[shut] for business: Performing Transience in a Bankrupt City

Abstract

This paper will explore how performance and the arts can respond to the lost spaces, cultures and businesses of urban environments. It will do this by discussing the recent short operatic work [shut], which seeks to combine social, historical and geographical experience of a neighbourhood in flux, to expose hidden narratives to audiences through a reflective metatheatrical approach.

This paper will provide a contextual backdrop, exploring the dichotomous socio-economic status of the city and neighbourhood in which [shut] is based, as an exemplar of the empty utopia touted by speculative developers and journalists in western turbocapitalist (Luttwak, 1999) neoliberal urban centres. In particular we will explore the creation of this work as a response to the rising rate of small business bankruptcy in Birmingham since the COVID19 pandemic.

The paper will then discuss the creation and performance of [shut] as part of Birmingham Opera Company's BRUM commissions 2024, which responds to the ongoing experience of small business bankruptcy in a bankrupt city. The 2024 performance of [shut] was presented in the same week as the exhibition Teach your business how to swim: Rise and Fall in Digtopia. This exhibition documented the life of the brewery Dig Brew Co. which closed down in January 2022. It served as both a documentation of the brewery’s creative outputs, an exposition of the incoming archive to Birmingham City University’s Arts, Design and Media Archive, and a space for positive reflection on the loss or death of this iconic business and space in the city. 

This work will be analysed through the lens of both metatheatre, and the metamodern movement, as a part of the ‘Age of Engagement’ as coined by Andy Lavender (2016). Whilst being ‘shut down’ marks and ending, it can also be experienced as an unfinishing. These half travelled journeys or unfulfilled dreams within harsh neoliberal urban capitalist zones present a series of ungrieved losses (Jenkins et al, 2014), as communities are uprooted, ‘undead’ businesses cast out, and artists displaced. We will explore how artists and creatives can go some way to unifying the communities who become adrift, and engage in a grieving process of lost lifestyles and workplaces, through performance, action and presentation.