance of social life and suggested novel ways of presenting the findings from these by extending the mapping of time-geography. 33 Equally, Duffy and Waitt have further expanded this to include solicited sound diaries to get at the experience of the soundscapes of social life via less textual means. 34 Morton has also outlined an experimental multi-method participative/visual/textual performance ethnography, 35 and there have also been a number of engagements with video as a methodological and presentational tool. 36 Following such multi-modal approaches to engaging the complexity of practices, in this paper I continue to re-dress this imbalance by asking the question: what specific methods, techniques, or recording tools can be employed in the study of the rhythms that circulate in and through everyday practices? I respond by suggesting time-lapse photography as one option that can aid in the reflection upon the complex and multi-faceted temporal unfolding of everyday practices and the ways in which various rhythms intermingle in and so affect the playing out of the practices.
Drawing on time-lapse photography challenges Lefebvre and Mel’s assertions in the opening epigraphs that a rhythm-analytical methodology should not include photography. While I do agree that an image or series of images cannot necessarily fully capture or evoke such rhythms and their qualities,
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I do feel that a series of images can be useful in rhythmanalysis and ‘provide techniques for thinking through the rhythms of urban life’.
38
In considering temporality, it is important to be attentive to the fact that a large part of what is taking place actually appears to be fixed or uneventful based on our habitual ways of looking at (and listening to) the world.
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There are other durational rhythms at play and time-lapse photography can prove useful in re-orienting the ways in which we perceive the world: Imagine a film of the landscape, shot over years, centuries, even millennia. Slightly speeded up, plants appear to engage in very animal-like movements, trees flex their limbs without any prompting from the winds. Speeded up rather more, glaciers flow like rivers and even the earth begins to move. At yet greater speeds solid rock bends, buckles and flows like molten metal. The world itself begins to breath.
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In suggesting the utility of time-lapse photography in apprehending the rhythms of social life, the discussion here is illustrated with an examination of the practice of street performance. This is drawn from a broader research project that, in part, sought to examine the relationship between informal forms of performances and the everyday life of cities, considering the sort of experiential context that city spaces present in contrast to a more formalized performance environment, and the ways in which such performances come to be situated in relation to the spatio-temporal routines of these spaces. 41 As such, considering this practice provides an insightful lens into the understanding of the ways in which the city’s public spaces come to have a particular spatio-temporal organization, and so are traversed by a multitude of patterns and routines all unfolding at different speeds and across different durations, but equally how specific practices are both situated within such routines and can intervene in them. 42
Based on this, the rest of the paper unfolds as follows. First, I provide an introduction to some of the key themes related to conceiving rhythm. Following this, I introduce time-lapse photography, drawing particular attention to its past uses in the social sciences and how its use here moves away from certain dominant aspects of this. I then turn to street performance and rhythm-analyse a specific spatio-temporal event through the analysis of a series of time-lapse images, research diary entries, and academic commentary. I conclude by summarizing the key points of utility of time-lapse photography in apprehending rhythms and so in studying of the interrelation of a multitude of temporalities in everyday life.
Conceiving rhythms
Rhythmanalysis broadly relates to the examination of the complex interrelation of a multitude of different temporalities, and their resultant organization and functioning, in the everyday life of the city. In thinking about this, this section will outline three interrelated sets of key themes recurrent in a range of discussions of rhythm: duration and clock time, linear and cyclical rhythms, and the rhythms of the body.
Duration and clock time
As Elden notes, ‘[r]hythm . . . is something inseparable from understandings of time, in particular repetition’. 43 However, there is a danger of confusing rhythm with ‘movement, speed, a sequence of movements or objects (machines, for example)’. 44 This attributes too much of a ‘mechanical’ overtone to rhythms and so forgets the organic aspects of their movement. As such, ‘the question of rhythm raises issues of change and repetition, identity and difference, contrast and continuity’. 45 There is, thus, ‘[n]o rhythm without repetition in time and space, without reprises, without returns, in short without measure’; but equally ‘there is no absolute identical repetition, indefinitely . . . there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference’. 46
As part of this relationship between repetition and change a recurrent tension drawn out in discussions of rhythm has been between duration and ‘clock-time’. For example, Bergson draws out a distinction between a qualitative form of lived duration and a quantitative form of measured ‘clock-time’. 47 Here, the former refers to the temporality of lived experience in all its irreducible singularity and so a time that can ‘only be lived in the very specific time of its unfolding’. 48 Duration refers to a heterogeneous temporality where there is a multiplicity of different qualities unfolding and where duration is this unfolding itself. In contrast, the latter refers to the chopping up of lived time into units, a mapping out of time in an objective series, a form of counting or measurement. This quantification of time for Bergson is taken to be a product of the intellect and constitutes a spatial representation on an imagined horizon. Clock-time refers to a ‘homogenous medium in which our conscious states are arranged alongside one another as in space’ and whereby the articulated units become equivalent to each other. 49 For Bergson, this sort of spatialized clock time has become our habitual way of thinking about time and so we have forgotten lived duration given its non-representational nature and the resultant difficulty of articulating it.
Developing this, Ingold distinguishes between a form of duration without beginning or end and a sort of ‘connecting together of dots’ that lays emphasis on the point of origin or distinction and has emerged as ‘a virtual icon of modernity, an index for the triumph of rational, purposeful design over the vicissitudes of the natural world’.
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Ingold then makes a distinction between the metronome and its abstraction and a more undifferentiated nature of rhythm that cannot be reduced to the counting of beats, something like a pattern of lived time:
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A metronome, like a clock, inscribes an artificial division into equal segments upon an otherwise undifferentiated movement; rhythm, by contrast, is intrinsic to movement itself . . . Social life . . . is never finished, and there are no breaks in it that are not integral to its tensile structure, to the ‘eb and flow of activity’ by which society itself seems to breathe.
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Based on these discussions, we can identify how the flow of duration is spatialized or broken up into something more measured. As such, we tend to think of time in a spatial way as part of our habitual ways of conceiving the world meaning its durational nature is forgotten. However, and returning to the work of Lefebvre, we can consider a slightly different way in which temporality is often conceptualized and through which the organic unfolding of time becomes rationalized – through the relationship of linear rhythms and cyclical rhythms and the incursion of the former into the latter in capitalist society.
Linear and cyclical rhythms
A key distinction that runs through many discussions of rhythm is between linear rhythms and cyclical rhythms. For example, Lefebvre suggested that: Cyclical repetition and the linear repetitive separate out under analysis, but in reality interfere with one another constantly. The cyclical originates in the cosmic, in nature: days, nights, seasons, the waves and tides of the sea, monthly cycles etc. The linear would come rather from social practice, therefore from human activity: the monotony of actions and movements, imposed structures. Great cyclical rhythms last for a period and restart: dawn, always new, often superb, inaugurates the return of the everyday.
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Here, the linear bear a stronger resemblance to the mechanical and so the properly repetitive. In contrast, the cyclical for Lefebvre presents a strong sense of evolution and change within repetition. What was concerning for Lefebvre in particular, and so founds his rhythmanalytical project, is ‘the practico-social dominance of linear over cyclical repetition – that is to say, the dominance of one aspect of rhythms over another’.
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Therefore, Lefebvre’s rhythmanalytical project examines this interaction and the disquiets that it produces which may provide the grounds for a response to this colonization of the cyclical by the linear: Critique of everyday life studies the persistence of rhythmic timescales within the linear time of modern industrial society. It studies the interactions between cyclic time (natural, and in a sense, irrational, and still concrete) and linear time (acquired, rational, and in a sense abstract and antinatural). It examines the defects and disquiet this as yet unknown and poorly understood interaction produces. Finally, it considers what metamorphoses are possible in the everyday as a result of this interaction.
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For Lefebvre, the rhythmanalytical project is to examine the ‘complete quantification of social time’ and how ‘quantification has conquered society in its entirety’ 56 and so has almost completely eliminated the qualitative in time – the effacement of the multiple lived durations into one synchronic social whole. We only need to think here of the innumerable timetables and timings that we follow in our everyday tasks and how these organize certain behaviors, mould certain responses, and so choreograph the cyclical rhythms of our body’s actions and functions.
It is important to emphasize though that for Lefebvre there is not an absolute colonization of the qualitative or the cyclical by the quantitative or the linear. As Meyer notes, ‘[i]n spite of the merciless rule of the abstract clock time, the immense cosmic rhythms continue to exert influence on everyday life’. 57 There is a potential for change, for everyday life to be interrupted and its organization to be changed, if only for a short time. This focus then makes rhythmanalysis ‘particularly useful in investigating the patterning of a range of multiscalar temporalities – calendrical, diurnal and lunar, lifecycle, somatic and mechanical – whose rhythms provide an important constituent of the experience and organization of social time’. 58
However, it is also important to note that others have articulated this distinction between the linear and the cyclical differently. While linear rhythms can be an imposition, it can also be the case that ‘[w]e establish our own daily routines to give our lives rhythm and predictability’ and do so to ‘bring order and control to lives that may otherwise seem entirely determined by the contingencies of context’. 59 As such, Ingold characterizes cyclical rhythms as presenting the ‘mechanical system . . . (putatively) constituted by the earth in its axial rotations and in its revolutions around the sun’. 60 While Lefebvre sees an element of potential in this sort of cosmic time and its inauguration of something new, Ingold takes this ‘astronomical time’ as quantitative and not affected by human activities or experiences. In distinction to this, Ingold discusses a social time, the time of what he calls the ‘taskscape’, which refers to the multiple and interrelated ensemble of tasks that we undertake in everyday life and is, as such, a constitutive part of our dwelling in the world. It is a more overtly human time than the astronomical time just discussed.
In both Lefebvre and Ingold, there is thus a value ascribed to social time. For Lefebvre, social rhythms are taken to relate to part of our socialization into a specific routine that in some way detaches them from a more originary or authentic form of being in the world; they are an effect of a largely top-down form of power. 61 In contrast, for Ingold such social temporality is taken as a part of our more general intersubjective place-making activities; it refers to a form of multiple temporality that emerges in our interactions with the world and the others around us and is foundational to our social being. That said, both draw attention to the fact that modern society has a leaning towards a sort of linearity of time, that ‘modern society . . . has a linear bias to it; and that with this linear bias many natural rhythms have been replaced by artificial ones, a rhythmic society replaced by a metronomic’. 62 This is a form of temporality detached from the cosmic cycles Lefebvre sees value or significance in and the more bottom-up social rhythms of the taskscape that Ingold identifies.
Based on these different rhythms, various rhythms interact and impose themselves onto others. In social life there is not just one rhythmic cycle, but rather ‘a complex interweaving of very many concurrent cycles’.
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Lefebvre suggests a number of concepts to facilitate the understanding of this ‘polyrhythmia’. One form of polyrhythmia is eurhythmia, which is when ‘[r]hythms unite with one another in the state of health, in normal (which is to say normed!) everydayness’.
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Here there is a sort of positive ‘affective tonality’ to the rhythms present.
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In contrast, ‘when they are discordant, there is suffering, a pathological state (of which arrhythmia is generally, at the same time, symptom, cause and effect)’.
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We then have a contrast between the harmonious interrelation of rhythms (eurhythmia) and the dysfunctional interrelation of rhythms (arrhythmia). To explain, Lefebvre gives the example of the body here: The eu-rhythmic body, composed of diverse rhythms – each organ, each function, having its own – keeps them in metastable equilibrium, which is always understood and often recovered, with the exception of disturbances (arrhythmia) that sooner or later becomes illness (a pathological state).
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Finally, Lefebvre discusses isorhythmia. This relates to the ‘equality’ of rhythms. 68 As such, this is mutually exclusive from eurhythmia in that there are few isorhythmias, few rhythmic equalities or coincidences, but a proliferation of eurhythmia for they are present in any organization, organism, or life/living body.
Rhythms of the body
Given these core concepts, the undertaking of rhythmanalysis or any analysis of social rhythms needs to be a multi-sensory experience based on actual lived experience: The rhythmanalyst calls on all his [sic] sense. He draws on his breathing, the circulation of his blood, the beating of his heart and the delivery of his speech as landmarks. Without privileging any one of these senses, raised by him in the perception of rhythms, to the detriment of any other. He thinks with his body not in the abstract, but in lived temporality.
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Therefore, the rhythmanalyst’s body is to act as a metronome; the body is a ‘bundle of rhythms’ 70 and so the analyst ‘calls upon a physiology of organs and their functioning’. 71 As Young notes: ‘the bodies of human beings, and almost all other organisms, are composed of multiple rhythms, time locked ones at that. Every bodily process is pulsing to its own beat within the overall beats of the solar system’. 72 Equally though, we do not necessarily consult these rhythms in a conscious manner. Rather, such rhythms inhabit us and are embodied in our actions rather than looked to like a watch. If the analyst’s own body is the starting or reference point, learning from it so as to be able to experience external rhythms, the rhythmanalyst ‘is always listening to his [sic] body, to whatever it communicates to him’. 73 This is not to say though that the rhythmanalyst is to jump from their body to these other rhythms, the rhythms being observed. Rather, the analyst ‘should come to listen to them as a whole and unify them by taking his [sic] own rhythms as a reference’. 74
This emphasis on the rhythmanalyst’s use of their body as a tool for research largely explains Lefebvre’s hostility toward the idea that images can show rhythms. For Lefebvre images cannot capture the quality of rhythms as these need to be sensed in relation to the analyst’s own corporeal rhythms: We know that a rhythm is slow or lively only in relation to other rhythms (often our own: those of our walking, our breathing, our heart). This is the case even though each rhythm has its own specific measure: speed, frequency, consistency. Spontaneously, each of us has our preferences, references, frequencies; each must appreciate rhythms by referring to oneself, one’s heart or breathing, but also to one’s hours of work, of rest, of waking and of sleep.
75
To undertake rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre suggests, is necessary to get outside of the complex polyrhythmia that constitutes the everyday. However, as his discussion of the relation sensing of rhythms suggests, this is not to be a complete detachment. Rather, ‘to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it’; 76 there is the need for a receptivity and a sensitivity to these rhythms. There is then a necessary tension between being inside and outside the rhythms being studied.
One way we can elaborate this sensitivity is through Abraham’s discussion of what he calls ‘rhythmizing consciousness’. 77 Here, rather than seeking the rhythm in the object observed or trying to measure it in objective terms, what is important is our embodied perception of rhythm: ‘we know rhythm only by our experience of it’. 78 Abraham illustrates this in terms of a prehension of an event based on the experience of a past occurrence that, having initially been received passively, becomes actively anticipated or expected. This is not necessarily actively thought about in the first instance, but rather is felt and manifest in our bodily actions – the tapping of a foot, the pace of our steps, and so on. As Abraham states, ‘the body itself produces movements that parallel the successive emergences, movements through which it tends to appropriate them, as it were, by imitating their temporal configuration’. 79 It is not then that there is an objective rhythm present for all that would require a ‘perception of rhythm’, but rather that we perceive an unfolding sequence as rhythmic through an adjustment in our corporeal attitude toward that phenomenon, a ‘rhythmization of perception’. Such a perception is not an analytic act based on the exact identification of interval, but a synthesizing act that adjusts to minor variations and so accommodates variation in the recurrence of the rhythmized phenomenon.
However, despite these discussions, we are still left with little indication as to what methods might be fruitfully employed by the rhythmanalyst; it is still not clear how a researcher might proceed in actually doing rhythmanalysis. Thinking more practically, how might we go about recording and registering such rhythms in a way that will aid us in perceiving and drawing out their interrelated complexity? What tools are at the rhythmanalyst’s disposal other than the cultivation of a specific form of disposition towards the world? I will now go on to suggest one potential response to these questions in the form of time-lapse photography.
Time-lapse photography
Time-lapse is a photographic technique produced using either a still or video camera whereby each frame or image is captured at a slower speed or greater interval compared to the speed at which it would usually be played back at in a film sequence. As such, this can be used to produce the appearance of events unfolding at a faster pace than they actually occurred. While connections could be drawn to early technologies used in the animation of still images to show movement (such as the magic lanterns and zootropes of the late 18th and early 19th centuries 80 ), a significant antecedent here would be the photographs taken by Muybridge in 1878 that documented the motions of a horse trotting. Using an elaborate set up of 12 cameras, these images broke down the fluid movements of the horse into individual stages. The change from one image to the next though in itself represents this motion vividly, 81 giving this movement a ‘new form of legibility’. 82
While the technique has been used most extensively in the physical and biological sciences, it does have some history in the social sciences. Of particular note is the work of William H. Whyte on the public life of ‘small spaces’ in cities (squares, parks and plazas). Whyte used time-lapse photography to examine why some public spaces ‘worked’ for users and others did not by observing the ways such spaces were used, with a particular focus on their function, the frequency and patterns of their use, what types of interactions happened in them and how often, the capacities of these spaces, and so on. Based on this, Whyte produced charts and diagrams outlining the variations in the use of different spaces across set time periods. 83 In light of such work, the technique has also been adopted and modified in light of recent technological developments (such as digital video and computer-automated counting) in areas like urban design, landscape architecture, and environmental management to consider, and ultimately enumerate, the spatio-temporal patterns of human movement and activity in a variety of social context. 84
These studies hint at the utility of time-lapse photography in facilitating the examination of the temporal unfolding of a variety of social practices and the establishment of patterns and cycles of repetition within these. That said, one difference in the way I want to draw on time-lapse photography here, and linking back to the previous section’s discussion of the spatializing of the temporality of events (and also to the critiques made of time-geography’s mappings of individuals’ space-time routines 85 ), connects to how many of these studies largely use the technique to enumerate the frequency of certain activities or map their patterns. 86 While undoubtedly rich in empirical detail and illuminating in the accounts they provide, such an emphasis on the mapping and diagramming of spatio-temporal practices risks the felt-experiential aspects of inhabiting and moving through these space-times being given a rather marginal position in the accounts produced. Therefore, rather than engaging in such mappings here, I want to employ time-lapse photography as an avenue into the examination of the qualitative unfolding of events as they happen. As recent work on images in geography has shown, images can do far more than provide content to be quantified and put into tables, charts or diagrams. Rather, such images can ‘represent, capture or expose’ the dynamism of movement. 87 Such images here will then facilitate the development of another way of looking, a means of ‘unfixing and altering the perspective’, and so unsettling how we habitually figure this so as to witness ‘the playing out of . . . life as it happens in all its complexity’. 88
With this in mind, and closer to the ambitions of this paper, the initial inspiration for the use of time-lapse photography here in relation to the pursuit of rhythmanalysis actually came from performance studies, 89 and specifically one of the few extant studies of street performance – Harrison-Pepper’s discussion of street performers in Washington Square Park, New York. 90 Alongside extensive ethnographic observations and interviews with performers, Harrison-Pepper took a series of time-lapse photographs from the roof of a building adjacent to the Square in an attempt to map the performances that occurred in the space in terms of their interrelated movements and so to chart their rhythms and durations. The images produced show ‘notions of density, accretion, duration, dispersal, and flow . . . and show how space may be defined through the location and movement of people . . . and how time is defined in terms of interaction, rhythm and intensity’. 91
Harrison-Pepper’s use of time-lapse photography conforms to the previous section’s discussion of the need to get outside of rhythms so as to be able to appreciate their broader context and interrelation. By situating herself on a building top across from the Square, Harrison-Pepper was able to present an overall picture of the temporal unfolding of the space and the polyrhythmic interrelation of the practices that occurred therein that she would not necessarily have been able to see in her more close-up ethnographic observations. While this might also risk falling into the trap that Lefebvre suggests images present of becoming detached from the events occurring given her physical distance (and the further distance the images might produce), and so giving a limited sense of the quality of their unfolding, this is mitigated by the integration of her ethnographic observations of performances and her conversations with performers into her account.
Therefore, based on these various uses, I would argue that time-lapse photography holds the potential to show the dynamic evolution of urban spaces and the situation of specific practices within this. The images produced through this photography potentially facilitate the fine-grained analysis of everyday activities and especially how these activities play out and vary across different interrelated timescales. That said, it is not a case of mapping out trajectories through this recording and presenting these in diagrammatic form, but rather of gaining a sense of the unfolding of events and so attending to the multiple durations that such events unfold along. While I will be presenting a sequence of images here, this is more to draw attention to the multiple durational flows that occur across the event than to enumerate frequencies or quantify actions. 92 As such, the following section will draw on one example of time-lapse photography being used in the examination of rhythms, and in the undertaking and presentation of rhythmanalysis, as part of a broader ethnographic approach. Combining time-lapse photography with the photographer’s own observant presence provides the presence of the necessary ‘eyes and ears’ and ‘head and heart’ that aid in the sensing of the qualities of the rhythms present. Therefore, I will show here that the combination of a record of photographs, researcher diary entries based on the ethnographic experience, and academic commentary provides a fruitful entrée into the documentation of everyday rhythms and so the undertaking and presentation of the rhythmanalysis of everyday practices.
A rhythmanalysis of street magic
Having provided an introduction to some key themes related to rhythm and to time-lapse photography, I now turn to an analysis of a street performance, and a street magician’s attempts to perform in Bath, UK in particular, to illustrate the potential utility of this method in the examination of the polyrhythmia of the everyday and the multi-durational unfolding of the practices that play out therein.
Bath is a well know tourist destination in the UK. However, it is also know as a site for street performances among both performers and tourists. As Bath and North East Somerset Council note, this is ‘part of the Bath “experience”, creating an enhanced atmosphere and providing pleasure to many people, both local residents and visitors’. 93 Bath’s general spatio-temporal routines and orders that contribute to this ‘experience’, and equally present the setting into which performers aim to intervene, in part arises from its status as a World Heritage City. Bath attracts many tourists, but also a large number of shoppers, along with those who work and live there. The activities of tourists, shoppers, workers and residents then form particular overlain and interwoven patterns, rhythms and routines. People follow guided tours, visits particularly significant sites, move from attraction to attraction or shop to shop along central thoroughfares, commute to and from work at set times, and so on. As Allen notes ‘the regular comings and goings of people about the city to the vast range of repetitive activities, sounds and even smells that punctuate life in the city . . . give many of those who live there a sense of time and location’. 94 This sense of time and location is particularly significant to street performers for the routinized spaces of the city constitute the ‘stage’ for their performances. 95
The event discussed here occurred in the summer of 2008. The performer, a magician, was set up on a large paved area where the top of two pedestrianized streets meet – a regular site for performances. I have chosen to focus on this event in particular as it foregrounds a number of key features of performing in public spaces, particularly in terms of there being a variety of other activities going on in the space that the performance has to intervene in, and so a complex polyrhythmic context specific to that location. For example, the space performed on here is a transitional space. Pedestrians tend to be moving from tourist attractions such as the Abbey or Roman Baths, or coming from the shopping streets of Union Street and Stall Street to the South, and heading to further attractions such as the Jane Austin Museum, The Circus, and The Royal Crescent to the North (or the reverse). There is a substantial and continuous flow of people moving from right to left (or left to right) in the images. This draws attention to how the potential street performance audience will have a range of agendas and motivations for being there which the performer will have to distract them from. Equally, in the background of the performance is a road (Milson Street) with traffic moving at varying speeds to the patterns of traffic lights, speed limits, traffic volume, etc. Milson Street tends to have slow moving traffic and doesn’t present much noise (as can be seen by the relative lack of traffic present in the background of Images 1–9). That said, the traffic does vary with the time of day and becomes stop-start even at peak times due to the presence of traffic lights nearby. This means the sounds of car stereos, horns, and so on can distract from performances. As I will discuss later though, different spaces present different contexts that performances have to intervene in and so each space places specific demands of performers in trying to intervene into them.
Frustrated magician
Teenagers stop
More people begin to watch
Larger crowd including school group
Tour group leaves
Little audience remains
Peak audience
Another tour group leave at instruction of leader
Audience for finale
In observing this event, I situated myself a little way down the street, next to a wall, so as to get a wide angle and to capture the main direction of pedestrian flow through the space. This facilitated a sort of dual relation of being close enough to be involved with the events unfolding in the street but equally not being swallowed up in the huddle of the audience. A digital SLR camera was secured on a tripod and photographs taken at intervals of approximately 15–20 seconds. This generated a total of 151 images. A selection of these is presented below which highlight key moments in the unfolding of the event, but which together also give a sense of the dynamic unfolding of the event. A time-lapse video based on the full series of images can be accessed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjiwHwsX9L8. A diary recording of the event was also maintained, which provided an overall narrative of the events unfolding and also highlighted key matters such as the tone of voice and comments of the performer when they addressed the audience or passersby, the speed and volume at which comments were made, and so on.
In terms of the analysis of the time-lapse images, this entailed an iterative process of watching and re-watching the time-lapse footage generated, manually navigating through sequences of images, and comparing all this with the diary notes written at the time. Here, experimenting with the frame rate of the playback allowed for different spatio-temporal patterns important to the event’s unfolding to emerge across the various viewings. Speeding up playback allowed for longer durational patterns to become more apparent and slowing it down allowed the shorter term or more punctual to emerge. Equally, this also allowed key moments to be identified and examined further within such patterns. In particular, such moments were considered by comparing a smaller selection of images and consulting the corresponding diary notes related to that point in the event’s unfolding. While specific details of this process varied depending on the particular event being considered (in light of the overall length of the event, the interval between the photographs taken, and so on), in general it variously allowed for the multiple durational unfoldings playing out in specific spatio-temporal occurrences to come to the fore, and so augmented and refigured the researcher’s habitual ways of perceiving the temporalities of such events.
Turning to the specific unfolding of the event being considered here, on this space, given its transitory nature, it can be difficult to gather a crowd. The performer struggled to get the attention of passersby. Although she spoke to passersby, she struggled to get them to stop. Many walked past quickly showing little interest in breaking from their plans. While this is often the case with street magicians who don’t have the same spectacular props as other street performers (such as fire or giraffe unicycles
96
), this felt like a long time here. Every approach the magician made to anyone passing was brushed off quickly or was simply ignored. It appeared not so much to be a case of a lack of talent on the behalf of the performer, but rather more a general indifference on behalf of the audience relative to the tasks they were pursuing. The magician became visibly frustrated – the affects of this were manifest in her body language.
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She slumped forward over her table (Image 1), and her requests for people to stop became almost pleading. As my diary noted: The tone of her voice sounded more and more desperate and frustrated and I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable watching. Time seemed to pass more and more slowly the longer this went on. The more people failed to stop or brushed off her comments with a shrug, the more awkward it felt.
Here the rhythms of the potential audience where clearly in arrhythmic relation to the vital rhythms of the performer’s body and the intending unfolding of her show. The unrelenting passage of the day amid the hustle-and-bustle, the unfolding of its circadian rhythms, can be seen in the encroaching shadow at the bottom left of the images/time-lapse video.
However, her luck eventually changed. She asked a group of teenagers if they wanted to see some magic and they stopped to watch (Image 2). Unlike most of the passersby, the teenagers had been walking quite slowly; the rhythms of their gaits meandering, joking about, and generally they seemed to not be in a rush to get anywhere. With this group now watching, the magician proceeded to do some basic card tricks. From here a few others stopped to watch to see what was going on and what all the laughing was about. After a few minutes a small crowd had formed and more and more people were looking over to see what was going on.
After five minutes of watching this initial group lost interest and left, wandering off at the same laid-back pace they had arrived with. The crowd that developed also dwindled. It was apparent that her starter-tricks were not enough to hold their interest relative to their other intentions. The crowd did not totally disappear though and with the magician becoming more and more animated in an attempt to keep the attention of those still watching. Gestures became larger and faster paced, her tone increasingly energetic, the rhythm of her banter accelerated. More people were attracted to watch (Image 3).
After another five minutes a large crowd had formed, partly made up of a large school tour group (left side of Image 4). However, again this was not to last long. At the persistent instruction of their leader, the tour group walked on up Milsom Street, returning to their previous plans and leaving a large gap in the crowd where they had stood (Image 5). The organizers had stood peripherally to the crowd, only allowing a brief distraction. This left a big empty space at the side of the performance and started a trend. As one performer had commented in an interview earlier in the research, it is imperative in circle shows to keep a tight and coherent circle or else it is easy for people to get distracted or to become detached from the proceedings. More and more of the audience started to walk off, again heading up Milsom Street (Image 6). This left only around a quarter of the audience.
Again, however, the audience was re-built. The magician again had to shout to passersby to try to get them to join the audience. More elaborate tricks were undertaken and within a couple of minutes a few more had been stopped by the magician’s shouts. Within a further seven minutes or so a full audience had been attracted again. Two further minutes on and the audience reached its peak size so far as a result of another tour group stopping (Image 7). However, the tour group again left within a few minutes, again as a result of requests of those running it to keep them to their itinerary (Image 8). Watches were gestured to and any reluctant members personally encouraged to move on. This again caused a few others to leave with them.
However, not so many left this time and the crowd rebuilt quickly with the empty spaces being filled (Image 9) in time of the act’s finale. Within two minutes all the audience had left (some donating) and the magician was left chatting to someone, before starting the process over again.
As this event shows, one of the challenges presented by performing in such a space is that there are a multitude of temporalities at play in this space, a polyrhythmia into which the performance must intervene. Unlike performing in a more formal venue where performances will have a set timing and be expected by their audience, in the street performers need to intervene into other routines to gain their audience. 98 The performance is a living event that emerges out of a complex range of spatio-temporal relations. 99 Here, the rhythms of the various tour groups that passed by and stopped briefly were clearly significant. These tours would likely be organized to fit a specific linear timetable dictating where they would have to be and when, how long they had at each place, and so on. 100 However, such ordering is ‘liable to breakdown’ as it ‘can only provide a framework within which other elements intrude, aligning themselves or striking discord with the tour rhythms’, even if for a short time. 101 This meant that, while the members of the various tours that figured in the unfolding of the event could stop for a few minutes, they did not have the time to watch until the end.
This also drew other tourists with less formally organized plans for their visit to return to their plans. A tour group leaving could bring it back into their mind. These planned out linear rhythms interacted and affected each other, returning to some sense of isorhythmia in their (re)synchronization. Further, those who were simply in Bath shopping would also likely have a plan for their day (a list of items they want to get, shops to go to, and so on) and more generally be part of a broader rhythmic ordering of their consumption practices. 102 Seeing others not hang around could again bring to mind their own plans and the restrictions placed on these, and could lead them to leave. Equally, given the constant need to attract more people to watch, this drew out the magician’s show and altered the rhythm of its planned unfolding. This could contribute to a loss of interest by some watching or meant the show lasted for a longer time than they could spare given the plans suggested above. Rather than spending her time entertaining with tricks and banter, the performer had to spend more time getting additional people to stop and watch or didn’t want to move to the more elaborate tricks with a small audience present. The rhythm and building of the show was out of sync.
Such variations in the attention span of the audience meant the magician had to work far harder than in spaces where people tend to linger more, such as the pedestrian areas around Bath’s Abbey and Roman Baths. Such spaces are destinations in and of themselves and so have different rhythms to their use and inhabitation. 103 Compare the time-lapse video of this area available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGjDn-IQRL0. This shows greater lingering with, for example, people sitting on benches for some time (in some cases, upwards of 30 minutes) – there appears to be a more eurhythmic relation between tourists and performers. Further, while it was not too destructive for the magician’s show (a substantial crowd were there for the finale), the show the magician did before this was left with a crowd of only 10–12 people at its close due to a tour group leaving seconds before the end of the performance, actually during the finale. Therefore, the intersection of these rhythms – of the performance, the tours, consumers, and so on – which make up the polyrhythmia of this space can be conflicting, and, in their arrhythmia, destructive for the performance.
Conclusion
In light of and contributing to recent work interested in the rhythms of social life, this paper has begun to address the need for greater methodological reflection in relation to the study of rhythms, 104 and in relation to studying the cultural geographies of practice more generally. 105 In doing so, the paper has suggested the possibility of using time-lapse photography as a means of documenting, analysing, and presenting the spatio-temporal unfolding of everyday life in the city in fine-grained detail and so the moment-by-moment changes across multiple durations that perpetually occur within this.
The potential of this method in the pursuit of rhythmanalysis has been illustrated in relation to the examination of the complex interrelation of different social and vital rhythms in the playing out of the everyday life of the city of Bath, UK, and specifically in relation to the attempts of a street magician to intervene into and reorganize the everyday rhythms of one space there in particular. In doing so, the paper has illustrated the utility of time-lapse photography in providing a record of the spatio-temporal unfolding of everyday events and how various rhythms and routines interrelate and interfere in this unfolding. While the researcher needs to be careful not to become too detached from the events under study in the use of this method and so lose a sense of their qualities, nor to remove this qualitative nature of their unfolding as a result of the means through which it is presented, time-lapse photography allows for the documentation and examination of the longer durational unfolding of the everyday life of the space and the rhythms that play out across this, and also how specific micro-scale occurrence impact upon and so affect this unfolding and evolution. This is where, to me, time-lapse photography has an advantage over recent uses of video. While losing some of the multi-sensory elements of standard video recording in not including audio, in compressing the time of the event time-lapse photography gives a stronger sense of these more longitudinal rhythms. Importantly then, in terms of the need to pay attention to the quality or feeling of specific rhythms, an emphasis on the presence of the photographer-as-ethnographer does also provide the opportunity for the bodily presence that Lefebvre desires in rhymthanalyst’s dual position of peripheral presence.
As part of this, time-lapse photography allows for such live and ephemeral events to be further examined beyond their initial occurrence – another means for getting out of rhythms so as to appreciate their interaction, but this being accompanied by the initial bodily presence of the researcher suggested above. The visual record produced through time-lapse photography facilitates the uncovering of patterns and detail that may have on first sight been missed and for a more sustained and detailed rhythmanalysis to be undertaken. While not necessarily capturing such events in toto, this further facilitates the identification of key events and cycles within this durational unfolding that can impact upon the ‘repetition’ that occurs within various rhythms’ playing out, and potentially mark a change in their quality, intensity, combination, measure, or their experience, or more generally show the presence of difference within repetition.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tim Cresswell and the two anonymous referees for their constructive critical engagement with the paper. Thanks also go to JD Dewsbury for supervising the project from which this paper emerged.
Funding
This research was funded by the ESRC (ref. PTA-031-2005-00199).
Notes
Biographical note
Paul Simpson is a lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Physical and Geographical Sciences, Keele University. His research explores the social and cultural geographies of everyday and artistic practices, with a specific focus on embodied experience, affective relations, subjectivity, and the complex situatedness of such practices in the environments in which they take place.